How fake science is infiltrating scientific journals
January 5, 2022
The Sydney Morning Herald
By Harriet Alexander
"In 2015, molecular oncologist Jennifer Byrne was surprised to discover during a scan of the academic literature that five papers had been written about a gene she had originally identified, but did not find particularly interesting.
'Looking at these papers, I thought they were really similar, they had some mistakes in them and they had some stuff that didn’t make sense at all,' she said. As she dug deeper, it dawned on her that the papers might have been produced by a third-party working for profit.
'Part of me still feels awful thinking about it because it’s such an unpleasant thing when you’ve spent years in a laboratory and taking two to 10 years to publish stuff, and making stuff up is so easy,' Professor Byrne said. 'That’s what scares the life out of me.'"
