The debasement of the scientific literature

The debasement of the scientific literature is the collective result of many factors, such as:

• Incentives to publish in quantity rather than in quality, such as the use of impact factor to assess research merit.
• Sloppy and poorly documented methodology, leading to non-reproducible research.  Some of this is due to poor scientific education.
• Paper mills.
• Networks of authors who conspire to cite each others' works, inflating citation counts and impact factors.
• Poor editing by journal editors.
• Cursory, lazy, narrow-minded, and/or selfish peer reviewers.
• Predatory journals.
• Artificial intelligence slop.
• Scientific fraud.

Now Nature has thrown the lid open on yet another such factor, "review mills".  These are peer reviewers who produce lazy peer reviews (often reproducing identical prose across hundreds of reviewer reports) and demanding citation to their own work.  Writer Katarina Zimmer and data visualizer Andreion de Castro released this groundbreaking interactive article a few days ago to document this phenomenon, which I had not been previously aware of.  However I do not find it in the least surprising.  I won't regurgitate details here; their article is a bombshell and you should read it.

This year I was asked to peer-review an article that I had discovered had been extensively plagiarized.  The journal's editorial policy claims they check submissions against a plagiarism database, but evidently this had not been done before the manuscript was sent out for peer review.  The publisher was Springer-Nature.  Other commercial publishers (especially MDPI in a case study examined in detail) are implicated in the "review mill" problem discussed in the article by Zimmer and de Castro.  Thankfully I've never been published in an MDPI journal, as I've never had a high impression of that publisher, and I've been lucky that none of my coauthors over the decades has ever entertained publishing in their journals.  However, I have been published by Springer and the other major commercial publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Sage) as well as a good number of nonprofit ones.

As my scientific career may be drawing to a close, I may personally not have to deal with the debasement of the literature for much longer.  However, I remain a consumer of the literature, and find it disheartening.