One awful spring day in 2025, Luís Amaral sat at his desk at Northwestern University after he had just finished “probably the most depressing project I’ve been involved with.” He had reason to be disheartened. His new study reveals an uncomfortable truth: scientific fraud is no longer just the work of a few bad apples. It is organized to the point it’s become industrialized — and growing much faster than legitimate science.

What we are seeing is large networks of editors and authors cooperating to publish fraudulent research at scale. They are exploiting cracks in the system to launder reputations, secure funding, and climb academic ranks.

This isn’t just about the occasional plagiarized paragraph or data fudged to fool reviewers. This is about a vast and resilient system that, in some cases, mimics organized crime. And it’s infiltrating the very core of science.

“These networks are essentially criminal organizations,” Amaral said. “Millions of dollars are involved in these processes.”

A Shadow Industry

The study’s findings stem from a sweeping analysis of over five million scientific papers across more than 70,000 journals. Researchers also examined tens of thousands of retractions, journal editorial records, and even image duplications. What emerged is a disturbing ecosystem: fraudulent “paper mills” manufacturing low-quality studies, brokers selling authorship slots and journal placements, and compromised editors willing to rubber-stamp fake research.

One such paper mill, the Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA), offers a window into how deeply entrenched this problem has become. Notice that they all seem to have legitimate-sounding names. Between 2018 and 2024, ARDA expanded its list of affiliated journals from 14 to 86, many of which were indexed in major academic databases. Some of these journals were later found to be hijacked — illegitimately revived after their original publishers stopped operating. It’s something we’ve seen happen often in our own industry (journalism), as bankrupt legitimate legacy newspapers have been bought by shady venture capital, only to hijack the established brands into spam and affiliate marketing magnets.

What ARDA and similar operations offer isn’t science. It’s superficial credibility and influence, for sale. Clients pay for their names to be placed on prewritten papers, often without contributing any actual research to polish their CVs, which later translates into material advantages.

The System That Allows It

Fraudulent science has always existed, but Richardson’s team found the modern scale unprecedented. Paper mills are now estimated to double their output every 1.5 years. Meanwhile, retractions — the scientific community’s main corrective measure — are doubling every 3.5 years.

In other words, fake science is far outpacing legitimate efforts to catch it. That’s no surprise. Truth seeking has always been expensive, whereas fraud is cheap and fast.

“You either buy into scientific fraud, or you leave science,” the study’s lead author, Reece Richardson, a social scientist at Northwestern University, US, told DW. “This is a situation that tens of thousands of scientists are in.”

The study shows how even some reputable journals have been infiltrated by bad actors. A very small group of editors — fewer than 0.3% at one journal — were found to be responsible for up to 30% of all retracted articles. These editors weren’t catching fraud (one of their main prerogatives); they were enabling it. The analysis revealed that they frequently accepted each other’s submissions, bypassing proper peer review and creating a closed loop of mutual approval. One especially active group at PLOS ONE operated between 2020 and 2023, with many of their accepted papers later retracted for similar reasons: “one of a series of submissions for which we have concerns about authorship, competing interests, and peer review.”

And these aren’t isolated incidents. Similar patterns were identified at Hindawi journals and even in IEEE conference proceedings.

Fraud in the Details

To spot fake science, Richardson’s team looked at things like reused images — telling signs that research data was copied and repackaged. In one network of 2,213 papers with duplicated images, only a third had been retracted.

Other hallmarks of fraud include fast-tracked peer review (under 30 days), odd publication spikes in certain journals, and unnatural authorship patterns — such as unrelated co-authors from across the globe on narrowly focused technical papers.

Many of these fraudulent studies fall into specific subfields, notably areas like micro-RNAs and long noncoding RNAs in cancer biology. The more niche and obscure the research, the better, as it adds another layer of opacity. These subfields saw retraction rates as high as 4%, compared to 0.1% for more established areas like CRISPR.

“You can map out networks of image duplication that are thousands of articles wide,” Richardson said.

Fake Science, Real Consequences

Fraudulent studies mislead scientists, distort meta-analyses, waste public funds, and derail therapeutic development.

Consider the case of Alzheimer’s research. One manipulated paper led to billions in investment and years of follow-up studies before the original research was discredited. During COVID-19, fraudulent studies promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine, which indirectly led to as many as 17,000 fatalities.

“It’s incredible what just one paper can do,” said Anna Abalkina, a research integrity expert at the Free University of Berlin.

Scientific careers are built on publication records. The more papers you publish — and the more citations they accrue — the more funding, jobs, tenure teaching positions, and prestige you attract. In a hypercompetitive system with scarce resources, incentives lean toward quantity over quality.

“If you believe that science is useful and important for humanity, then you have to fight for it,” Amaral said.

The authors argue that existing tools like retractions and journal deindexing, while important, are not enough. Some fake articles remain in databases even after their journals have been deindexed. Others continue to be cited, creating a cascade of misinformation.

Richardson and Amaral advocate for deeper systemic changes: separating conflict-prone tasks like peer review from journals’ business interests, rethinking academic incentives, and moving away from simplistic metrics like citation counts or journal impact factors.

A Looming Threat

The rise of generative AI further complicates matters. If AI models are trained on tainted literature, their outputs — used to generate new research or aid diagnostics — could be compromised from the start. Then there’s the issue of AI-generated science papers. In 2024, a peer-reviewed science journal published a study with an obviously AI-generated diagram showing a cartoon rat with a gigantic penis. Only after the picture made the rounds on social media was the paper retracted.

“We have no clue what’s going to end up in the literature, what’s going to be regarded as scientific fact and what’s going to be used to train future AI models,” Richardson warned.

Some academic publishers, like Springer Nature and Frontiers Media, are starting to issue large-scale retractions — Frontiers recently pulled 122 studies after finding evidence of citation manipulation and undisclosed peer-review collusion. But even these efforts only scratch the surface. Richardson estimates that only 15–25% of fake papers will ever be retracted.

Where Do We Go from Here?

To fix science, experts say the culture must shift. That means funding institutions must reconsider how they measure success. Journals must invest in independent integrity checks. And researchers must be supported in choosing quality over quantity.

“This isn’t about attacking science,” Amaral said. “We are defending it from bad actors.”

The alternative is a slow erosion of trust in one of the most powerful self-correcting tools humanity has ever created. Without reform, future discoveries — and the public good they are meant to serve — may be built on sand.

The findings appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.