Speaker 1: First of all, I'm so curious about your alias smart Clyde.
Speaker 2: To work out your name as a porn star, you
Speaker 2: take the name of your first pet and the street
Speaker 2: on which you first lived.
Speaker 3: So this is Sivanae producer Shane Anderson talking to a
Speaker 3: guy who goes by the moniker of smut Clyde. He's
Speaker 3: not an actual porn star, by the way.
Speaker 1: So you had a pet called Smut.
Speaker 2: Yes, she was a tortoise shell who was covered all
Speaker 2: over on black smuts, as if she'd fallen down the chimney.
Speaker 2: I guess my crimate fighting activity is usually associated with
Speaker 2: the smut Clyde name, so it might be easier if
Speaker 2: that becomes the main I tinderfire.
Speaker 3: So smut Clyde is a science sleuth and his crime
Speaker 3: fighting activity is combating a growing phenomenon of fake science papers.
Speaker 1: And how much of your time do you think it takes.
Speaker 2: Up tier week? Maybe the here week it's getting gone
Speaker 2: to find them time unpaid.
Speaker 3: Job from Shawes Media. I'm Rick Morton and this is
Speaker 3: seven AM. Academic journals pretty much around the world and
Speaker 3: across all disciplines are being flooded with fake submissions. They're
Speaker 3: typically generated with the help of artificial intelligence by paper mills,
Speaker 3: a cottage industry relying on overworked and desperate researchers to
Speaker 3: fuel their business model, and then more than just a usance.
Speaker 3: The infiltration of fake papers is so bad it's undermining
Speaker 3: the work of scientists and critical fields like cancer research.
Speaker 3: Today seven AM producer Shane Anderson on the cost of
Speaker 3: this research fraud and the science detectives who are trying
Speaker 3: to fight it. That's coming up after the break. Shane,
Speaker 3: you've been looking into the issue of fake scientific papers.
Speaker 3: I have to ask, how did you get interested in
Speaker 3: it to begin with?
Speaker 1: I guess it started when I was sick a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks ago, and so, you know, in the process
Speaker 1: of spending way too much time on the internet looking
Speaker 1: at science articles, I started to notice that there were
Speaker 1: a lot of scientists online who were trying to sound
Speaker 1: the alarm about something strange happening in the field of
Speaker 1: science research. They were noticing a huge uptick essentially in
Speaker 1: bunk research. So fake science papers were proliferating academia.
Speaker 3: There is a scientific fraud epidemic. Every week. There seems
Speaker 3: to be so many retractions, There seems to be so
Speaker 3: many scandals, fraudum.
Speaker 1: And so that was how I stumbled onto this community
Speaker 1: of people who are trying to science. And I guess
Speaker 1: that story starts with a guy called smut Clyde.
Speaker 2: You can basically pay someone to make you a never
Speaker 2: plane out of bamboo and sticks and twine, and it's
Speaker 2: not a real ever plane, but you still get promoted
Speaker 2: for it. It still counts on your academic record.
Speaker 1: Smut Clyde is the pseudonym of a guy called David Bimler.
Speaker 1: He's a retired psychologist previously associated with Massive University in Wellington,
Speaker 1: which is where he lives. He's a really lovely guy.
Speaker 1: He's got you know, long long haired, long beard, lives
Speaker 1: with his cats, and he is one of these what
Speaker 1: they call sleuths. He spends a couple of hours every
Speaker 1: day on his computer at home scouring science journals looking
Speaker 1: for signs of suspicious looking research.
Speaker 3: Okay, so I'm getting Scooby Doo vibes. They've got a
Speaker 3: guy called Smutt Clyde and he's looking for clues. What
Speaker 3: is he looking for exactly? What does suspicious research look like?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Smart gave me a couple of examples of
Speaker 1: the kinds of things that he's looking for.
Speaker 2: First of all, they were really cycling the occasional image.
Speaker 1: So, for example, there are these things called Western blots,
Speaker 1: which are essentially this technique that's used to interpret bands
Speaker 1: of protein, so they images. A lot of the time,
Speaker 1: he'll be looking at these Western blots and he'll notice
Speaker 1: signs that they've been photoshopped, or he'll notice that they're
Speaker 1: identical to a Western blot that is in a paper
Speaker 1: that's from a totally different author, supposedly on a totally
Speaker 1: different subject. Another thing he looks out for is experiments
Speaker 1: that have odd features.
Speaker 2: One paper talked about keeping the mice understandard thick non celsius.
Speaker 1: Condition, which was an experiment that claimed to have treated
Speaker 1: cancer in lab mice kept at thirty nine degrees celsius.
Speaker 2: It's fine if you're keeping cells in the incubator. But
Speaker 2: I put mice at thirty nine degrees, they will not
Speaker 2: live very long.
Speaker 1: So when SMART finds one of these suspicious papers, often
Speaker 1: what they'll do is theyll alert the author to it,
Speaker 1: or they'll alert the publisher, and if it is as
Speaker 1: they suspect, fake science, then ideally the article is then
Speaker 1: retracted and SMART isn't the only person doing this. He's
Speaker 1: part of a tight knit community of sleuths who are
Speaker 1: all themselves scientifically literate. A lot of them are working researchers,
Speaker 1: and they all band together to draw attention to this
Speaker 1: growing problem of essentially fake research.
Speaker 2: Do you feel that science needs more of an immune system?
Speaker 1: In their view, science is sick. There's an epidemic of
Speaker 1: fake research infecting the scientific record, and they see themselves
Speaker 1: as the unofficial, unpaid immune system, and they're really good
Speaker 1: at it. In fact, Smart and a few other sleuths
Speaker 1: managed to uncover this network of three hundred fake papers
Speaker 1: that were all reusing the same data sets, and these
Speaker 1: papers had all been published by one of the biggest
Speaker 1: and most reputable academic publishers, Wiley. So John Wiley and
Speaker 1: Sons this is one of the leading academic publishers. That
Speaker 1: network has since grown to twelve hundred retractions all from
Speaker 1: these special issues, and just last month Wiley announced that
Speaker 1: they were actually going to shudder nineteen of the journals
Speaker 1: as part of the fallout from this discovery, and they
Speaker 1: estimated the closures will cost them around forty million US dollars.
Speaker 3: I mean, honestly, the scale of those blowing my mind.
Speaker 3: It's a huge problem obviously, but how big are we
Speaker 3: talking That.
Speaker 1: Part of what people are trying to figure out. So
Speaker 1: depending on what estimates you use, there are around kind
Speaker 1: of three to four million science papers published each year,
Speaker 1: and the vast, vast majority are good, sound science. But
Speaker 1: against that, the rate of retractions of papers has never
Speaker 1: been higher. So Nature, which is kind of the world's
Speaker 1: leading science journal, they have calculated that last year alone
Speaker 1: there were ten thousand retractions, which is more than double
Speaker 1: the amount for the year before. The thing is that
Speaker 1: bad science is by no means a new problem. You're
Speaker 1: probably aware of some of the more kind of notorious
Speaker 1: examples of bad science, people like Andrew Wakefield, who's the
Speaker 1: discredited doctor who was pushing now very retracted research into
Speaker 1: links between vaccines and autism.
Speaker 3: That was published in the British Medical Journal as well,
Speaker 3: like one of the most esteemed in the world.
Speaker 1: Exactly, this was a bad actor who was specifically using
Speaker 1: this and to essentially launder their political views. But it's
Speaker 1: a little bit different to what we're experiencing now with
Speaker 1: this wave of retractions, and many sluice feel that that
Speaker 1: number of ten thousand is really only the tip of
Speaker 1: the iceberg, because what we're seeing now is this kind
Speaker 1: of rise of mass produced papers of just straight up
Speaker 1: fake science. And so unlike Andrew Wakefield, where you've got
Speaker 1: this clear villain that you can point to and say,
Speaker 1: you know, this research is causing people harm, the brunt
Speaker 1: of this infection is much more quiet and more insidious.
Speaker 1: All it takes is one piece of this fake science
Speaker 1: to derail real research. And so a lot of Smart's
Speaker 1: work is looking at fake science in biomedicine, which is
Speaker 1: a lot of it has to do with cancer research.
Speaker 1: So this is kind of areas where human health is
Speaker 1: at stake. And he explained to me that sometimes these
Speaker 1: fake papers get mixed in with the real and they
Speaker 1: create this framework of knowledge that doesn't actually exist. So
Speaker 1: anyone down the line who reads that and bases real
Speaker 1: clinical research off it is essentially bound to fail. This
Speaker 1: is not only incredibly frustrating for scientists to have their
Speaker 1: experiment fail and not know why, but it's also really
Speaker 1: costly and time consuming in a field where cancer research
Speaker 1: is already very costly and time consuming. So you can
Speaker 1: see how one tiny piece of fake research can have
Speaker 1: an enormous ripple effect. But this isn't just one paper.
Speaker 1: It's tens of thousands that we know of, and many
Speaker 1: more out there that haven't been detected yet. And so
Speaker 1: many people I spoke to said that the accumulated weight
Speaker 1: of these fake papers can threaten the integrity of all
Speaker 1: scientific research time time when we really need to trust
Speaker 1: it the most.
Speaker 3: Coming up after break, what's driving this epidemic of ferny research, Shane,
Speaker 3: We've been talking about the explosion of retractions in the
Speaker 3: scientific literature. Where exactly are these dodgy papers coming from.
Speaker 1: They're not from nothing, iicm no, And to better understand
Speaker 1: where these papers are coming from, I went and spoke
Speaker 1: to a guy called Ivan Ransky. He's Distinguished Journalist in
Speaker 1: Residence at the Arthur el Kada Journalism Institute at New
Speaker 1: York University. But more importantly, he's also the co founder
Speaker 1: of a website called retraction Watch.
Speaker 4: The sort of reason why retraction Watch exists is because
Speaker 4: there was a particularly bad case here in the States
Speaker 4: that person was making up the data and clinical trinds
Speaker 4: of the painkiller.
Speaker 1: One of the main things they do is keep a
Speaker 1: database of retracted articles, which is currently sitting at fifty thousand,
Speaker 1: which is pretty incredible.
Speaker 4: So it's not a new problem. It's definitely more visible now,
Speaker 4: which is a good thing, but it also means it's
Speaker 4: a very painful time for science. It's a painful time
Speaker 4: for publishers, a painful time for universities that are dealing
Speaker 4: with these issues.
Speaker 1: He says there's a few factors driving this epidemic of
Speaker 1: fake papers. One is the real epidemic, the COVID nineteen pandemic.
Speaker 1: Cases like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine made us a lot more
Speaker 1: aware of how easily misinformation can spread. But he says
Speaker 1: that there's another factor, which is the growth of this
Speaker 1: entire black market of companies who are behind a lot
Speaker 1: of these fake papers. And these are the paper mills.
Speaker 4: These operations, these shady operations that sell papers to people
Speaker 4: that make things up to make fake papers, that sell authorship,
Speaker 4: you know, all the things you need in order to
Speaker 4: succeed as an academic, in order to get a job
Speaker 4: and grants and promotions and everything like that.
Speaker 1: They're essentially companies where for a fee, they will generate
Speaker 1: a science paper and get it published in a journal
Speaker 1: on your behalf and there's this whole economy around this,
Speaker 1: where you pay more to be listed as an author
Speaker 1: higher on the article, or you pay more to be
Speaker 1: published in a high quality journal, for example. And these
Speaker 1: mills also take advantage of the way journals vet papers. Basically,
Speaker 1: if you submit a paper, your research won't get published
Speaker 1: until it passes the peer review process. The problem is
Speaker 1: these peer reviewers are often working for free and they're
Speaker 1: often very busy.
Speaker 4: When you have been told for decades that this is
Speaker 4: the way that peer review like a good housekeeping seal
Speaker 4: of approval, then you find out that in fact it misses,
Speaker 4: maybe more often than it actually finds the problems and
Speaker 4: screens the problems properly, you start to i think justifiably
Speaker 4: lose trust in that system.
Speaker 1: And one study that came out a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: they actually worked with a bunch of journals and they
Speaker 1: found that on average, around two percent of the papers
Speaker 1: submitted will be junk science. But if a paper slips
Speaker 1: through peer review and then gets published, the number of
Speaker 1: fake science that will be submitted to that journal can
Speaker 1: rise to up to forty six percent. And what these
Speaker 1: loose have done that's incredibly clever is that They've recognized
Speaker 1: shared features in a lot of these fake science articles,
Speaker 1: and through that have actually been able to identify networks
Speaker 1: of hundreds of papers linked to common features and basically
Speaker 1: unmask where some of these paper mills are coming from.
Speaker 3: That's wild. I mean, what can we actually do about it?
Speaker 3: I mean, this is a global phenomenon. Surely do we
Speaker 3: have a role to play here in Australia about beoliefing it.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of solutions that people have been growing about.
Speaker 1: So last year, South Australia's Independent Commissioner against Corruption, Bruce Lander,
Speaker 1: he recommended actually having a body that could deal with
Speaker 1: specific cases and also equipping the Australian Research Council with
Speaker 1: kind of legislative powers so it could be easier to
Speaker 1: try cases of extreme misconduct in the court system, for example.
Speaker 1: But I mean, ultimately that's not really going to be
Speaker 1: equipped to deal with the problem of paper mills that
Speaker 1: are based internationally infiltrating research that happens in Australia. Like,
Speaker 1: it's just not set up to deal with that. Everyone
Speaker 1: I spoke to agreed that the best way to fix
Speaker 1: this was to change the conditions that allowed these mills
Speaker 1: to flourish. So solving this problem of fake science really
Speaker 1: is about looking at the bigger picture about why this
Speaker 1: market exists. It's because of the way academia is set up,
Speaker 1: so academics have to publish articles to get grants, promotions,
Speaker 1: all of the things you need not just to kind
Speaker 1: of have a good career, but to have any career
Speaker 1: in science. You can't get grant money so you can
Speaker 1: chase a cure for cancer. None of that really happens
Speaker 1: without publications. So this is a system that's incentivizing at best,
Speaker 1: science that's rushed and under pressure, and at worst, it's
Speaker 1: creating the market for paper mills.
Speaker 3: To borrow another kind of science analogy, it's survival of
Speaker 3: the fittest, isn't it's natural selection. We've got these pressures
Speaker 3: existing in academia that are forcing, or at least seem
Speaker 3: to be forcing. Research is down a certain path, which
Speaker 3: is publisher perish. And I guess publisher perish is defining
Speaker 3: the whole system, right it.
Speaker 1: Is, And there is something dull, winny and about it, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And the people I spoke to said that there are
Speaker 1: slowly steps being taken to deal with this, but on
Speaker 1: the whole publishers and universities have been really slow to
Speaker 1: respond to the problem. The more that we ignore it,
Speaker 1: the more damage we're doing down the line, where essentially
Speaker 1: trust in the entire scientific project is being eroded. And
Speaker 1: when we don't have trust in the scientific project, then
Speaker 1: it's much easier for people to weaponize the distrust, and
Speaker 1: we kind of come back to people who actively weaponize science,
Speaker 1: like you know, the vaccine myths and the COVID misinformation.
Speaker 1: At the end of the day, you know, science isn't perfect,
Speaker 1: and it's also never set out to obtain an absolute truth.
Speaker 1: You know, mistakes are made, and a lot of them
Speaker 1: are genuine. But science is a process and it's set
Speaker 1: up to check and to correct itself. But right now
Speaker 1: those systems of correction aren't quite holding up the way
Speaker 1: they used to.
Speaker 3: Seane, thank you so much for taking the time to
Speaker 3: talk to us today.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Rick. Also in the news today, first term Senator Fatima
Speaker 3: Payman has now she's leaving the Labor Party to sit
Speaker 3: as an independent. Speaking to the media, Senator payment said
Speaker 3: she was deeply torn over the decision and still supported
Speaker 3: the values of the Labor Party. They could see no
Speaker 3: middle ground when it came to conforming to caucous solidarity
Speaker 3: over the recognition of Palestinian statehood. The senator confirmed she
Speaker 3: will not be joining any Muslim community linked party and
Speaker 3: police have arrested four people after a pro Palestinian demonstration
Speaker 3: on the roof of Parliament House in Canberra. Protesters from
Speaker 3: the group Renegade Activists climbed onto the roof of Parliament
Speaker 3: House to unfurl banners accusing Australia of complicity in war
Speaker 3: crime and jenocide. Seven Am is a daily show from
Speaker 3: Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper. It's produced by Kara Jensen, McKinnon,
Speaker 3: Shane Anderson and Zalton Fetcher. Our senior producer is Chris
Speaker 3: dan Gaden. Our technical producer Zaticus Bastow. Edited by Scott Mitchell,
Speaker 3: Chris Dangate and Sarah mcveee. Our head of audio, Eric Jensen,
Speaker 3: is our editor in chief. Mixing by Travis Evans and
Speaker 3: Atticus Bastow. Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and
Speaker 3: Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio. I'm Rick Morton, thanks for listening.