ABOUTOne of my kids is angry that I deleted an important school email. I submit that there are so many useless emails landing in my inbox that some useful emails will surely be missed. This excuse doesn't inspire any sympathy, but it does motivate me to comb through hundreds of deleted emails. They come from all corners of the world – from Lisbon to London, from Athens to Ankara – and almost all of them are an invitation to prove themselves in a research publication.
In recognition of your scientific achievements and contributions to the advancement of knowledge in your field, we ask you to submit a research paper on a topic of your choice.
The writer promises qualified editorial assistance, quick publication and professional fame.
The proposal to bridge the gap between science and society seems interesting until I read that a polished editorial process will only require my name, not my time. There is a reply letter “in case it goes to spam.”
Next comes an invitation to submit abstracts to a “prestigious conference” (is there another?) in exchange for free nights in (sigh) Vienna. Also, a somewhat petulant reminder that I was “willfully ignoring” an invitation to write an editorial on advances in prostate surgery, and a slightly disappointed tone about my silence about the 30% “article processing fee” waiver for writing articles on the origins of psychosis, about which I know next to nothing.
There is an intriguing contract to write an entire book about cancer to create a “global legacy” through sales on every platform, but the catch for the writer in me is that I don’t have to write words that “accurately represent” my “scientific ideas.”
But my favorite might just be the offer of membership in research societies that are “more than a hundred years old” in order to gain professional recognition through networking (online) with “equally distinguished” scientists. It certainly makes me anxious, like Groucho Marx, who worried, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that I would be a member of.”
Every year the pace fraudulent publication rises. People who must live by the “publish or perish” mentality, whose promotion is tied to research output, or whose funding is tied to citations, are likely to fall under the influence of these get-rich-quick schemes.
Ask most medical researchers about fraudulent studies and they will insist that it is an isolated incident involving a few bad people. For most, research and honesty go hand in hand.
But how extensive research from Northwestern University states that “large-scale, systematic fraud occurs at the industrial level.” Researchers have noted an increase in the prevalence of paper mills that mass produce fake or falsified research papers for scientists; intermediaries who interact between scientists and publishers; and “predatory” journals whose main goal is to churn out articles regardless of their quality.
According to the researchers, while the doubling time of scientific papers is 15 years, the doubling time of fraudulent scientific papers is only one and a half years. They claim that at least The 400,000 (no, that's not a typo) articles published between 2000 and 2022 are suspect, the vast majority of them the result of fraud or plagiarism.
I'm an oncologist, so what bothers me most is their next statement. Citing cancer as the most vulnerable area for fraudulent research, they state: “The vast majority of cancer literature is completely unreliable.”
Given the hundreds of types of cancer and the thousands of molecules and combinations used to treat them, it is considered relatively easy to select numbers and images to construct a plausible manuscript. The advent of artificial intelligence has lowered the barrier to entry for creating a fake article and posting it online.
It is obvious that even an attentive gatekeeper can be deceived: the world's leading magazines forced to retract publications. But when the people who perpetuate fake science are the same people who publish fake science.What was once a minor issue has now become a real problem.
How does this affect the average cancer patient?
“I did my own research.” is a statement I hear too often from my patients. Given the decline in trust in science and the decline in funding for trusted institutions, the average patient turning to the Internet cannot distinguish evidence from gloss.
Every conscientious oncologist knows that no one is an expert in everything. Some patients who do their own research ask insightful questions and force their doctor to think harder and achieve more. This is welcome because there is no shortage of ways doctors fail patients, especially when it comes to protecting quality of life.
But I'm worried about other patients. Those who have read (in an online supposedly peer-reviewed article) that an alkaline diet, light therapy, organic spinach or turmeric have been proven to cure cancer. Those who draw “neutralizing potions” on their noticeably enlarging lumps and claim that I have not seen the latest research. They borrow phrases that sound scientific and mean nothing (“My antibodies are migrating”).
Having exhausted alternatives and become much worse off, they end up needing more extensive and costly care as a result of fraudulent research that affects every taxpayer.
It's easy to dismiss patients as naive, but the fraudulent publishing industry has a lot to answer for. Suggestions for containing the damage include improved funding to support good research, vigilance and cooperation from reputable publishers, and increased public awareness of the enormous scale of fraud disguised as cancer research.
I will tell my patients that it is a good idea to do your own research. But where they conduct such research requires much more thought than they may realize.
