Illustration: Bodara

years is what it takes for the number of scholarly articles produced by so-called ‘paper mills’ to double, according to a paper in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA). Paper mills are organisations that engage in scientific fraud and sell fake articles. Such fakes use up funding monies, and they are growing in number quicker than the scientific world is able to unmask and prevent them; the number of papers actually retracted doubles only every 3.3 years. In conversation with the magazine ZME Science, the last-named author of the above study, Luís Amaral, said: “If you believe that science is useful and important for humanity, then you have to fight for it” .