Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A network producing template manuscripts in medical imaging where 50 papers share the same skeleton with author names, gene targets, and figure colours rotated.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A professional editing service that improves the English of an author-written manuscript without altering its scientific content.
Editorial commentary
Paper mills have shifted from individual hobbyist operations to industrial-scale enterprises producing thousands of manuscripts per year, often with shared figure templates, tortured phrases (from machine paraphrasing), and citation patterns that recur across unrelated venues. COPE and STM jointly published 'Paper Mills' (2022), and the United2Act initiative (2023) coordinates publisher, integrity-officer, and sleuth response. Detection signals include sudden submission spikes from the same institution, recycled figures across unrelated papers, and authors who cannot answer basic questions about their own methods.
References
- COPE & STM (2022) 'Paper Mills: Research Report'
- United2Act consensus statement (2023)
Also known as
manuscript mill · publication mill
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Paper mill"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/paper-mill" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "Paper mill",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/paper-mill",
"description": "A commercial operation that produces fabricated or low-effort manuscripts and sells authorship slots, or that brokers acceptance of such manuscripts into journals. A submission originates from a paper mill if the underlying research was not conducted by the named authors or was fabricated to order.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-integrity-and-misconduct/",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/paper-mill",
"sameAs": [
"manuscript mill",
"publication mill"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
