The Epidemic of Bogus Science

 Anjana Ahuja in The FT

The 1996 paper is now legendary in academic circles. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, penned by the mathematician Alan Sokal, was published in a cultural-studies journal. It claimed that physical reality was a social and linguistic construct. 

It was a floridly written spoof: a jargon-heavy, plausible-sounding parody designed to pander to the biases of lazy reviewers and expose flaws in the academic enterprise. The bogus paper, targeting preening postmodernist intellectuals pontificating on scientific matters, confirmed the suspicions of Sokal — now at University College London — that the canon of human knowledge was vulnerable to rogue infiltration.  

The hoax seems comically quaint today compared with the fraud crisis plaguing science journals. This week, the publisher Wiley announced it would close 19 journals, some of which had been linked to large-scale research fraud. In the past two years, according to reports, it has retracted more than 11,000 papers. Wiley and other publishers, such as Springer Nature, are battling an epidemic of fakery. 

But battle it they must. Without due diligence, science may suffer a reputational hit. With so many scientific challenges ahead — climate change, artificial intelligence, energy security, pandemics — it is a loss of trust humanity can ill-afford.  

Scholarly publishing is surprisingly lucrative, worth about $28bn annually worldwide. While top journals charge hefty subscriptions, others will publish, subject to peer review, for a fee. That system feeds off a “publish or perish” research culture, with academics rated for grants, tenure and promotion according to how often they publish and how frequently they are cited. 

The result is a feverishly competitive climate where authorship is a commodity, now brazenly touted on the open market. Nick Wise, an engineering researcher at Cambridge university, collates adverts by so-called authorship brokers and posts them on X under the handle @author_for_sale. 

In a 2022 interview with Retraction Watch, a website that monitors papers under suspicion (for unintended errors as well as fraud), Wise itemised how brokers hook up with unscrupulous academics: “There’s this entire economy, ecosystem of Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels selling authorship for papers, selling citations, selling book chapters, selling authorship of patents.” All pollute the knowledge pool. 

Authors, of course, need papers to put their names to. This is where the “paper mill” comes in, an industrial-scale operation that often uses AI to churn out papers en masse (many such mills are based in China). These are then submitted to multiple journals in the hope that some will slip past overworked reviewers.  

Investigators use fraud-busting software to spot defective offerings, such as the “tortured phrases” spat out by AI-generated papers to fool plagiarism detectors. AI becomes “counterfeit consciousness”; breast cancer is mangled into “bosom peril”. Other red flags include unlikely author collaborations; irrelevant reference lists; and clusters of papers that cite each other incestuously. “My hunch is that most fraud goes undetected,” Wise told me. 

Publishing companies, meanwhile, are opening fraud departments and trying to trap perpetrators who submit identical papers. But it is a perpetual struggle: brokers are wording their adverts more coyly; AI is writing more convincing papers. 

As Sokal correctly noted in his 2008 book Beyond the Hoax, preserving the integrity of science is an existential matter. “Clear thinking, combined with a respect for evidence . . . are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century,” he wrote. This is an arms race that the science sleuths must win.

The “Inefficient” State Mops up the Disasters caused by “Efficient” Private Companies.

George Monbiot in The Guardian


Again the “inefficient” state mops up the disasters caused by “efficient” private companies. Just as the army had to step in when G4S failed to provide security for the London 2012 Olympics, and the Treasury had to rescue the banks, the collapse of Carillion means that the fire service must stand by to deliver school meals.

Two hospitals, both urgently needed, that Carillion was supposed to be constructing, the Midland Metropolitan and the Royal Liverpool, are left in half-built limbo, awaiting state intervention. Another 450 contracts between Carillion and the state must be untangled, resolved and perhaps rescued by the government.

Fire services ready to deliver school meals after Carillion collapse


When you examine the claims made for the efficiency of the private sector, you soon discover that they boil down to the transfer of risk. Value for money hangs on the idea that companies shoulder risks the state would otherwise carry. But in cases like this, even when the company takes the first hit, the risk ultimately returns to the government. In these situations, the very notion of risk transfer is questionable.

Nowhere is it more dubious than when applied to the private finance initiative projects in which Carillion specialised. The PFI was invented by John Major’s Conservative government, but greatly expanded by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Private companies finance and deliver public services that governments would otherwise have provided.

The government claimed that the private sector, being more efficient, would provide services more cheaply than the private sector. PFI projects, Blair and Brown promised, would go ahead only if they proved to be cheaper than the “public sector comparator”.

But at the same time, the government told public bodies that state money was not an option: if they wanted new facilities, they would have to use the private finance initiative. In the words of the then health secretary, Alan Milburn: “It’s PFI or bust”. So, if you wanted a new hospital or bridge or classroomor army barracks, you had to demonstrate that PFI offered the best value for money. Otherwise, there would be no project. Public bodies immediately discovered a way to make the numbers add up: risk transfer.


Nurses might be laid off, but the walls will still be painted


The costing of risk is notoriously subjective. Because it involves the passage of a fiendishly complex contract through an unknowable future, you can make a case for almost any value. A study published in the British Medical Journal revealed that, before the risk was costed, every hospital scheme it investigated would have been built much more cheaply with public funds. But once the notional financial risks had been added, building them through PFI came out cheaper in every case, although sometimes by less than 0.1%.

Not only was this exercise (as some prominent civil servants warned) bogus, but the entire concept is negated by the fact that if collapse occurs, the risk ripples through the private sector and into the public. Companies like Carillion might not be too big to fail, but the services they deliver are. You cannot, in a nominal democracy, suddenly close a public hospital, let a bridge collapse, or fail to deliver school meals.

Partly for this reason, and partly because of the inordinate political power of corporations and the people who run them, governments seek to insulate these companies from the very risks they claim to have transferred to them. This could explain why Theresa May’s administration continued to award contracts to Carillion after it had issued a series of profit warnings. Was this an attempt to keep the company in business?

If so, it was one of a long list of measures designed to privatise profit and socialise risk. PFI contracts specify that if there is a conflict between paying the private provider and delivering public services, the payments must come first. However deep the crisis in the NHS becomes, however many people must have their cancer operations postponed or be left to rot on trolleys, the legal priority is still to pay the contractor. Money is officially more valuable than life.

If a PFI consortium is contracted to deliver maintenance and ancillary services, these non-clinical functions are ringfenced, while the clinical services delivered by the public sector must be cut to make room for them. This forces public bodies to respond perversely to a funding crisis: nurses might be laid off, but the walls will still be painted. Many of the contracts cannot be broken for 25 or 30 years, regardless of whether or not they still meet real needs: again, this insulates the private sector from hazard, leaving it with the public. The risk lands not only on the state but also on the people. Carillion leaves behind a series of scandals, such as the food hygiene failure at Swindon’s Great Western Hospital, and the failings at the Surgicentre clinic it ran in Hertfordshire, revealed in a horrifying report in the Observer. Similar crises have attended many other deals with private providers: operating theatres flooded with sewage, power cuts which have left nurses to ventilate patients on life support by hand, school buildings falling apart, useless services continuing to be delivered while essential services are cut.

None of this was unforeseen. Some of us warned again and again during the New Labour years that this programme would prove to be an expensive fiasco. Even the Banker magazine predicted, in 2002, that “eventually an Enron-style disaster will be rerun on a sovereign balance sheet”. But the government didn’t want to know. Nor did the Conservative opposition, whose idea it was in the first place. Nor did the other newspapers, now apparently scratching their heads and wondering how this happened. There is no joy in being proved right, just immense frustration.

Risk to a company is not the same as risk to those who own and run it. The executives keep their payoffs. The shareholders take a hit on part of their portfolios, but limited liability ensures they can walk away from any debts. The company might disappear, but ultimately it’s just a name and some paperwork. But the risks imposed on the people – including the company’s workers – are real. We pay for these risks twice: first, when they are nominally transferred to corporations; then again, when they are returned to us. The word used to describe this process is efficiency.