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Scientific fraud: widespread and organized according to Northwestern University research + math fraud scandal

Northwestern University and widespread scientific fraud

An August 4, 2025 article by Cathleen O’Grady for science.org describes a study into global networks instigating scientific fraud, Note: A link has been removed,

For years, sleuths who study scientific fraud have been sounding the alarm about the sheer size and sophistication of the industry that churns out fake publications. Now, an extensive investigation finds evidence of a range of bad actors profiting from fraud. The study, based on an analysis of thousands of publications and their authors and editors, shows paper mills are just part of a complex, interconnected system that includes publishers, journals, and brokers.

The paper, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paints an alarming picture. Northwestern University metascientist Reese Richardson and his colleagues identify networks of editors and authors colluding to publish shoddy or fraudulent papers, report that large organizations are placing batches of fake papers in journals, suggest brokers may serve as intermediaries between paper mills and intercepted journals, and find that the number of fake papers—though still relatively small—seems to be increasing at a rate far greater than the scientific literature generally.

The paper shows that misconduct “has become an industry,” says Anna Abalkina of the Free University of Berlin, who studies corruption in science and was not involved with the research. Richardson and colleagues hope their sweeping case will attract attention and spur change.

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O’Grady’s August 4, 2025 article provides some fascinating detail, Note: Links have been removed,

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They began their analysis by pinpointing corrupt editors. They focused their investigation on PLOS ONE, because the megajournal allows easy access to bulk metadata and publishes the names of the editors who have handled the thousands of papers it publishes each year, making it possible to detect anomalies without behind-the-scenes information. The researchers identified all the papers from the journal that had been retracted or received comments on PubPeer—a website that allows researchers to critique published work—and then identified each paper’s editors.

All told, 33 editors stood out as more frequently handling work that was later retracted or criticized than would be expected by chance. “Some of these were immense outliers,” Richardson says. For instance, of the 79 papers that one editor had handled at PLOS ONE, 49 have been retracted. Flagged editors handled 1.3% of papers published in the journal by 2024, but nearly one-third of all retracted papers.

The team also spotted that these editors worked on certain authors’ papers at a suspiciously high rate. These authors were often editors at PLOS [Public Library of Science] ONE themselves, and they often handled each other’s papers. It’s possible that some editors are being paid bribes, Richardson says, but “also possible that these are informal arrangements that are being made among colleagues.” The researchers detected similarly questionable editor behavior in 10 journals published by Hindawi, an open-access publisher that was shuttered because of rampant paper mill activity after Wiley acquired it. A spokesperson for Wiley told Science the publisher has made “significant investments to address research integrity issues.”

Renee Hoch, head of publication ethics at PLOS, said in an email to Science that the publisher has long been aware of networks like these, and will assess whether any of the editors implicated are still on the journal’s editorial board, opening investigations if they are. She emphasizes that the study focused on PLOS because of its readily accessible data: “Paper mills are truly an industry-wide problem.”

Researchers working on paper mills have long assumed that editors and authors have been colluding. The new findings are “killer evidence” for these suspicions, says Domingo Docampo, a bibliometrician at the University of Vigo (Spain). He adds that although the findings only show collusion at a limited number of journals, others are probably affected. Just last week, Retraction Watch reported that the publisher Frontiers had begun to retract 122 papers after discovering a network of editors and authors “who conducted peer review with undisclosed conflicts of interest,” according to a company statement. The network of 35 individuals has also published more than 4000 papers in journals from seven other publishers, the company said, which require further scrutiny. A Frontiers spokesperson said they planned to share information with the other affected publishers.

Richardson and his colleagues found that the problem goes far beyond networks of unscrupulous editors and authors scratching each other’s backs. They identified what appear to be coordinated efforts to arrange the publication of batches of dubious papers in multiple journals.

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For the curious, there’s more in O’Grady’s August 4, 2025 article. An August 4, 2025 Northwestern University news release by Amanda Morris (received via email and available on EurekAlert) focuses on other aspects of the research,

From fabricated research to paid authorships and citations, organized scientific fraud is on the rise, according to a new Northwestern University study.

By combining large-scale data analysis of scientific literature with case studies, the researchers led a deep investigation into scientific fraud. Although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on lone individuals, the Northwestern study instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and entities, which systematically work together to undermine the integrity of academic publishing.

The problem is so widespread that the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications. The authors argue these findings should serve as a wake-up call to the scientific community, which needs to act before the public loses confidence in the scientific process.

The study will be published during the week of August 4 the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Science must police itself better in order to preserve its integrity,” said Northwestern’s Luís A. N. Amaral, the study’s senior author. “If we do not create awareness around this problem, worse and worse behavior will become normalized. At some point, it will be too late, and scientific literature will become completely poisoned. Some people worry that talking about this issue is attacking science. But I strongly believe we are defending science from bad actors. We need to be aware of the seriousness of this problem and take measures to address it.”

An expert in complex social systems, Amaral is the Erastus Otis Haven Professor and professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. Reese Richardson, a postdoctoral fellow in Amaral’s laboratory, is the paper’s first author.

Extensive analysis

When people think about scientific fraud, they might remember news reports of retracted papers, falsified data or plagiarism. These reports typically center around the isolated actions of one individual, who takes shortcuts to get ahead in an increasingly competitive industry. But Amaral and his team uncovered a widespread underground network operating within the shadows and outside of the public’s awareness.

“These networks are essentially criminal organizations, acting together to fake the process of science,” Amaral said. “Millions of dollars are involved in these processes.”

To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed extensive datasets of retracted publications, editorial records and instances of image duplication. Most of the data came from major aggregators of scientific literature, including Web of Science (WoS), Elsevier’s Scopus, National Library of Medicine’s PubMed/MEDLINE and OpenAlex, which includes data from Microsoft Academic Graph, Crossref, ORCID, Unpaywall and other institutional repositories.

Richardson and his colleagues also collected lists of de-indexed journals, which are scholarly journals that have been removed from databases for failing to meet certain quality or ethical standards. The researchers also included data on retracted articles from Retraction Watch, article comments from PubPeer and metadata — such as editor names, submission dates and acceptance dates — from articles published in specific journals.

Buying a reputation

After analyzing the data, the team uncovered coordinated efforts involving “paper mills,” brokers and infiltrated journals. Functioning much like factories, paper mills churn out large numbers of manuscripts, which they then sell to academics who want to quickly publish new work. These manuscripts are mostly low quality — featuring fabricated data, manipulated or even stolen images, plagiarized content and sometimes nonsensical or physically impossible claims.

“More and more scientists are being caught up in paper mills,” Amaral said. “Not only can they buy papers, but they can buy citations. Then, they can appear like well-reputed scientists when they have barely conducted their own research at all.”

“Paper mills operate by a variety of different models,” Richardson added. “So, we have only just been able to scratch the surface of how they operate. But they sell basically anything that can be used to launder a reputation. They often sell authorship slots for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. A person might pay more money for the first author position or less money for a fourth author position. People also can pay to get papers they have written automatically accepted in a journal through a sham peer-review process.”

To identify more articles originating from paper mills, the Amaral group launched a parallel project that automatically scans published materials science and engineering papers. The team specifically looked for authors who misidentified instruments they used in their research. A paper with those results was accepted by the journal PLOS ONE.

Brokers, hijacking and collusion

Amaral, Richardson and their collaborators found fraudulent networks use several key strategies: (1) Groups of researchers collude to publish papers across multiple journals. When their activities are discovered, the papers are subsequently retracted; (2) brokers serve as intermediaries to enable mass publication of fraudulent papers in compromised journals; (3) fraudulent activities are concentrated in specific, vulnerable subfields; and (4) organized entities evade quality-control measures, such as journal de-indexing.

“Brokers connect all the different people behind the scenes,” Amaral said. “You need to find someone to write the paper. You need to find people willing to pay to be the authors. You need to find a journal where you can get it all published. And you need editors in that journal who will accept that paper.”

Sometimes these organizations go around established journals altogether, searching instead for defunct journals to hijack. When a legitimate journal stops publishing, for example, bad actors can take over its name or website. These actors surreptitiously assume the journal’s identity, lending credibility to its fraudulent publications, despite the actual publication being defunct.

“This happened to the journal HIV Nursing,” Richardson said. “It was formerly the journal of a professional nursing organization in the U.K., then it stopped publishing, and its online domain lapsed. An organization bought the domain name and started publishing thousands of papers on subjects completely unrelated to nursing, all indexed in Scopus.”

Fighting for science

To combat this growing threat to legitimate scientific publishing, Amaral and Richardson emphasize the need for a multi-prong approach. This approach includes enhanced scrutiny of editorial processes, improved methods for detecting fabricated research, a greater understanding of the networks facilitating this misconduct and a radical restructuring of the system of incentives in science.

Amaral and Richardson also underscore the importance of addressing these issues before artificial intelligence (AI) infiltrates scientific literature more than it already has.

“If we’re not prepared to deal with the fraud that’s already occurring, then we’re certainly not prepared to deal with what generative AI can do to scientific literature,” Richardson said. “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, which then will be used to write more papers.”

“This study is probably the most depressing project I’ve been involved with in my entire life,” Amaral said. “Since I was a kid, I was excited about science. It’s distressing to see others engage in fraud and in misleading others. But if you believe that science is useful and important for humanity, then you have to fight for it.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly by Reese A. K. Richardson, Spencer S. Hong, Jennifer A. Byrne, Thomas Stoeger, and Luís A. Nunes Amaral. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences August 4, 2025 122 (32) e2420092122 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420092122

This paper is open access.

And now—math fraud

A September 19, 2025 news item on ScienceDaily features an investigation into fraudulent math research, Note: A link has been removed,

An international team of authors led by Ilka Agricola, professor of mathematics at the University of Marburg, Germany, has investigated fraudulent practices in the publication of research results in mathematics on behalf of the German Mathematical Society (DMV) and the International Mathematical Union (IMU), documenting systematic fraud over many years. The results of the study were recently published on the preprint server arxiv.org and in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and have since caused a stir among mathematicians.

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Sanjana Gajbhiye’s September ??, 2025 article for earth.com delves further into the topic, Note: Links have been removed,

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Quality lost to quantity

The findings show how the definition of research quality has shifted. Instead of focusing on content, originality, and insight, institutions and individuals are increasingly evaluated by commercial metrics. These include the number of publications, total citations, and the so-called impact factor of journals.

Such measures, calculated by private companies with little transparency, have gained outsized influence. Providers promote their databases globally, and universities use them to enhance prestige and compete internationally.

This environment rewards quantity over quality, pushing academics to publish more, even when contributions are marginal or flawed.

Fraudulent companies have seized this opportunity. They sell services that manipulate rankings, offering ghostwritten articles, fake peer reviews, and even bundles of citations. For individuals, this can mean better career prospects.

For universities, it can result in higher rankings, increased funding, and greater appeal to international students. The collateral damage is a growing pool of unread publications that add nothing to scientific understanding.

Fake mathematics success

The report documents striking examples that reveal how metrics can produce absurd outcomes. In 2019, Clarivate Inc., the market leader for citation data, ranked a Taiwanese university as having the most world-class mathematicians. The catch was startling: mathematics was not even offered at the institution.

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Mathematic trust under threat

“‘Fake science‘ is not only annoying, it is a danger to science and society,” said IMU Secretary General Professor Christoph Sorger.

“Because you don’t know what is valid and what is not. Targeted disinformation undermines trust in science and also makes it difficult for us mathematicians to decide which results can be used as a basis for further research.”

This erosion of trust strikes at the heart of mathematics. Proofs rely on certainty, yet when fraudulent or hollow work appears in respected outlets, that certainty weakens.

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Fixing trust in mathematics publishing

The commission’s work does not end with exposing the problem. It also outlines possible solutions for a healthier publication system. These recommendations emphasize the need to strengthen peer review, encourage collaboration among journals, and recenter the evaluation of research on quality rather than raw numbers.

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Metrics are deeply tied to funding and prestige, so the shift won’t be simple, but it could reshape the landscape for future generations.

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A September 20, 2025 Castle Journal blog posting provides more information,

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The “Culture of Numbers” and its Consequences

The study, led by Professor Ilka Agricola of the University of Marburg, argues that the root cause of the problem is a “culture of numbers” that prioritizes commercial metrics over scientific content. Universities and research institutions have become increasingly reliant on commercial databases like Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to evaluate researchers. These metrics, which are not transparent and are not vetted by the scientific community, have become the main currency for career progression, grants, and prestige.

* “Megajournals”: The study highlights the rise of “megajournals,” which publish anything as long as the authors pay a fee. These journals now publish more articles per year than all reputable mathematics journals combined. The report cites a shocking example where a commercial database ranked a university in Taiwan as having the most world-class researchers in mathematics, despite the fact that the university does not even offer mathematics as a subject.

* Paper Mills and Citation Cartels: The investigation found evidence of “paper mills,” which sell fabricated papers to researchers, and “citation cartels,” where academics agree to cite each other’s work to artificially inflate their metrics. These services are offered anonymously online, with prices for articles and citations ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars. The report describes these networks as “criminal organizations” that have invaded the “ecosystem” of scientific publishing.

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Ilka Agricola gave an interview to Retraction Watch, from the undated article, Note: Links have been removed,

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A pair of papers posted to the arXiv addresses the issue of fraudulent publishing in math, particularly metrics gaming, and offers a list of recommendations to help detect and deal with that problem and other fraudulent activities. (The former was also published in the October AMS Notices; the latter will appear in the November issue.) “Fraudulent publishing undermines trust in science and scientific results and therefore fuels antiscience movements,” mathematician Ilka Agricola, lead author of both papers, told Retraction Watch.

A professor of mathematics at Marburg University in Germany, Agricola was president of the German Mathematical Society in 2021-2022 and is chair of the Committee on Publishing of the International Mathematical Union. The new articles are the products of a working group of the IMU and the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

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Retraction Watch: As you note in the new papers, Clarivate announced in 2023 it had excluded the entire field of math from its list of “Highly Cited Researchers,” or HCRs. What’s going on?

Agricola: The publication culture in math differs a bit from, say, experimental and life sciences. On average, mathematicians publish fewer papers with fewer authors than scientists in other fields. So, with the same absolute number of papers and citations, one can become a “highly-cited researcher” in math, but not in other fields. Thus, gaming the system is easier.

The list of HCRs for mathematics became so screwed that Clarivate couldn’t pretend anymore that it had any value. This being said, Clarivate announced that they would look into new measuring tools, but didn’t come up with any alternative ideas in the meantime, nor did they contact any representatives of the international mathematical community.

Retraction Watch: Few people talk about fraudulent publishing in math. Why is that?

Agricola: For a long time, mathematicians thought that as long as they keep away from predatory journals or paper mills, the problem does not affect them. This turned out to be wrong.

Retraction Watch: If you look at the number of papers that tripped Clear Skies’ Papermill Alarm in 2022 (we included a histogram in this article we wrote for The Conversation [link and excerpts follow]), math is pretty far down the list. Are there a lot of fake papers in math?

Agricola: It is probably fair to say that the problem is not as severe as in other fields like cancer research, but the community is smaller and the number of fake papers is growing at alarming speed. Predatory and low-quality mega-journals are trying hard to lure respected scientists into their parallel universe of fake science, thus trying to give themselves the impression of respectability. Thus, one of our goals is to raise awareness for the issue in the mathematical community!

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Retraction Watch: You and your coauthors are mathematicians, and yet you argue against focusing on numbers like journal impact factors and publication and citation counts. Is that what’s driving all of this bad behavior?

Agricola: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” This quote is from the British economist Charles Goodhart, and it also applies to bibliometrics measures. Of course, gaming these metrics has always existed, but some of us liked to believe that they would be roughly OK, with some error bar due to some cheating. Now, we realize the error bar is larger than the number one wants to measure. Perhaps one advantage of mathematicians is that they are not easily impressed by numbers, and we have the means to understand and analyze them — this is our job. And so, the conclusion is very clear: The correlation between bibliometrics and research quality is so low that we should not use bibliometrics. And I urge all colleagues to say so openly!

Retraction Watch: So how do we judge research quality if we shouldn’t use publication metrics?

Agricola: Read the actual publications instead of relying on bibliometrics! Plus, in mathematics, we are lucky to have two extremely well curated databases for math papers and journals, zbMath Open and MathReviews. If a journal is not included there, it’s either very interdisciplinary or one should get suspicious.

Retraction Watch: Is it possible for individual researchers to jump off the bibiometrics bandwagon without jeopardizing their careers?

Agricola: We need to fight for a change in culture, that’s for sure, and the path will be rash and hard. To young researchers, we should give the warning that being involved in predatory publishing can also just as well put their scientific integrity at risk. Remember the people who had to resign because of data falsification?

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I am providing citations (of a sort) to both papers and links to all three sites where both papers can be found and PDFs for both papers: Everything is open access.

Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences by Ilka Agricola, Lynn Heller, Wil Schilders, Moritz Schubotz, Peter Taylor, Luis Vega.

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07257

AMS (American Mathematical Society) Notices October 2025: https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202509/noti3217/noti3217.html?adat=October%202025&trk=3217&pdfissue=202509&pdffile=rnoti-p1038.pdf&cat=none&type=.html

Ilke Agricola’s Research Gate website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilka-Agricola (scroll down to see the listed papers)

PDF: https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202509/rnoti-p1038.pdf

How to Fight Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences: Joint Recommendations of the IMU [International Mathematical Union] and the ICIAM [International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics] by Ilka Agricola, Lynn Heller, Wil Schilders, Moritz Schubotz, Peter Taylor, Luis Vega.

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09877

AMS (American Mathematical Society) Notices November 2025: https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202510/noti3266/noti3266.html?adat=November%202025&trk=3266&pdfissue=202510&pdffile=rnoti-p1179.pdf&cat=none&type=.html

Ilke Agricola’s Research Gate website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilka-Agricola (scroll down to see the listed papers)

PDF: https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202510/rnoti-p1179.pdf

Fraud slows down research

Mentioned in the Retraction Watch/Agricola interview, this January 29, 2025 article by Frederik Joelving (contributing editor, Retraction Watch), Cyril Labbé, (professor of computer science, Université Grenoble Alpes [UGA]), Guillaume Cabanac, (professor of computer Science, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) is chilling, Note: Links have been removed,

Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.

It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. Around 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating – possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies only to find that they were made up.

Even when the bogus papers are spotted – usually by amateur sleuths on their own time – academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews other research and discusses findings.

These fake papers are slowing down research that has helped millions of people with lifesaving medicine and therapies from cancer to COVID-19. Analysts’ data shows that fields related to cancer and medicine are particularly hard hit, while areas like philosophy and art are less affected. Some scientists have abandoned their life’s work because they cannot keep pace given the number of fake papers they must bat down.

The problem reflects a worldwide commodification of science. Universities, and their research funders, have long used regular publication in academic journals as requirements for promotions and job security, spawning the mantra “publish or perish.”

But now, fraudsters have infiltrated the academic publishing industry to prioritize profits over scholarship. Equipped with technological prowess, agility and vast networks of corrupt researchers, they are churning out papers on everything from obscure genes to artificial intelligence in medicine.

These papers are absorbed into the worldwide library of research faster than they can be weeded out. About 119,000 scholarly journal articles and conference papers are published globally every week, or more than 6 million a year. Publishers estimate that, at most journals, about 2% of the papers submitted – but not necessarily published – are likely fake, although this number can be much higher at some publications.

… there is a bustling online underground economy for all things scholarly publishing. Authorship, citations, even academic journal editors, are up for sale. This fraud is so prevalent that it has its own name: paper mills, a phrase that harks back to “term-paper mills,” where students cheat by getting someone else to write a class paper for them.

The impact on publishers is profound. In high-profile cases, fake articles can hurt a journal’s bottom line. Important scientific indexes – databases of academic publications that many researchers rely on to do their work – may delist journals that publish too many compromised papers. There is growing criticism that legitimate publishers could do more to track and blacklist journals and authors who regularly publish fake papers that are sometimes little more than artificial intelligence-generated phrases strung together.

To better understand the scope, ramifications and potential solutions of this metastasizing assault on science, we – a contributing editor at Retraction Watch, a website that reports on retractions of scientific papers and related topics, and two computer scientists at France’s Université Toulouse III–Paul Sabatier and Université Grenoble Alpes who specialize in detecting bogus publications – spent six months investigating paper mills.

This included, by some of us at different times, trawling websites and social media posts, interviewing publishers, editors, research-integrity experts, scientists, doctors, sociologists and scientific sleuths engaged in the Sisyphean task of cleaning up the literature. It also involved, by some of us, screening scientific articles looking for signs of fakery.

What emerged is a deep-rooted crisis that has many researchers and policymakers calling for a new way for universities and many governments to evaluate and reward academics and health professionals across the globe.

Just as highly biased websites dressed up to look like objective reporting are gnawing away at evidence-based journalism and threatening elections, fake science is grinding down the knowledge base on which modern society rests.

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The January 29, 2025 article highlights a number of problems including these,

To expedite the publication of one another’s work, some corrupt scientists form peer review rings. Paper mills may even create fake peer reviewers impersonating real scientists to ensure their manuscripts make it through to publication. Others bribe editors or plant agents on journal editorial boards.

María de los Ángeles Oviedo-García, a professor of marketing at the University of Seville in Spain, spends her spare time hunting for suspect peer reviews from all areas of science, hundreds of which she has flagged on PubPeer. ……

“One of the demanding fights for me is to keep faith in science,” says Oviedo-García, who tells her students to look up papers on PubPeer before relying on them too heavily. Her research has been slowed down, she adds, because she now feels compelled to look for peer review reports for studies she uses in her work. Often there aren’t any, because “very few journals publish those review reports,” Oviedo-García says.

An ‘absolutely huge’ problem

It is unclear when paper mills began to operate at scale. The earliest article retracted due to suspected involvement of such agencies was published in 2004, according to the Retraction Watch Database, which contains details about tens of thousands of retractions. (The database is operated by The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch.) Nor is it clear exactly how many low-quality, plagiarized or made-up articles paper mills have spawned.

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“The threat of paper mills to scientific publishing and integrity has no parallel over my 30-year scientific career …. In the field of human gene science alone, the number of potentially fraudulent articles could exceed 100,000 original papers,” she [Jennifer Byrne, an Australian scientist] wrote to lawmakers, adding, “This estimate may seem shocking but is likely to be conservative.”

In one area of genetics research – the study of noncoding RNA in different types of cancer – “We’re talking about more than 50% of papers published are from mills,” Byrne said. “It’s like swimming in garbage.”

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… in the global south, the publish-or-perish edict runs up against underdeveloped research infrastructures and education systems, leaving scientists in a bind. For a Ph.D., the Cairo physician who requested anonymity conducted an entire clinical trial single-handedly – from purchasing study medication to randomizing patients, collecting and analyzing data and paying article-processing fees. In wealthier nations, entire teams work on such studies, with the tab easily running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Research is quite challenging here,” the physician said. That’s why scientists “try to manipulate and find easier ways so they get the job done.”

Institutions, too, have gamed the system with an eye to international rankings. In 2011, the journal Science described how prolific researchers in the United States and Europe were offered hefty payments for listing Saudi universities as secondary affiliations on papers. And in 2023, the magazine, in collaboration with Retraction Watch, uncovered a massive self-citation ploy by a top-ranked dental school in India that forced undergraduate students to publish papers referencing faculty work.

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According to the January 29, 2025 article, there is a root cause, Note: Links have been removed,

… unsavory schemes can be traced back to the introduction of performance-based metrics in academia, a development driven by the New Public Management movement that swept across the Western world in the 1980s, according to Canadian sociologist of science Yves Gingras of the Université du Québec à Montréal. When universities and public institutions adopted corporate management, scientific papers became “accounting units” used to evaluate and reward scientific productivity rather than “knowledge units” advancing our insight into the world around us, Gingras wrote.

This transformation led many researchers to compete on numbers instead of content, which made publication metrics poor measures of academic prowess. As Gingras has shown, the controversial French microbiologist Didier Raoult, who now has more than a dozen retractions to his name, has an h-index – a measure combining publication and citation numbers – that is twice as high as that of Albert Einstein – “proof that the index is absurd,” Gingras said.

Worse, a sort of scientific inflation, or “scientometric bubble,” has ensued, with each new publication representing an increasingly small increment in knowledge. “We publish more and more superficial papers, we publish papers that have to be corrected, and we push people to do fraud,” said Gingras.

In terms of career prospects of individual academics, too, the average value of a publication has plummeted, triggering a rise in the number of hyperprolific authors. One of the most notorious cases is Spanish chemist Rafael Luque, who in 2023 reportedly published a study every 37 hours.

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There is some hope according to the January 29, 2025 article, Note: Links have been removed,

Stern [Bodo Stern, a former editor of the journal Cell and chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute] isn’t the first scientist to bemoan the excessive focus on bibliometrics. “We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons,” wrote the late statistician Douglas G. Altman in a much-cited editorial from 1994. “Abandoning using the number of publications as a measure of ability would be a start.”

Nearly two decades later, a group of some 150 scientists and 75 science organizations released the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA, discouraging the use of the journal impact factor and other measures as proxies for quality. The 2013 declaration has since been signed by more than 25,000 individuals and organizations in 165 countries.

Despite the declaration, metrics remain in wide use today, and scientists say there is a new sense of urgency.

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Stern and his colleagues have tried to make improvements at their institution. Researchers who wish to renew their seven-year contract have long been required to write a short paragraph describing the importance of their major results. Since the end of 2023, they also have been asked to remove journal names from their applications.

That way, “you can never do what all reviewers do – I’ve done it – look at the bibliography and in just one second decide, ‘Oh, this person has been productive because they have published many papers and they’re published in the right journals,’” says Stern. “What matters is, did it really make a difference?”

Shifting the focus away from convenient performance metrics seems possible not just for wealthy private institutions like Howard Hughes Medical Institute, but also for large government funders. In Australia, for example, the National Health and Medical Research Council in 2022 launched the “top 10 in 10” policy, aiming, in part, to “value research quality rather than quantity of publications.”

Rather than providing their entire bibliography, the agency, which assesses thousands of grant applications every year, asked researchers to list no more than 10 publications from the past decade and explain the contribution each had made to science. …

Gingras, the Canadian sociologist, advocates giving scientists the time they need to produce work that matters, rather than a gushing stream of publications. He is a signatory to the Slow Science Manifesto: “Once you get slow science, I can predict that the number of corrigenda, the number of retractions, will go down,” he says.

At one point, Gingras was involved in evaluating a research organization whose mission was to improve workplace security. An employee presented his work. “He had a sentence I will never forget,” Gingras recalls. The employee began by saying, “‘You know, I’m proud of one thing: My h-index is zero.’ And it was brilliant.” The scientist had developed a technology that prevented fatal falls among construction workers. “He said, ‘That’s useful, and that’s my job.’ I said, ‘Bravo!’”

Sometimes, there’s a science reporting problem

A September 3, 2025 Universiteit van Amsterdam press release (also on EurekAlert) highlights a problem with science reporting and over confidence,

Science journalists aren’t particularly concerned about so-called “predatory journals”, confident that they have the skills and intuition needed to avoid reporting on problematic research. For many, a journal’s reputation and name-recognition are decisive factors in assessing the quality of scientific research – but this could be exacerbating existing imbalances in science and journalism. This perspective emerges from a new study, led by Dr Alice Fleerackers of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and published on 2 September [2025] in Journalism Practice.

Predatory journals prioritise profit over editorial and publication standards. They often charge researchers publication fees but offer little to no real quality control, such as peer review. As a result, some journals publish almost everything submitted. ‘Predatory journals are not a harmless side effect of the academic publishing industry,’ says Fleerackers. ‘They are becoming increasingly common, raising concerns about the integrity of scientific publishing. They not only undermine the reliability of science but also jeopardise science journalism, as journalists can unknowingly report on weak or even flawed research.’

In the new study, Fleerackers – along with colleagues from Simon Fraser University (Canada) and San Francisco State University (US) – investigated how science journalists view predatory journals and what strategies they employ to ensure the reliability of the journals they report on. The researchers present a qualitative analysis of interviews with 23 health, science, and environmental journalists in Europe and North America.

Problematic, but only in theory

Some of the journalists interviewed were familiar with the phenomenon of predatory journals and acknowledged that they are theoretically problematic. However, most weren’t concerned that they might be using them in their own work. They acknowledged that these journals might be a problem for colleagues, but not for them.

Well-known, therefore reliable

Journalists in the study were confident they wouldn’t fall for a predatory journal because of their strong intuition, which they said allowed them to immediately distinguish high-quality from problematic research. Besides their intuition, they also relied on strategies for verifying the reliability of research that they had developed through years of experience. These strategies often centred on trust proxies – like the journal’s prestige, impact factor, and selectivity – as well as whether the journal claimed to conduct peer review.

Proofreading also played a role for some journalists: if an article contained grammatical or spelling errors, it could be a sign of low-quality research. Open access journals were also considered less reliable by several journalists. ‘But by far the most commonly used benchmark for reliability was the journal’s reputation,’ Fleerackers explains. ‘Some journalists avoid all journals they’re not familiar with and report only on research published in top journals like Science and Nature.’

Distortion in science news

According to Fleerackers, journalists’ focus on the reputation and prestige of journals has major consequences for the diversity of research in the news media. ‘Research from newer, lesser-known journals, and from journals in the Global South, for example, remains hidden from the public. Most journalists in our study didn’t realise that their selection strategies could perpetuate the existing imbalance in science news. I hope that our study can raise awareness of this among journalists.’

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper.

“I’d Like to Think I’d Be Able to Spot One”: How Journalists Navigate Predatory Journals by Alice Fleerackers, Laura L. Moorhead & Juan Pablo Alperin. Journalism Practice 1–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2025.2551984 Published online: 02 Sep 2025

Final comments

This has been a good wake up call for me. Bad apples, yes, but criminal networks? I had no idea. I will probably write more about this in my 2025 year post. In the meantime, This is a good reminder to exercise caution.

Canadian Science Policy Centre and its February 26, 2025 online event: Maintaining trust in published scientific research

Science and stories: an online talk January 5, 2022 and a course starting on January 10, 2022

Massey Dialogues on January 5, 2022, 1 – 2 pm PST

“The Art of Science-Telling: How Science Education Can Shape Society” is scheduled for today (Wednesday, January 5, 5022 at 1 pm PST or 4 pm EST), You can find the livestream here on YouTube,

Massey College
Join us for the first Massey Dialogues of 2022 from 4:00-5:00pm ET on the Art of Science-Telling: How Science Education Can Shape Society.
Farah Qaiser (Evidence for Democracy), Dr. Bonnie Schmidt (Let’s Talk Science) and Carolyn Tuohy (Senior Fellow) will discuss what nonprofits can do for science education and policy, moderated by Junior Fellow Keshna Sood.
The Dialogues are open to the public – we invite everyone to join and take part in what will be a very informative online discussion. Participants are invited to submit questions to the speakers in real time via the Chat function to the right of the screen.
——-
To ensure you never miss a Massey Event, subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/masseyco…
We also invite you to visit masseycollege.ca/calendar for upcoming events.
Follow us on social media:
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You can find out more about the Massey Dialogues here. As for the college, it’s affiliated with the University of Toronto as per the information on the College’s Governance webpage.

Simon Fraser University (SFU; Vancouver, Canada) and a science communication course

I stumbled across “Telling Science Stories” being offered for SFU’s Spring 2022 semester in my twitter feed. Apparently there’s still space for students in the course.

I was a little surprised by how hard it was to find basic information such as: when does the course start? Yes, I found that and more, here’s what I managed to dig up,

From the PUB 480/877 Telling Science Stories course description webpage,

In this hands-on course, students will learn the value of sharing research knowledge beyond the university walls, along with the skills necessary to become effective science storytellers.
Climate change, vaccines, artificial intelligence, genetic editing — these are just a few examples of the essential role scientific evidence can play in society. But connecting science and society is no simple task: it requires key publishing and communication skills, as well as an understanding of the values, goals, and needs of the publics who stand to benefit from this knowledge.
This course will provide students with core skills and knowledge needed to share compelling science stories with diverse audiences, in a variety of formats. Whether it’s through writing books, podcasting, or creating science art, students will learn why we communicate science, develop an understanding of the core principles of effective audience engagement, and gain skills in publishing professional science content for print, radio, and online formats. The instructor is herself a science writer and communicator; in addition, students will have the opportunity to learn from a wide range of guest lecturers, including authors, artists, podcasters, and more. While priority will be given to students enrolled in the Publishing Minor, this course is open to all students who are interested in the evolving relationship between science and society.
…

I’m not sure if an outsider (someone who’s not a member of the SFU student body) can attend but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

The course is being given by Alice Fleerackers, here’s more from her profile page on the ScholCommLab (Scholarly Communications Laboratory) website,

Alice Fleerackers is a researcher and lab manager at the ScholCommLab and a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University’s Interdisciplinary Studies program, where she works under the supervision of Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin to explore how health science is communicated online. Her doctoral research is supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from SSHRC and a Michael Stevenson Graduate Scholarship from SFU.
In addition, Alice volunteers with a number of non-profit organizations in an effort to foster greater public understanding and engagement with science. She is a Research Officer at Art the Science, Academic Liaison of Science Borealis, Board Member of the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada (SWCC), and a member of the Scientific Committee for the Public Communication of Science and Technology Network (PCST). She is also a freelance health and science writer whose work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, National Post, and Nautilus, among other outlets. Find her on Twitter at @FleerackersA.

Logistics such as when and where the course is being held (from the course outline webpage),

Telling Science Stories
Class Number: 4706
Delivery Method: In Person
Course Times + Location: Tu, Th 10:30 AM – 12:20 PM
HCC 2540, Vancouver
Instructor: Alice Fleerackers
afleerac@sfu.ca
…

According to the Spring 2022 Calendar Academic Dates webpage, the course starts on Monday, January 10, 2021 and I believe the room number (HCC2540) means the course will be held at SFU’s downtown Vancouver site at Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street.

Given that SFU claims to be “Canada’s leading engaged university,” they do a remarkably poor job of actually engaging with anyone who’s not member of the community, i.e., an outsider.

Science communication: perspectives from 39 countries

8 Replies

Bravo to the team behind “Communicating Science: A Global Perspective” published in September 2020 by the Australian National University Press!

Two of the editors, Toss Gascoigne (Visiting fellow, Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University) and Joan Leach (Professor, Australian National University) have written November 8, 2020 essay featuring their book for The Conversation,

It’s a challenging time to be a science communicator. The current pandemic, climate crisis, and concerns over new technologies from artificial intelligence to genetic modification by CRISPR demand public accountability, clear discussion and the ability to disagree in public.
…
Since the Second World War, there have been many efforts to negotiate a social contract between science and civil society. In the West, part of that negotiation has emphasised the distribution of scientific knowledge. But how is the relationship between science and society formulated around the globe?
We collected stories from 39 countries together into a book. …
…
The term “science communication” is not universal. For 50 years, what is called “science communication” in Australia has had different names in other countries: “science popularisation”, “public understanding”, “vulgarisation”, “public understanding of science”, and the cultivation of a “scientific temper”.
Colombia uses the term “the social appropriation of science and technology”. This definition underscores that scientific knowledge is transformed through social interaction.
Each definition delivers insights into how science and society are positioned. Is science imagined as part of society? Is science held in high esteem? Does association with social issues lessen or strengthen the perception of science?
Governments play a variety of roles in the stories we collected. The 1970s German government stood back, perhaps recalling the unsavoury relationship between Nazi propaganda and science. Private foundations filled the gap by funding ambitious programs to train science journalists. In the United States, the absence of a strong central agency encouraged diversity in a field described variously as “vibrant”, “jostling” or “cacophonous”.
…
Russia saw a state-driven focus on science through the communist years, to modernise and industrialise. In 1990 the Knowledge Society’s weekly science newspaper Argumenty i Fakty had the highest weekly circulation of any newspaper in the world: 33.5 million copies. But the collapse of the Soviet Union showed how fragile these scientific views were, as people turned to mysticism.
…
Eighteen countries contributing to the book have a recent colonial history, and many are from the Global South. They saw the end of colonial rule as an opportunity to embrace science. …
…
Science in these countries focused mainly on health, the environment and agriculture. Nigeria’s polio vaccine campaign was almost derailed in 2003 when two influential groups, the Supreme Council for Shari’ah in Nigeria and the Kaduna State Council of Imams and Ulamas, declared the vaccine contained anti-fertility substances and was part of a Western conspiracy to sterilise children. Only after five Muslim leaders witnessed a successful vaccine program in Egypt was it recognised as being compatible with the Qur’an.
…

If you have time, I recommend reading the entire essay, which can be found here in November 8, 2020 essay on The Conversation or in a Nov. 9, 2020 news item on phys.org.

I found more information about the book on the Australian National University Press’s Communicating Science: A Global Perspective webpage,

This collection charts the emergence of modern science communication across the world. This is the first volume to map investment around the globe in science centres, university courses and research, publications and conferences as well as tell the national stories of science communication.
…
Communicating Science describes the pathways followed by 39 different countries. All continents and many cultures are represented. For some countries, this is the first time that their science communication story has been told. [emphasis mine]

Here’s a link to and a citation for the book,

Communicating Science; A Global Perspective. Edited by Toss Gascoigne, Bernard Schiele, Joan Leach, Michelle Riedlinger, Bruce V. Lewenstein, Luisa Massarani, Peter Broks. DOI: http://doi.org/10.22459/CS.2020 ISBN (print): 9781760463656 ISBN (online): 9781760463663 Imprint [Publisher]: ANU Press Publication date: Sep 2020

The paper copy is $150 and I assume those are Australian dollars. There are free online and e-versions but they do ask you to: Please read Conditions of use before downloading the formats.

A commentary on the Canadian chapter, mostly

Before launching into the commentary, Here’s a bit about words.

Terminology

Terminology, whether it’s within one language or across two or more languages, is almost always an issue and science communication is no exception as is noted in the Introduction (Subsection 4, page 11),

In the course of compiling the chapters, we found that the term ‘science communication’ has many definitions and not all researchers or practitioners agree on its goals and boundaries. It has been variously described as an objective, goals, a process, a result and an outcome. This confusion over a definition is reflected in the terminology used internationally for the field. From the second half of the 20th century, what we have chosen to call ‘science communication’ for this book has flown under different headings: ‘science popularisation, ‘public understanding’, ‘vulgarisation’, ‘social appropriation of science and technology’, ‘public understanding of science’ and ‘scientific temper’ for example. In all, the chapters mention 24 separate terms for the expression ‘science communication’ that we chose. We have taken note of that variety.

Very few of the chapters which are organized by country name attempt to establish a definition. The chapter on Canada written by Michelle Riedlinger, Alexandre Schiele and Germana Barata is one of the many not offering any definitions for ‘science communication’. Although, it does offer a few other terms used as synonyms or closely allied concepts (also without definitions). They include ‘science or scientific culture’, which (according to a Nov.13.20 email from Toss Gascoigne in response to my question about science culture being a term unique to Canada) has French roots and is used in France and Canada.

Scope

The scope for both the book and the chapter on Canada is substantive and everyone involved is to be lauded for their efforts. Here’s how the book is described on the publisher’s ‘Communicating Science; A Global Perspective’ webpage (Note: more about the emphases in the ‘I love you; we need to talk’ subsection below),

…
This collection charts the emergence of modern science communication across the world. This is the first volume to map investment around the globe in science centres, university courses and research, publications and conferences as well as tell the national stories of science communication. [emphases mine]
…

The authors of the Canada chapter managed to squeeze a lot of Canadian science communication history into 21 pp. of text.

Quite an accomplishment. I am particularly admiring as earlier this year I decided to produce a 10 year overview (2010 – 19) of science culture in Canada and ~~got carried away~~ proceeded to write a 25,000 word, multi-part series.

Given the November 8, 2020 essay and its storytelling style, I wasn’t expecting the largely historical review I found in both the Canada and France chapters. I advise reading the Introduction to the book first as that will set expectations more accurately.

I love you; we need to talk

I learned a lot about the history of science communication in Canada. It’s the first time I’ve seen a document that pulls together so much material ranging from 19th century efforts to relatively contemporaneous efforts, i.e., 2018 or thereabouts.

There’s something quite exciting about recognizing the deep roots that science communication has in Canada.

I just wish the authors hadn’t taken ‘the two cultures’ (French and English) route. By doing so, they managed to write a history that ignores a lot of other influences including that of Canada’s Indigenous peoples and their impact on Canadian science, science culture, and, increasingly, science communication. (Confession, I too missed the impact from Indigenous peoples in my series.)

Plus, ‘two cultures’ seems a dated (1970s?) view of Canadian society and, by extension, its science culture and communication.

This was not the only element that seemed out of date. The authors mentioned Canada’s National Science and Technology Week without noting that the effort was rebranded in 2016 as ‘Science Odyssey’ (plus, its dates moved from Oct. to May of each year).

No surprise, the professional and institutional nature of science communication was heavily emphasized. So, it was delightful to find a section (2.10 on page 11) titled, “Citizen involvement in science communication.” Perhaps, they were constrained for space as they didn’t include the astronomy community, which I believe is amongst our oldest citizen science groups with roots that can be traced back to the 19th century (1868).

There are some other omissions (unless noted otherwise, I managed to include something on the topic in my series):

the Canadian Arctic and/or The North (I tried but did not succeed)
art/science (also known as sciart) communities
the maker and do-it-yourself (DIY) communities
open science, specifically, the open science initiative at McGill University’s Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) (can’t remember but I probably missed this too)
the immigrant communities and their impact (especially obvious in light of the January 2020 downed PS752 Flight from Iran to the Ukraine; many of the passengers were Canadians and/or students coming to study and a stunning percentage of those people were in science and/or technology) (I didn’t do as good as job as I should have)
women or gender issues (I missed it too)
BIPOC representation (yes, I missed it)
LGBTQ+ representation (yes, me too)
social sciences (yes, me too)
etc.

The bits I emphasized in the publisher’s description of the book “science centres, university courses and research, publications and conferences as well as tell the national stories of science communication” set up tension between a ‘national story of science communication’ and a ‘national story of institutionalized and/or academic science communication’.

Clearly, the authors had an almost impossible task and by including citizen science and social media and some independent actors they made an attempt to recognize the totality. Still, I wish they had managed even a sentence or two mentioning some of these other communities of interest and/or noting the omissions.

Here’s more about the difficulties I think the authors encountered.

It’s all about central Canada

As noted with other problems, this one happened to me too (in my 2010 – 19 Canadian science culture overview). It’s as if the provinces of Ontario and Québec exert a centrifugal force throughout every aspect of our nationhood including our science and science communication. Almost everything tracks back to those provinces.

The authors have mentioned most of the provinces, although none of the three Northern territories, in their chapter, evidence they made an attempt. What confounds me is the 7 pp. of 21 pp. of text dedicated to Québec alone, in addition to the Québec mentions in the other 14 pp. If there was a problem with word count, couldn’t they have shaved off a paragraph or two to include some or all of the omissions I noted earlier? Or added a paragraph or two to the chapter?

Framing and authors

By framing the discussion about Canada within the ‘two culture’ paradigm, the authors made things difficult for themselves. Take a look at the title and first sentence for the chapter,

CANADA
One country, two cultures: Two routes to science communication
…
This chapter provides an account of modern science communication in Canada, including historical factors influencing its development, and the development of the distinct Province of Quebec. …

The title and discussion frame the article so tightly that anything outside the frame is an outlier, i.e., they ‘baked’ in the bias. It’s very similar to the problem in scientific research where you have to be careful about your research question because asking the wrong question or framing it poorly will result in problematic research.

Authors

It’s not unusual for family members to work in the same field and even work together (Marie and Pierre Curie spring to mind). I believe the failure to acknowledge (I checked the introduction, the acknowledgements, and the Canada chapter) the relationship between one of the authors (Alexandre Schiele, son) of the Canada chapter to one of the book’s editors (Bernard Schiele, father) was an oversight. (Both also have some sort of affiliation with the Université du Québec à Montréal [UQAM]).

Anyway, I hope subsequent editions of the book will include an acknowledgement. These days, transparency is important, eh?

Having gotten that out of the way, I was curious about the ‘Canada’ authors and found this on p. 204,

Contributors
Dr Michelle Riedlinger is an associate professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, Canada, and secretary of the PCST Network [Public Communication of Science and Technology Network] and her career spans the practical and theoretical sides of science communication.
Dr Alexandre Schiele holds a PhD in communication science (Sorbonne) and another in political science (University of Quebec). He is working on a project ‘Mapping the New Science Communication Landscape in Canada’.
Dr Germana Barata is a science communication researcher at the Laboratory of Advanced Studies in Journalism (Labjor) at the State University of Campinas, Brazil, and a member of the Scientific Committee of the PCST Network.

Outsiders often provide perceptive and thoughtful commentary. I did not find any discernible trace of that perspective n the chapter despite all three authors having extensive experience in other countries.

Riedlinger is more strongly associated with Australia than Canada (source: Riedlinger’s biography on the Public Communication of Science and Technology Network). As of July 2020, she is a senior lecturer at Australia’s Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

Interestingly, she is also a Board member of the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada (SWCC) (source: her QUT biography). I’ll get back to this membership later.

Barata is (or was?) a research associate at Simon Fraser University’s Canada Scholar Communications Lab (ScholCommLab) (source: Barata’s SFU biography) in addition to her work in Brazil.

Those two would seem to cover the southern hemisphere. The third gives us the northern hemisphere.

A. Schiele (source: his CV on ResearchGate) is (or was?) a researcher at the UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréa) East Asia Observatory and is (or was?) at (source: profile on Academia.edu) The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies.

After looking at their biographies and CV, the Canada book chapter is even more disappointing. Yes, the authors were constrained by the book’s raison d’être and the way they framed their chapter but , perhaps, there’s something more to the story?

The future of science communication and the ‘elephant in the room’

At the conclusion of the Canada chapter (pp. 194-6), there’s this,

4. The future for modern science communication in Canada
Recent surveys of Canadian science communicators identified though Twitter and Instagram show that, compared to traditional science communication professionals, social media communicators are younger, paid less (or not at all) for their science communication activities, and have been communicating for fewer years than other kinds of science communicators (Riedlinger, Barata and Schiele [A], 2019). They are more likely to have a science background (rather than communication, journalism or education background) and are less likely to be members of professional associations. These communicators tend to be based in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, and communicate with each other through their own informal networks. Canadian social media science communicators are primarily located in the provinces identified by Schiele [B] and Landry (2012) as the most prolific regions for science communication in Canada, where Canada’s most prestigious and traditional universities are located, and where the bulk of Canada’s population is concentrated. While some science journalists and communicators in Canada mourn the perceived loss of control over science communication as a loss of quality and accuracy, others welcome digital technology for the public engagement potential it offers. For example, Canadian science Instagram communicator Samantha Yammine [emphasis mine] was recently criticised in a Sciencemagazine op-ed piece for trivialising scientific endeavours on social media (Wright, 2018). However, supporters of Yammine argued that she was successfully responding to the Instagram medium in her communication (see, for example, Lougheed, 2018 [emphasis mine]; Marks, 2018). Science has subsequently published an article by Yammine and other social media communicators on the benefits of social media for science communication (Yammine, Liu, Jarreau and Coe, 2018). Social media platforms are allowing space for sociopolitically motivated communicators in Canada to work productively. The impact of these social media science communication efforts is difficult to assess; yet open science for consensus building and support for science in society efforts are needed in Canada now more than ever.
Canada has seen increased investments in science as described by the Naylor Report and the Global Young Academy, but science communication and outreach efforts are still needed to support science culture nationally (Boon, 2017a) [emphasis mine]. Funding for activities happens at the federal level through agency funding; however, Canadian scientists, science communicators and science policymakers have criticised some recent initiatives for being primarily aimed at youth rather than adults, supporting mainly traditional and established organisations rather than innovative science communication initiatives, and having limited connection with the current and broader community of science communicators in Canada. While some science communicators are actively advocating for greater institutional support for a wider range of science communication initiatives (see Boon, 2017b) [emphasis mine], governments and scientific communities have been slow to respond.
Austerity continues to dominate public policy in Quebec, and science culture has ceased to be a priority. The Society for the Promotion of Science and Technology dissolved in 2010 and State-sponsored PCST in Quebec has come to an end. PCST actors and networks in Quebec persevere although they face difficulties in achieving an online presence in a global, yet overwhelmingly Anglophone, social media environment. However, the European Union program Horizon 2020 may very well encourage a new period of renewed government interest in science communication.

As a preface to the next subsection, I want to note that the relationships and networks I’m describing are not problematic or evil or sinister in and of themselves. We all work with friends and acquaintances and, even, family when we can. If not, we find other ways to establish affiliations such as professional and informal networks.

The advantages include confidence in the work quality, knowing deadlines will be met and that you’ll be treated fairly and acknowledged, getting a fast start, etc. There are many advantages and one of the biggest disadvantages (in my opinion) is ‘group think’, i.e., the tendency for a group to unconsciously reinforce each other’s biases.

Weirdly, outsiders such as myself have a similar problem. While people within networks tend to get reinforcing feedback, ‘group think’, outsiders don’t get much, if any. Without feedback you’re at the mercy of your search techniques and you tend to reinforce your own biases and shortsightedness (you’re inside your own echo chamber). In the end research needs to take those shortcomings, biases, and beliefs into account.

Networks and research can be a trap

All three authors are in one fashion or another closely associated with the PCST Network. Two (Riedlinger and Barata) are board or executive members of the PCST Network and one (A. Schiele) has familial relationship with a book editor (B. Schiele) who is himself an executive member of the PCST Network. (Keep tuned, there’s one more network of relationships coming up.)

Barata, Riedlinger, and A. Schiele were the research team for the ‘Mapping the New Science Communication Landscape in Canada’ project as you can see here. (Note: Oops! There’s a typo in the project title on the webpage, which, unexpectedly, is hosted by Brazil’s Laboratory of Advanced Studies in Journalism [Labjor] where Barata is a researcher.)

My points about ‘Mapping …’ and the Canada book chapter,

The Canada book chapter’s ‘The impact of new and emerging technology …’ has roots that can be traced back to the ‘Mapping’ project, which focused on social media (specifically, Instagram and Twitter).
The ‘Mapping’ project is heavily dependent on one network (not PCST).
The Canada chapter is listed as one of the ‘Mapping’ project’s publications. (Source: Project’s Publications page).
The ‘Impact’ subsection sets the tone for a big chunk of the final subsection, ‘The future …’ both heavily dependent on the ‘Mapping’ project.
The ‘Mapping’ project has a few problems, which I describe in the following.

In the end, two sections of the Canada chapter are heavily dependent on one research project that the authors themselves conducted.

Rather than using an authoritative style, perhaps the authors could have included a sentence indicating that more research is needed before making definitive statements about Canadian science communication and its use of new and emerging technologies and about its future.

The second network and other issues

Counterintuitively, I’m starting with the acknowledgements in the materials produced by the three authors for their ‘Mapping’ project and then examining the Canada chapter’s ‘Impact of new emerging and technologies …’ subsection before getting back to the Canada chapter’s final subsection ‘The future …’.

The authors’ 2019 paper is interesting. You can access the title, “The landscape of science communication in contemporary Canada: A focus on anglophone actors and networks” here on Academia.edu and you can access the author’s 2018 paper “Using social media metrics to identify science communicators in Canada” for the 2018 Science & You conference in Beijing, China here on ResearchGate. Both appear to be open access. That is wonderful and much appreciated.

The 2019 and 2018 papers’ Acknowledgements have something interesting (excerpt from 2019 paper),

This study was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through Grant (892-2017-2019) to Juan Pablo Alperin [there’s a bit more info. about the grant on Alperin’s CV in the Grants subsection] and Michelle Riedlinger. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We would like to thank the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada (SWCC) for their partnership in this project. [emphasis mine] In particular, we are grateful for the continued support and assistance of Shelley McIvor, Janice Benthin and Tim Lougheed [emphasis mine] from SWCC, and Stéphanie Thibault from l’Association des communicateurs scientifiques du Québec (ACS).

It seems the partnership with SWCC very heavily influenced the text found in the Canada chapter’s subsection ‘The impact of new and emerging technologies on science communication (p. 187),

2.12. The impact of new and emerging technologies on science communication
Coupled with government ambivalence towards science communication over the last decade, Canada has experienced the impact of new and emerging technologies and changing economic conditions. These changes have reshaped the mainstream media landscape in many parts of the world, including Canada, and the effects have been exacerbated by neoliberal agendas. The changes and their impacts on Canadian journalism were captured in the Canadian survey report The Shattered Mirror (2017). The survey found that Canadians prefer to be informed through the media but on their own timelines and with little or no cost to themselves.
Canada’s science media have responded to new media in many ways. For example, in 2005, CBC’s Quirks and Quarks became the first major CBC radio show to be made available as a free podcast. Canada’s very active blogging community has been developing from the early 2000s, and recent digital initiatives are helping redefine what independent science communication looks like. These initiatives include Science Borealis, launched in 2013 [emphasis mine] (Science Borealis, 2018), Hakai Magazine [emphasis mine] launched in 2015 (Hakai Magazine, n.d.), and The Conversation Canada launched in 2017 (The Conversation Canada, 2018). Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are also supporting a growing number of science communicators engaging a diverse range of publics in digital spaces. …
[assume my emphasis for this paragraph; I didn’t have the heart to make any readers struggle through that much bolding] In 2016, the Canadian Science Writers Association changed its name to the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Association (SWCC) to reflect the new diversity of its membership as well as the declining number of full-time journalists in mass media organisations. SWCC now describes itself as a national alliance of professional science communicators in all media, to reflect the blurring boundaries between journalism, science communication and public relations activities (SWCC, 2017). In 2017, SWCC launched the People’s Choice Awards for Canada’s favourite science site and Canada’s favourite blog to reflect the inclusion of new media.

Given that so much of the relatively brief text in this three paragraph subsection is devoted to SWCC and the examples of new media science practitioners (Science Borealis, Hakai Magazine, and Samantha Yammine) are either associated with or members of SWCC, it might have been good idea to make the relationship between the organization and the three authors a little more transparent.

We’re all in this together: PCST, SWCC, Science Borealis, Hakai Magazine, etc.

Here’s a brief recapitulation of the relationships so far: Riedlinger and Barata, both co-authors of the Canada chapter, are executive/board/committee members of the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) network. As well, Bernard Schiele one of the co-editors of the book is also a committee member of PCST (source: PCST webpage) and, as noted earlier, he’s related to the third co-author of the Canada chapter, Alexandre Schiele.

Plus, Riedlinger is one of the book’s editors.

Interestingly, four of the seven editors for the book are members of the PCST network.

More connections:

Remember Riedlinger is also a board member of the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada (SWCC)?
One of the founding members* of Science Borealis (a Canadian science blog aggregator), Sarah Boon is the managing editor for Science Borealis (source: Boon’s LinkedIn profile) and also a member of the SWCC (source: About me webpage on Watershed Notes). *Full disclosure: I too am a co-founding member of Science Borealis.*
- Boon’s works and works from other SWCC members (e.g., Tim Lougheed) are cited in the conclusion for the Canada chapter.
Hakai Magazine and Science Borealis both cited as “… recent digital initiatives … helping redefine what independent science communication looks like.”
- Hakai’s founding and current editor-in-chief is Jude Isabella, a past board member of the *SWCC’s predecessor organization Canadian Science Writers Association (source: Dec. 11, 2020 communication from Ms. Isabella)*

In short, there are many interlaced relationships.

The looking glass and a lack of self-criticism

Reviewing this work put some shortcomings of and biases in my own work into high relief. It’s one of the eternal problems, blindness, whether it’s a consequence of ‘group think’ or a failure to get out of your own personal bubble. Canadian science communication/culture is a big topic and it’s easy to get trapped in your own bubble or your group’s bubble.

As far as I can tell from reading the conference paper (2018) and the paper published in Cultures of Science (2019), there is no indication in the text that the researchers critiqued their own methodology.

Specifically,. most of the respondents to their survey were from one of two professional science communication organizations (SWCC and ACS [Association des communicateurs scientifiques du Québec]). As for the folks the authors found on Twitter and Instagram, those people had to self-identify as science communicators or use scicomm, commsci, vulgarisation and sciart as hashtags. If you didn’t use one of those hashtags, you weren’t seen. Also, ‘sciart’ can be called ‘artsci’ so, why wasn’t that hashtag also used?

In short, the research seems to have a rather narrow dataset, which is not a problem in and of itself, as long as it’s noted in your paper. Unfortunately, the authors didn’t and that problem/weakness followed the researchers into the book.

Remember the subsection: ‘2.12. The impact of new and emerging technologies on science communication’? As noted, it was heavily influenced by the co-authors own research and in this book, those words attain great authority as they are writing about Canada’s science communication and the ‘The future for modern science communication in Canada‘.

Getting back briefly to connections or, in this case, a lack of. There seems to have been one ‘outside’ editor/reviewer (source: Acknowledgements] for the book, Ranjan Chaudhuri, Associate Professor at National Institute of Industrial Engineering Mumbai (source: Chaudhuri’s LinkedIn profile). He’s the only person amongst the authors and the editors for whom I could find no connection to PCST.

(Book editors who weren’t previously mentioned: Joan Leach and Bruce V. Lewenstein were both invited speakers at the 2016 PCST Talk in Istanbul, Turkey and Peter Broks presented in 2004 at the PCST conference in Barcelona, Spain and his work was presented at a 2018 PCST conference in Dunedin, New Zealand.)

Chaudhuri doesn’t seem to have any connection and the other three seem to have, at best, a weak connection to PCST. That leaves four ‘outsiders’ to critically review and edit chapters from 39 countries. It’s an impossible job.

So, what is the future of science communication in Canada?

In the end, I have love for and two big problems with the Canada chapter.

What were they thinking?

Maybe someone could help me understand why the final paragraph of the Canada chapter is about Québec, the PCST, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 science funding initiative.

Ending the chapter with the focus, largely, on one province, **an international organization (PCST) incorporated in Australia**, and a European science funding initiative that sunsets in 2020 to be replaced by Horizon Europe 2021-27 confounds me.

Please, someone out there, please help me. How do these impact or set the future for science communication in Canada?

Aside: the authors never mention Québec’s Agence Science-Presse. It’s an independent media outlet founded in 1978 and devoted, as you can see from the name, entirely to science. It seems like an odd omission.

Now, I have another question.

What about other realities, artificial intelligence, and more?

Why didn’t the authors mention virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR)/mixed reality (MR)/cross reality (XR) and others? What about artificial intelligence (AI) and automated writing, i.e., will we need writers and communicators? (For anyone not familiar with the move to automate more of the writing process, see my July 16, 2014 posting “Writing and AI or is a robot writing this blog?” when Associated Press (AP) had made a deal with Automated Insights and my Sept. 16, 2019 posting “Automated science writing?” about some work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT].)

It’s not exactly new but what impact are games of the virtual and real life types having?

All of these technologies and others on the horizon are certain to have an effect on the future of science communication in Canada.

Confession: I too missed these new and emerging technologies when pointing to the future in my own series. (sigh) Blindness affects all of us.

The future

I wish the authors had applied a little more imagination to the ‘future’ because I think it has major possibilities grounded in both new and emerging technologies and in hopes for greater inclusiveness (Indigenous communities, citizen scientists, elders, artists, and more) in the Canadian science communication effort. As for the possible impact these groups and technologies will have on institutionalized and noninstitutionalized science communication, I would dearly like to have seen mention of the possibility if not outright speculation.

The end

There is a lot to admire in the Canada chapter. Given the amount of history they were covering, the authors were admirably succinct and disciplined. There’s a lot to be learned in this chapter.

As for the flaws, as noted many times, I am subject to many of the same ones. I have often longed for a critical reader who can see what I can’t. In some ways, it’s the same problem academics face.

Thank you to the authors and the editors for an unexpected treat. Examining their work made it possible for me to cast a jaundiced eye on some of my own, becoming my own critical reader. Again, thank you to the authors and editors of this book. I just hope this critique proves useful to someone else too.

Links

For anyone who is curious, here’s a link to the authors’ interactive map of the new landscape (Twitter and Instagram) of science communication in Canada. BTW, I was charmed by and it looks like they’re still adding to the map.

My multipart series,

Part 1 covers science communication, science media (mainstream and others such as blogging) and arts as exemplified by music and dance: The decade that was (2010-19) and the decade to come (2020-29): Science culture in Canada (1 of 5).

Part 2 covers art/science (or art/sci or sciart) efforts, science festivals both national and local, international art and technology conferences held in Canada, and various bar/pub/café events: The decade that was (2010-19) and the decade to come (2020-29): Science culture in Canada (2 of 5).

Part 3 covers comedy, do-it-yourself (DIY) biology, chief science advisor, science policy, mathematicians, and more: The decade that was (2010-19) and the decade to come (2020-29): Science culture in Canada (3 of 5).

Part 4 covers citizen science, birds, climate change, indigenous knowledge (science), and the IISD Experimental Lakes Area: The decade that was (2010-19) and the decade to come (2020-29): Science culture in Canada (4 of 5).

Part 5: includes science podcasting, eco art, a Saskatchewan lab with an artist-in-residence, the Order of Canada and children’s science literature, animation and mathematics, publishing science, *French language science media,* and more: The decade that was (2010-19) and the decade to come (2020-29): Science culture in Canada (5 of 5).

Plus,

An addendum: where I make some corrections and include a reference to some ‘biopoetry’: The decade that was (2010-19) and the decade to come (2020-29): Science culture in Canada (an addendum).

There you have it, science communication in Canada, more or less, as a book chapter and as a multipart series warts and all.

*Original: “a past board member of the SWCC’ (source: homepage of Isabella’s eponymous website)” changed on Dec. 11, 2020 to”past board member of SWCC’s predecessor organization Canadian Science Writers Association (source: Dec. 11, 2020 communication from Ms. Isabella)”

**Original:”an Australian organization (PCST)” changed on Dec. 11, 2020 to “an international organization (PCST) incorporated in Australia”

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Commentary about nanotech, science policy and communication, society, and the arts

Tag Archives: Juan Pablo Alperin

Scientific fraud: widespread and organized according to Northwestern University research + math fraud scandal

Northwestern University and widespread scientific fraud

And now—math fraud

Quality lost to quantity

Fake mathematics success

Mathematic trust under threat

Fixing trust in mathematics publishing

Fraud slows down research

An ‘absolutely huge’ problem

Sometimes, there’s a science reporting problem

Problematic, but only in theory

Well-known, therefore reliable

Distortion in science news

Final comments

Canadian Science Policy Centre and its February 26, 2025 online event: Maintaining trust in published scientific research

Details

Venue

Panelist: Natasha McDonald

Science and stories: an online talk January 5, 2022 and a course starting on January 10, 2022

Massey Dialogues on January 5, 2022, 1 – 2 pm PST

Simon Fraser University (SFU; Vancouver, Canada) and a science communication course

Northwestern University and widespread scientific fraud

And now—math fraud

Quality lost to quantity

Fake mathematics success

Mathematic trust under threat

Fixing trust in mathematics publishing

Fraud slows down research

An ‘absolutely huge’ problem

Sometimes, there’s a science reporting problem

Problematic, but only in theory

Well-known, therefore reliable

Distortion in science news

Final comments

Details

Venue

Moderator: David Moher

Panelist: Natasha McDonald

Panelist: Sarah Elaine Eaton

Panelist: Juan Pablo Alperin

Panelist: Kaia Motter

Massey Dialogues on January 5, 2022, 1 – 2 pm PST

Simon Fraser University (SFU; Vancouver, Canada) and a science communication course

A commentary on the Canadian chapter, mostly

Terminology

Scope

I love you; we need to talk

It’s all about central Canada

Framing and authors

Authors

The future of science communication and the ‘elephant in the room’

Networks and research can be a trap

The second network and other issues

We’re all in this together: PCST, SWCC, Science Borealis, Hakai Magazine, etc.

The looking glass and a lack of self-criticism

So, what is the future of science communication in Canada?

What were they thinking?

What about other realities, artificial intelligence, and more?

The future

The end

Links