5 ms·

Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences

89 points by bikenaga 1y ago

mathattack 1y ago
Easy to see how social sciences can be games. Much sadder to see Mathematics get gamed too. It provides ammo to folks looking to defund the topics.
- aleatorianator 1y ago
  Mathematics did invent game theory, so in that way it simply takes more math to do math which isn't good
  - mathattack 1y ago
    True!
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Maybe the way forward is to break the impact factor game. Everybody in a field get together and publish a paper: literally every topologist could put their name on the paper “Generally we all agree that Topology is an interesting topic.” Everybody in the field cite that paper going forward, giving it a massive impact factor, making impact factor useless. Do this occasionally, randomly, do it in niche sub fields, everybody who goes to a conference put their name on the paper “we had a nice time at <conference> this year.” I mean, it is something everybody hates, right? There’s no point in preserving it.
kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
Things like citation brokers (paid to cite papers), abuse of power, paper mills, and blackmail (pg. 10) is appalling to me. I have to question how we ended up here. Academia seems very focused on results and output, and this is used as a metric to measure a researcher's worth or value. Has this always been an issue in academia, or is this an increasing or new phenomenon? It seems as if there is a widespread need to take shortcuts and boost your h-index. Is there a better way to determine the impact of research and to encourage researchers to not feel so pressed to output and boost their citations? Why is it like this today? Academic mathematics, from what I've seen, seems incredibly competitive and stressful (to be fair, so does competition math from a young age), perhaps because the only career for many mathematicians (outside a topics with applications such as but not limited to number theory, probability, and combinatorics) is academia. Does this play into what this article talks about?
- non_aligned 1y ago
  I've seen similar stuff in a couple of other places, including IT back in the 1990s (back when it wasn't nearly as glamorous as it is today). I think some of this has to do with... resentment? You're this incredibly smart person, you worked really hard, and no one values you. No one wants to pay you big bucks, no one outside a tiny group knows your name even if you make important contributions to the field. Meanwhile, all the dumb people are getting ahead. It's easy to get depressed, and equally easy to decide that if life is unfair, it's OK to cheat to win. Add to this the academic culture where, frankly, there are fewer incentives to address misbehavior and where many jobs are for life... and the nature of the field, which makes cheating is easy (as outlined in the article)... and you have an explosive mix.
  - moc_was_wronged 1y ago
    [dead]
- guyomes 1y ago
  > Has this always been an issue in academia, or is this an increasing or new phenomenon? The introduction of this article [1] gives an insight on the metric used in the Middle Ages. Essentially, to keep his position in a university, a researcher could win public debates by solving problems nobody else could solve. This led researchers to keep their work secret. Some researchers even got angry about having their work published, even with proper credit. [1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27956338 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27956338
- cycomanic 1y ago
  In my time in academia (~20 years) I have seen the demands and competition increase quite significantly, however talking to older researchers the this really started in the 90s the demands to demonstrate measurable outcomes increased dramatically and funding moved to be primarily through competitive grants (compared to significant base funding for researchers previously). The issue is that while previously it was common for academics to have funding for 1-2 PhD students to look into new research areas, now many researchers are required to bring in competitive grants for even covering part of their salary. What that means is that researchers become much more risk averse, and and stay in their research area even if they believe it is not the most interesting/imapactfull. You just can't afford to not publish for several years, to e.g. investigate a novel research direction, because without the publications it becomes much much harder to secure funding in the future.
beezle 1y ago
Sabine Hossenfelder has been on about this topic in the field of physics publishing for quite some time now. It really is a terrible thing, though I can understand how some researchers feel trapped in a system that gives them little if any alternative if they wish to be employed the next year. Not just one thing needs to be changed to fix it.
- mlpoknbji 1y ago
  Citation based metrics are much more prevalent in physics than in math (at least in the US and most countries in Europe). When compared with physics, my impression is that mathematics has the tradition "slow, long term" over "rapid, incremental." Of course, it's not perfect.
  - ykonstant 1y ago
    >When compared with physics, my impression is that mathematics has the tradition "slow, long term" over "rapid, incremental." Not anymore :(
_alternator_ 1y ago
TLDR: The publication culture of mathematics (with relatively few papers per researcher, few authors per paper, and few citations per paper) makes abuse of bibliometrics easier. The evidence suggests widespread abuse. My take: I’ve published in well-regarded mathematical journals and the culture is definitely hard to explain to people outside of math. For example, it took more than two years to get my key graduate paper published in Foundations of Computational Mathematics, a highly regarded journal. The paper currently has over 100 citations, which (last I checked) is a couple times higher than the average citation count for the journal. In short, it’s a great, impactful work for a graduate student. But in a field like cell biology, this would be considered a pretty weak showing. Given the long timelines and low citation counts, it’s not surprising that it’s so easy to manipulate the numbers. It is kinda ironic that mathematicians have this issue with numbers though.
- aoki 1y ago
  Pure math has a far greater vulnerability to this than applied math. Top journals have impact factors of around 5.0. Respectable but tiny specialist journals can have impact factors less than 1.0 (like, 0.4). Meanwhile, MDPI Mathematics is a Q1 journal with an impact factor over 2.0. The now-standard bibliometrics were not designed by statisticians :-)
  - mlpoknbji 1y ago
    The key is that mathematicians in the US and most parts of Europe do not count citations. So this is not really an issue.
    - Jaxan 1y ago
      It is an issue if a mathematician has to apply for grants. Often they are in the same competition as physicists, for instance, and then metrics do matter.
tho23i423423423 1y ago
Are "publication metrics" also used heavily in China by the bureaucracy ? I know for a fact that the number of fake-journals exploded once the Govt. of India decided to use this for promotions. It's a bit sad really: in the classical world both these countries spent inordinate amount of time on the questions of epistemology (India esp.). Now reduced to mimicking some silly thing that vaguely tracks knowledge-production even in the best case in the West.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  What a wonderful illustration of Goodhart's Law.
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  Yes. And filtering out publications in "paper mills" and then judging the guy properly doesn't scale beyond the top few institutions. So you'll find a sudden drop-off in research quality once you reach the n_th university. It really is almost like a threshold.
mlpoknbji 1y ago
This article does not seem to quite convey the experience of a pure mathematician. Yes, citation fraud is happening on an apalling scale, but no it is not a serious issue for mathematicians. The problem of AI generated papers is much more serious, although not happening on the same scale (yet!).
paulpauper 1y ago
Publishing math is one of the most time consuming things ever, between the submission, review/revising, and editing. I with there was a faster way of doing it outside of arXiv. Without having to review the paper closely, typically an experienced editor can tell at fist glace if it's correct or sound. It is what we could call the “zone of occasional poor practice”. Included are actions like I think this is more common in computer science papers. I see this all the time, where 5- 10 authors will collaborate on a short paper, then collaborate on each other's papers in such a way that the effort is minimized and publishing count and citation count is maximized. .
matusp 1y ago
Bibliometrics in science is just an unworkable approach in general, and IMO it causes more harms than not. Research is one of the least suitable human activities that you can possibly try to quantify, yet the entire scientific establishment runs on these metrics by now. I more or less believe that this strategy hinders scientific progress, as it pushes researchers into more and more risk-averse behaviors.
Hackbraten 1y ago
I love the table of tortured phrases [0], which shows hilarious examples of synonyms of established scientific phrases, machine-generated by fraudulent authors to stay below the radar of plagiarism detectors. My favorites from that table: - “fuzzy logic” becomes “fluffy rationale” - “spectral analysis” becomes “phantom examinations” - “big data” becomes “enormous information” [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07257#table.3 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07257#table.3
- KineticLensman 1y ago
  There are loads more in [0], including 'brilliant agreement' for 'smart contract', 'bosom malignancy' for 'breast cancer', and many, many others. [0] https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:24 https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:24
HPsquared 1y ago
Ironic that mathematics suffers due to an overemphasis on numbers.
avdelazeri 1y ago
When I took business 101 in college one of the first things they taught us is that long term, fixed metrics will always become gamified, that both the ones measuring and the ones being measured will replace the real results with the metrics and sacrifice the first for the second. I understand that this is common knowledge in the administrative world. Yet, every single performance metric always becomes ossified as the only target that matters, every time. Why?
- lavelganzu 1y ago
  At the level of industries and large groups, the chief answer to your "Why?" is the same sort of reasoning as the old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM": Nobody ever got fired for using established performance metrics. On the individual level, there's another tricky problem, which is that very few individuals could figure out an alternative performance metric that beats the established one, no matter how gamified the established one is.

89 points by bikenaga 1y ago

Easy to see how social sciences can be games. Much sadder to see Mathematics get gamed too. It provides ammo to folks looking to defund the topics.

aleatorianator 1y ago
Mathematics did invent game theory, so in that way it simply takes more math to do math which isn't good
- mathattack 1y ago
  True!
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Maybe the way forward is to break the impact factor game. Everybody in a field get together and publish a paper: literally every topologist could put their name on the paper “Generally we all agree that Topology is an interesting topic.” Everybody in the field cite that paper going forward, giving it a massive impact factor, making impact factor useless. Do this occasionally, randomly, do it in niche sub fields, everybody who goes to a conference put their name on the paper “we had a nice time at <conference> this year.” I mean, it is something everybody hates, right? There’s no point in preserving it.

kaladin-jasnah 1y ago

Things like citation brokers (paid to cite papers), abuse of power, paper mills, and blackmail (pg. 10) is appalling to me. I have to question how we ended up here. Academia seems very focused on results and output, and this is used as a metric to measure a researcher's worth or value. Has this always been an issue in academia, or is this an increasing or new phenomenon? It seems as if there is a widespread need to take shortcuts and boost your h-index. Is there a better way to determine the impact of research and to encourage researchers to not feel so pressed to output and boost their citations? Why is it like this today? Academic mathematics, from what I've seen, seems incredibly competitive and stressful (to be fair, so does competition math from a young age), perhaps because the only career for many mathematicians (outside a topics with applications such as but not limited to number theory, probability, and combinatorics) is academia. Does this play into what this article talks about?

non_aligned 1y ago
I've seen similar stuff in a couple of other places, including IT back in the 1990s (back when it wasn't nearly as glamorous as it is today). I think some of this has to do with... resentment? You're this incredibly smart person, you worked really hard, and no one values you. No one wants to pay you big bucks, no one outside a tiny group knows your name even if you make important contributions to the field. Meanwhile, all the dumb people are getting ahead. It's easy to get depressed, and equally easy to decide that if life is unfair, it's OK to cheat to win. Add to this the academic culture where, frankly, there are fewer incentives to address misbehavior and where many jobs are for life... and the nature of the field, which makes cheating is easy (as outlined in the article)... and you have an explosive mix.
- moc_was_wronged 1y ago
  [dead]
guyomes 1y ago
> Has this always been an issue in academia, or is this an increasing or new phenomenon? The introduction of this article [1] gives an insight on the metric used in the Middle Ages. Essentially, to keep his position in a university, a researcher could win public debates by solving problems nobody else could solve. This led researchers to keep their work secret. Some researchers even got angry about having their work published, even with proper credit. [1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27956338 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27956338
cycomanic 1y ago
In my time in academia (~20 years) I have seen the demands and competition increase quite significantly, however talking to older researchers the this really started in the 90s the demands to demonstrate measurable outcomes increased dramatically and funding moved to be primarily through competitive grants (compared to significant base funding for researchers previously). The issue is that while previously it was common for academics to have funding for 1-2 PhD students to look into new research areas, now many researchers are required to bring in competitive grants for even covering part of their salary. What that means is that researchers become much more risk averse, and and stay in their research area even if they believe it is not the most interesting/imapactfull. You just can't afford to not publish for several years, to e.g. investigate a novel research direction, because without the publications it becomes much much harder to secure funding in the future.

beezle 1y ago

Sabine Hossenfelder has been on about this topic in the field of physics publishing for quite some time now. It really is a terrible thing, though I can understand how some researchers feel trapped in a system that gives them little if any alternative if they wish to be employed the next year. Not just one thing needs to be changed to fix it.

mlpoknbji 1y ago
Citation based metrics are much more prevalent in physics than in math (at least in the US and most countries in Europe). When compared with physics, my impression is that mathematics has the tradition "slow, long term" over "rapid, incremental." Of course, it's not perfect.
- ykonstant 1y ago
  >When compared with physics, my impression is that mathematics has the tradition "slow, long term" over "rapid, incremental." Not anymore :(

_alternator_ 1y ago

TLDR: The publication culture of mathematics (with relatively few papers per researcher, few authors per paper, and few citations per paper) makes abuse of bibliometrics easier. The evidence suggests widespread abuse. My take: I’ve published in well-regarded mathematical journals and the culture is definitely hard to explain to people outside of math. For example, it took more than two years to get my key graduate paper published in Foundations of Computational Mathematics, a highly regarded journal. The paper currently has over 100 citations, which (last I checked) is a couple times higher than the average citation count for the journal. In short, it’s a great, impactful work for a graduate student. But in a field like cell biology, this would be considered a pretty weak showing. Given the long timelines and low citation counts, it’s not surprising that it’s so easy to manipulate the numbers. It is kinda ironic that mathematicians have this issue with numbers though.

aoki 1y ago
Pure math has a far greater vulnerability to this than applied math. Top journals have impact factors of around 5.0. Respectable but tiny specialist journals can have impact factors less than 1.0 (like, 0.4). Meanwhile, MDPI Mathematics is a Q1 journal with an impact factor over 2.0. The now-standard bibliometrics were not designed by statisticians :-)
- mlpoknbji 1y ago
  The key is that mathematicians in the US and most parts of Europe do not count citations. So this is not really an issue.
  - Jaxan 1y ago
    It is an issue if a mathematician has to apply for grants. Often they are in the same competition as physicists, for instance, and then metrics do matter.

tho23i423423423 1y ago

Are "publication metrics" also used heavily in China by the bureaucracy ? I know for a fact that the number of fake-journals exploded once the Govt. of India decided to use this for promotions. It's a bit sad really: in the classical world both these countries spent inordinate amount of time on the questions of epistemology (India esp.). Now reduced to mimicking some silly thing that vaguely tracks knowledge-production even in the best case in the West.

pfdietz 1y ago
What a wonderful illustration of Goodhart's Law.
porridgeraisin 1y ago
Yes. And filtering out publications in "paper mills" and then judging the guy properly doesn't scale beyond the top few institutions. So you'll find a sudden drop-off in research quality once you reach the n_th university. It really is almost like a threshold.

mlpoknbji 1y ago

This article does not seem to quite convey the experience of a pure mathematician. Yes, citation fraud is happening on an apalling scale, but no it is not a serious issue for mathematicians. The problem of AI generated papers is much more serious, although not happening on the same scale (yet!).

paulpauper 1y ago

Publishing math is one of the most time consuming things ever, between the submission, review/revising, and editing. I with there was a faster way of doing it outside of arXiv. Without having to review the paper closely, typically an experienced editor can tell at fist glace if it's correct or sound. It is what we could call the “zone of occasional poor practice”. Included are actions like I think this is more common in computer science papers. I see this all the time, where 5- 10 authors will collaborate on a short paper, then collaborate on each other's papers in such a way that the effort is minimized and publishing count and citation count is maximized. .

matusp 1y ago

Bibliometrics in science is just an unworkable approach in general, and IMO it causes more harms than not. Research is one of the least suitable human activities that you can possibly try to quantify, yet the entire scientific establishment runs on these metrics by now. I more or less believe that this strategy hinders scientific progress, as it pushes researchers into more and more risk-averse behaviors.

Hackbraten 1y ago

I love the table of tortured phrases [0], which shows hilarious examples of synonyms of established scientific phrases, machine-generated by fraudulent authors to stay below the radar of plagiarism detectors. My favorites from that table: - “fuzzy logic” becomes “fluffy rationale” - “spectral analysis” becomes “phantom examinations” - “big data” becomes “enormous information” [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07257#table.3 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07257#table.3

KineticLensman 1y ago
There are loads more in [0], including 'brilliant agreement' for 'smart contract', 'bosom malignancy' for 'breast cancer', and many, many others. [0] https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:24 https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:24

HPsquared 1y ago

Ironic that mathematics suffers due to an overemphasis on numbers.

avdelazeri 1y ago

When I took business 101 in college one of the first things they taught us is that long term, fixed metrics will always become gamified, that both the ones measuring and the ones being measured will replace the real results with the metrics and sacrifice the first for the second. I understand that this is common knowledge in the administrative world. Yet, every single performance metric always becomes ossified as the only target that matters, every time. Why?

lavelganzu 1y ago
At the level of industries and large groups, the chief answer to your "Why?" is the same sort of reasoning as the old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM": Nobody ever got fired for using established performance metrics. On the individual level, there's another tricky problem, which is that very few individuals could figure out an alternative performance metric that beats the established one, no matter how gamified the established one is.