WEHI Director’s Special Seminar hosted by Professor James Murphy

Professor Jennifer Byrne

Director of Biobanking-NSW Health, and Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Sydney

Challenges to biomedical publication integrity - a primer on research paper mills

 

Davis Auditorium

Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIseminar

Including Q&A session
 

Scientific progress relies upon the integrity of the published record. While the lack of reproducibility in biomedical and clinical research has been extensively discussed, most researchers assume that irreproducible research results arise from intrinsic challenges in conducting original research and reproducibility studies. Irreproducible research results have been comparatively rarely considered to arise through research misconduct or fraud. Over the past 10 years, there has been growing awareness that falsified or fabricated research manuscripts may be scaled through the activities of so-called research paper mills. While many details of their activities and operations remain unknown, paper mills are understood to provide undeclared publishing services to individuals who need research publications, but have insufficient time, training and/or resources to conduct genuine research. Our team’s research has uncovered potential indicators of scaled research misconduct affecting the human gene research literature, by identifying implausible reagent errors in preclinical human gene research papers. We have identified hundreds of examples of original papers that describe wrongly identified nucleotide sequence reagents, where these reagent errors can render some results implausible or impossible. We have also identified examples of human circular RNAs and cell line models whose existence cannot be independently verified. This presentation will provide a brief overview of our team’s research and consider how paper mill papers could impact biomedical research as conducted in Australia. We will conclude by discussing possible features of templated publications from paper mills, how features could be changing through the misuse of generative artificial intelligence, and how researchers can better recognise and prioritise quality publications in their fields.

Jennifer Byrne is Director of Biobanking-NSW Health, and Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she leads the PRIMeR group (Publication and Research Integrity in Medical Research). Jennifer was one of Nature’s 10 people who mattered in 2017 for highlighting repetitive human gene research papers with critical reagent errors, and she was one of 3 experts who testified before US Congress at their 2022 hearing into paper mills and research misconduct. Jennifer holds the Australian Academy of Science’s Professor David Vaux Research Integrity Fellowship award for 2025-2026.

All welcome!