Europe's Largest Paper Mill? 1,500 Research Articles Linked To Ukrainian Network (nature.com)
- Reference: 0179022754
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/05/1551253/europes-largest-paper-mill-1500-research-articles-linked-to-ukrainian-network
- Source link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02809-y
> Anna Abalkina, a research-integrity sleuth and social scientist at the Free University of Berlin, discovered the paper mill in 2022 after spotting papers with author e-mail addresses that had domains that did not match the geographical locations of academic affiliations. She dubbed the paper mill 'Tanu.pro' after the most frequently used of these unusual domains.
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> Abalkina later teamed up with Svetlana Kleiner, a research integrity officer at the publisher Springer Nature, who is based in Leiden, the Netherlands. Together, they traced more than 60 suspicious e-mail domains that were linked to Tanu.pro and appeared among the author e-mails of 1,517 papers published between 2017 and 2025, listing more than 4,500 researchers affiliated with around 460 universities across 46 countries. The majority of authors were in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02809-y
Peace finally! (Score:2)
Looks like Russia and Ukraine may finally settle their differences and return to a peaceful partnership running and selling scams on the internet.
Just throwing this out there (Score:1)
...but are they sure its just not because of censorship or difficulty in getting ideas out? Are the papers actually problematic or is it just that western medicine doesn't like to hear alternate takes?
too quick to hit submit (Score:2)
-just
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
anyone who uses the term "western medicine" is selling some bullshit
Re: (Score:3)
This is about academics paying "consultants" to write fake results for them and have them published. This happens typically in low income countries where researchers don't have any means to execute research, yet are evaluated yearly and expected to compete at international level. Say, to keep the job or progress in career, their university asks them N papers per year, which they can't do because the time spent in lectures is overwhelming and/or the research budget is inexistent. So they resort to paying the
Ender's Game was Cursory (Score:1)
Ender was cursed with an endgame that not only paralleled the Bible but challenged JK Rowling.
1500 seem like a very low number (Score:2)
I just read article about how a high percentage of research articles were fake. I can't find it right now but it makes fifteen hundred seem like a low number for such scrutiny when compared to how many in the US and Europe are baked up.
Effective use of results? (Score:2)
Assuming the results of the investigation are legit, what are the chances that they are used effectively by academic institutions, companies, government, or other organizations to actually mete out consequences? Like firing people, blacklisting them or their sponsors, etc.?
I read about how much work it took at Harvard to actually follow through investigating and taking action about a discredited researcher, and I suspect most places wouldn't choose that route, even if they had this sort of information abou
Re:Effective use of results? (Score:4, Interesting)
> what are the chances that they are used effectively by academic institutions, companies, government, or other organizations to actually mete out consequences?
We only know three countries of origin: Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine.
For Russia, I would say chances of accountability are very low. With Kazakhstan still under Russia influence, so I would not expect better. Ukraine might have a chance for better governance now with their on-going move towards Western standards.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it does mention 46 countries, so...