Audio excerpt – Cheyne:

“First of all, I’m so curious about your alias Smut Clyde?”

Audio excerpt – Smut:

“To work out your name as a porn star, you take the name of your first pet and the street on which you first lived.”

RICK:

So this is 7am producer Cheyne Anderson talking to a guy who goes by the moniker of Smut Clyde – he’s not an actual porn star, by the way.

Audio excerpt – Cheyne:

“So you had a pet called Smut?”

Audio excerpt – Smut:

“Yes. She was a tortoiseshell who was covered all over in black smut as if she'd fallen down the chimney. I guess my crime fighting activity is usually associated with a Smut Clyde name, so it might be easier if that becomes the main identifier.”

RICK:

So, Smut Clyde is a science sleuth and his crime fighting activity is combating a growing phenomenon of fake science papers.

Audio excerpt – Cheyne:

“How much of your time do you think it takes up?”

Audio excerpt – Smut:

“20 hour week, maybe a 30 hour week. It's getting on to a full time unpaid job.”

[Theme Music Starts]

RICK:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Rick Morton and this is 7am.

Academic journals, pretty much around the world and across all disciplines are being flooded with fake submissions.

They’re typically generated, with the help of artificial intelligence by paper mills, a cottage industry relying on overworked and desperate researchers to fuel their business model.

And they’re more than just a nuisance – the infiltration of fake papers is so bad, it’s undermining the work of scientists in critical fields, like cancer research.

Today, 7am producer Cheyne Anderson on the cost of this research fraud, and the science detectives who are trying to fight it.

That’s coming up after the break.

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RICK:

Cheyne, you've been looking into the issue of fake scientific papers. I have to ask, how did you get interested in it to begin with?

CHEYNE:

I guess it started when I was sick a couple of weeks ago. And so, you know, in the process of spending way too much time on the internet, looking at science articles, I started to notice that there were a lot of scientists online who were trying to sound the alarm about something strange happening in the field of science research. They were noticing a huge uptick, essentially, in bunk research. So fake science papers were proliferating academia.

Audio excerpt — Andy Stapleton (YouTuber):

“There is a scientific fraud epidemic. Every week there seems to be so many retractions, there seems to be so many scandals.”

CHEYNE:

And so that was how I stumbled onto this community of people who are trying to fix science. And I guess that story starts with a guy called Smut Clyde.

Audio excerpt – Smut:

“You can basically pay someone to make you an aeroplane out of bamboo and sticks and twine and it's not a real aeroplane, but you still get promoted for it. It still counts on your academic record.”

CHEYNE:

Smut Clyde, is the pseudonym of a guy called David Bimler. He's a retired psychologist previously associated with Massey University in Wellington, which is where he lives. He's a really lovely guy. He's got, you know, long hair, long beard, lives with his cats and he is one of these, what they call sleuths. He spends a couple of hours every day on his computer at home scouring science journals looking for signs of suspicious looking research.

RICK:

Okay, so I'm getting Scooby-Doo vibes. They've got a guy called Smut Clyde and he's looking for clues. What is he looking for, exactly? What does suspicious research look like?

CHEYNE:

Yeah. So, Smut gave me a couple of examples of the kinds of things that he's looking for.

Audio excerpt – Smut:

“First of all, they were recycling the occasional image.”

CHEYNE:

So, for example, there are these things called ‘western blots’, which are essentially this technique that's used to interpret bands of protein so that they’re images. A lot of the time he'll be looking at these western blots and he'll notice signs that they've been photoshopped, or he’ll notice that they're identical to a western blot that is in a paper that's from a totally different author, supposedly on a totally different subject. Another thing he looks out for is experiments that have odd features.

Audio excerpt – Smut:

“One paper talked about keeping mice under standard thick nine celsius conditions.”

CHEYNE:

Which was an experiment that claimed to have treated cancer in lab mice kept at 39°C.

Audio excerpt – Smut:

“Which is fine if you're keeping cells in an incubator, but if you’ve got mice at 39 degrees, they will not live very long.”

CHEYNE:

So when Smut finds one of these suspicious papers, often what they'll do is they'll alert the author to it, or they'll alert the publisher. And if it is, as they suspect, fake science, then ideally the article is then retracted. And Smut isn't the only person doing this. He's part of a tight knit community of sleuths who are all themselves scientifically literate. A lot of them are working researchers and they all band together to draw attention to this growing problem of essentially fake research.

Audio excerpt – Smut:

“Do feel that science needs more of an immune system.”

CHEYNE:

In their view, science is sick. There's an epidemic of fake research infecting the scientific record and they see themselves as the unofficial unpaid immune system.

And they're really good at it. In fact, Smut and a few other sleuths managed to uncover this network of 300 fake papers that were all reusing the same data sets. And these papers had all been published by one of the biggest and most reputable academic publishers Wiley, so John Wiley & Sons. This is one of the leading academic publishers. That network has since grown to 1,200 retractions, all from these special issues. And just last month, Wiley announced that they were actually going to shutter 19 of the journals as part of the fallout from this discovery. And they estimated the closures will cost them around 40 million USD.

RICK:

I mean, honestly, the scale of that is blowing my mind. It's a huge problem obviously, but how big are we talking?

CHEYNE:

That's part of what people are trying to figure out. So depending on what estimates you use, there are around kind of three to four million science papers published each year. And the vast, vast majority are good sound science. But against that the rate of retractions of papers has never been higher. So Nature, which is kind of the world's leading science journal, they have calculated that last year alone there were 10,000 retractions, which is more than double the amount for the year before. The thing is that that bad science is by no means a new problem. You're probably aware of some of the more kind of notorious examples of bad science people like Andrew Wakefield, who's the discredited Doctor who was pushing now very retracted research into links between vaccines and autism.

RICK:

That was published in the British Medical Journal as well, like one of the most esteemed in the world.

CHEYNE:

Exactly, and this was a bad actor who was specifically using this and to essentially launder their political views. But it's a little bit different to what we're experiencing now with this wave of retractions and many sleuths feel that that number of 10,000 is really only the tip of the iceberg, because what we're seeing now is this kind of rise of mass produced papers of just straight up fake science. And so, unlike Andrew Wakefield, where you've got this clear villain that you can point to and say, you know, this research is causing people harm. The brunt of this infection is much more quiet and more insidious. All it takes is one piece of this fake science to derail real research. And so a lot of Smut’s work is looking at fake science in biomedicine, which is a lot of it has to do with cancer research. So this is kind of areas where human health is at stake. And he explained to me that sometimes these fake papers get mixed in with the real and they create this framework of knowledge that doesn't actually exist. So anyone down the line who reads that and bases real clinical research off it is essentially bound to fail.

This is not only incredibly frustrating for a scientist to have their experiment fail and not know why, but it's also really costly and time consuming in a field where cancer research is already very costly and time consuming. So you can see how one tiny piece of fake research can have an enormous ripple effect. But this isn't just one paper, it's tens of thousands that we know of and many more out there that haven't been detected yet. And so many people I spoke to said that the accumulated weight of these fake papers can threaten the integrity of all scientific research at a time when we really need to trust it the most.

RICK:

Coming up after the break – what’s driving this epidemic of phoney research?

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RICK:

Cheyne, We've been talking about the explosion of retractions in the scientific literature. Where exactly are these dodgy papers coming from? They're not from nothing I assume.

CHEYNE:

I know, and to better understand where these papers are coming from, I went and spoke to a guy called Ivan Oransky. He's a distinguished journalist in residence at the Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, but more importantly, he's also the co-founder of a website called Retraction Watch.

Audio excerpt – Ivan:

“The sort of reason why Retraction Watch exists is because there was a particularly bad case here in the states. That person was making up the data in clinical trials of a painkiller.”

CHEYNE:

One of the main things they do is keep a database of retracted articles, which is currently sitting at 50,000, which is pretty incredible.

Audio excerpt – Ivan:

“So it's not a new problem. It's definitely more visible now, which is a good thing, but it also means it's a very painful time for science. It's a painful time for publishers. It's a painful time for universities that are dealing with these issues.”

CHEYNE:

He says there's a few factors driving this epidemic of fake papers. One is the real epidemic, the Covid-19 pandemic. Cases like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine made us a lot more aware of how easily misinformation can spread. But he says that there's another factor, which is the growth of this entire black market of companies who are behind a lot of these fake papers, and these are the paper mills.

Audio excerpt – Ivan:

“These operations, these shady operations that sell papers to people that make things up to make fake papers and sell authorship. You know, all of the things you need in order to succeed as an academic in order to get a job and grants and promotions and everything like that.”

CHEYNE:

They're essentially companies where for a fee they will generate a science paper and get it published in a journal on your behalf. And there's this whole economy around this where you pay more to be listed as an author higher on the article, or you pay more to be published in a high quality journal, for example. And these mills also take advantage of the way journals vet papers. Basically, if you submit a paper, your research won't get published until it passes the peer review process. The problem is, these peer reviewers are often working for free and they're often very busy.

Audio excerpt – Ivan:

“When you have been told for decades that this is the way that peer review, it's like a good housekeeping seal of approval, and then you find out that, in fact, it misses maybe more often than it actually finds the problems and screens the problems properly. You start to, I think, justifiably lose trust in that system.”

CHEYNE:

And one study that came out a couple of years ago, they actually worked with a bunch of journals and they found that on average, around 2 per cent of the papers submitted will be junk science. But if a paper slips through peer review and then gets published, the number of fake science that will be submitted to that journal can rise to up to 46 per cent. And what these sleuths have done that's incredibly clever is that they've recognised shared features in a lot of these fake science articles and through that, have actually been able to identify networks of hundreds of papers linked to common features and basically unmask where some of these paper mills are coming from.

RICK:

That's wild. And, well, I mean, what can we actually do about it? I mean, this is a global phenomenon, surely. Do we have a role to play here in Australia about policing it?

CHEYNE:

There's a bunch of solutions that people have been throwing about. So last year, South Australia's Independent Commissioner Against Corruption, Bruce Lander, he recommended actually having a body that could deal with specific cases and also equipping the Australian Research Council with kind of legislative powers so it could be easier to try cases of extreme misconduct in the court system, for example. But, I mean, ultimately, that's not really going to be equipped to deal with the problem of paper mills that are based internationally, infiltrating research that happens in Australia. Like it's just not set up to deal with that. Everyone I spoke to agreed that the best way to fix this was to change the conditions that allowed these mills to flourish. So solving this problem of fake science really is about looking at the bigger picture about why this market exists and it's because of the way academia is set up. So academics have to publish articles to, you know, get grants, promotions, all of the things you need, not just to kind of have a good career, but to have any career in science. You can't get grant money so you can chase a cure for cancer. None of that really happens without publications. So this is a system that's incentivising, at best, science that's rushed and under pressure and at worst, it's creating the market for paper mills.

RICK:

To borrow another kind of science analogy, it's survival of the fittest, it's natural selection. We've got these pressures existing in academia that are forcing, or at least seem to be forcing researchers down a certain path, which is publish or perish. And I guess publish or perish is defining the whole system, right?

CHEYNE:

It is and there is something Darwinian about it, absolutely. And the people I spoke to said that there are slowly steps being taken to deal with this. But on the whole, publishers and universities have been really slow to respond to the problem. The more that we ignore it, the more damage we're doing down the line, where essentially trust in the entire scientific project is being eroded. And when we don't have trust in the scientific project, then it's much easier for people to weaponise the distrust and we kind of come back to people who actively weaponise science, like, you know, the vaccine myths and the Covid misinformation.

At the end of the day, you know, science isn't perfect and it's also never set out to obtain an absolute truth. You know, mistakes are made and a lot of them are genuine. But science is a process and it's set up to check and to correct itself, but right now, those systems of correction aren't quite holding up the way they used to.

RICK:

Cheyne, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

CHEYNE:

Thank you Rick.

[Theme Music Starts]

RICK:

Also in the news today,

First term Senator Fatima Payman has announced she is leaving the Labor party to sit as an independent.

Speaking to the media, Senator Payman said she was “deeply torn” over the decision, and still supported the values of the Labor party, but could see no middle ground when it came to conforming to caucus solidarity over the recognition of Palestinian statehood.

The senator confirmed she will not be joining any Muslim community-linked party.

And, Police have arrested four people after a pro-Palestinian demonstration on the roof of Parliament House in Canberra.
Protesters from the group Renegade Activists climbed onto the roof of Parliament House to unfurl banners accusing Australia of complicity in "war crimes" and "genocide".

7am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper.

It’s produced by Kara Jensen-Mackinnon, Cheyne Anderson and Zoltan Fesco.

Our senior producer is Chris Dengate. Our technical producer is Atticus Bastow.

Edited by Scott Mitchell, Chris Dengate and Sarah McVeigh, our head of audio. Erik Jensen is our editor-in-chief.

Mixing by Travis Evans and Atticus Bastow.

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

I'm Rick Morton. Thanks for listening.

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