Last month at The Conversation, Frederik Joelving, contributing editor at Retraction Watch, and two computer scientists, Cyril Labbé (Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)) and Guillaume Cabanac (University of Toulouse), offered a serious warning about the deluge of fake science papers:

It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. Around 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating – possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies only to find that they were made up.

Even when the bogus papers are spotted – usually by amateur sleuths on their own time – academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews other research and discusses findings.

These fake papers are slowing down research that has helped millions of people with lifesaving medicine and therapies from cancer to COVID-19. Analysts’ data shows that fields related to cancer and medicine are particularly hard hit, while areas like philosophy and art are less affected. Some scientists have abandoned their life’s work because they cannot keep pace given the number of fake papers they must bat down.

“Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research,” January 29, 2025

AI automates frauds that would take much longer to perpetrate using traditional methods. Could this be seen as a form of model collapse in the science publishing industry? A triumph of nonsense until — as a British poet warned centuries ago — “universal darkness buries all?

The trio of researchers is attempting to fight back:

As part of our work detecting these bogus publications, co-author Guillaume Cabanac developed the Problematic Paper Screener, which filters 130 million new and old scholarly papers every week looking for nine types of clues that a paper might be fake or contain errors. A key clue is a tortured phrase – an awkward wording generated by software that replaces common scientific terms with synonyms to avoid direct plagiarism from a legitimate paper. “Slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research,”

“Creepy crawlies” for insects is a dead giveaway.