Systematic fraud uncovered in mathematics publications.

Sept 2025 : An international team of authors led by Ilka Agricola, professor of Mathematics at the University of Marburg, Germany, has investigated fraudulent practices in the publication of research results in mathematics on behalf of the German Mathematical Society (DMV) and the International Mathematical Union (IMU), documenting systematic fraud over many years. The results of the study were recently posted on the arXiv preprint server and in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and have since caused a stir among mathematicians.

To solve the problem, the study also provides recommendations for the publication of research results in mathematics. According to the team of authors: Nowadays, research quality is often no longer measured directly by the content of publications, but increasingly by commercial indicators such as the number of publications/citations by authors or the “reputation” of journals. These indicators are calculated in a non-transparent manner and without the involvement of the scientific community by commercial providers, who use them to boost sales of their databases worldwide.

Fraudulent companies offer their services specifically to optimise these metrics. This is worthwhile for both individuals and institutions, because a higher ranking, e.g., in a university ranking, means better access to funding and in an international context the possibility of charging higher tuition fees and attracting more applicants. The collateral damage is a high percentage of publications whose sole purpose is to boost the indicators, but which no one reads because they contain no new scientific findings or are even flawed.

The study cites some striking examples. For example, based on its database, the market leader for metrics, Clarivate Inc., calculated in 2019 that the university with the most world-class researchers in mathematics is a university in Taiwan, where mathematics is not even offered as a subject.

Megajournals, which print anything as long as the authors pay for it, now publish more articles per year than all reputable mathematics journals (which do not require payment) combined. Fraudsters anonymously offer everything that influences key figures for sale, from articles to citations, in exchange for payment.

“‘Fake science’ is not only annoying, it is a danger to science and society“, says IMU Secretary General Prof. Christoph Sorger. “Because you don’t know what is valid and what is not. Targeted disinformation undermines trust in science and also makes it difficult for us mathematicians to decide which results can be used as a basis for further research“.

DMV President Proffessor Jürg Kramer added, “The recommendations developed by the commission are a call to all of us to work toward a system change“.

Recommendations and Practical Advice –

The recent explosion in the number of publications in predatory journals demands action from all parties involved. The following list of recommendations for policy makers, institutions, and individual maps out how we can all contribute to regain control over the situation.

For Policy Makers:

Why should you care?

• Fraudulent publishing undermines trust in science and scientific results and therefore fuels antiscience movements.
• The use of falsified results can be dangerous and leads to a waste of research effort and funding.
• Fraudulent publication practice makes it hard for politicians and journalists to distinguish serious science from junk science.

What can be done?

• Assign resources based on expert-led assessments rather than bibliometric data. In particular, avoid relying on commercial journal rankings such as SJR and JCR.
• Endorse good journals and discourage publishing in predatory journals.
• Define good publishing practices and encourage people to follow them.
• Discourage the use of university rankings.

For Institutions:

Why should you care?

• Any instance of scientific fraud can cause significant long-term damage to an institution’s reputation and result in a failure to attract the best researchers and students and to raise grants.
• Research evaluation based substantially on bibliometrics incentivizes manipulation, which can result in low quality scientists being hired or promoted.
• Fraud ruins scientific collaboration and morale and can mislead the younger generation into adopting bad publication habits.

What can be done?

• Discourage the use of bibliometrics in hiring and promotion committees.
• Evaluate faculty by their best papers and ‘activeness’ without pressure to publish too frequently.
• Educate researchers about predatory journals and discourage publication in these outlets.
• Educate researchers about the low correlation between the quality of research and bibliometrics such as journal impact factors and citations.
• Do not grant PhDs or other higher degrees based upon a requirement to publish a certain number of papers.
• Choose carefully the Article Processing Charges (APCs) that you pay for.
• Implement best practice recommendations about the use of affiliations and professional email addresses.

For Individuals:

Why should you care?

• Your work cannot compete with citation cartels if it is evaluated solely based on bibliometrics.
• Your scientific integrity is at risk if you accidentally publish in a predatory journal.
• If many in the community inflate their publication lists, the pressure to increase output quantity will become even stronger.
• Mathematics has many famous open conjectures. Predatory journals can give people the opportunity to publish ‘proofs’ of these without credible peer review. The status of these results can become unclear.

What can be done?

• Read the actual publications instead of relying on bibliometrics, and say so when writing evaluations.
• Avoid publishing in predatory journals (see Section 3.2). If you have done so in the past without knowing, add a comment in your CV.
• Educate young researchers and colleagues about predatory publishing, the low correlation between bibliometrics and research quality, in particular in mathematics, and data literacy.
• Help identifying good journals in your field; being listed by zbMATH Open or MathSciNet is one good indicator of quality, but they will not cover some interdisciplinary outlets.
• Cite articles that are relevant for your work at hand, not more, not less.
• If a respected colleague is associated with a predatory journal (as an author, reviewer, or guest editor), inform them of the journal’s bad reputation and recommend that they stop cooperating with it.
• Check the quality of journals before joining their editorial board.
• Choose the journals or special issues in which you publish and the journals for which you write reviews wisely.
• Be a responsible editor / editor-in-chief. Make any attempts at influencing you transparent. Resign if the situation becomes too bad, and make it public why you did it.
• What should you do if you find suspected misconduct or other irregularities in scientific papers Make it public (but without putting yourself at risk).
• Be informed about screening tools for detecting plagiarism and fraud, and discuss their possible implementation if the need arises.
• Be critical! Verify author identities, affiliations, and email addresses whenever something seems suspicious. We recommend for this purpose ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), which is a unique and persistent identifier designed to solve the problem of name ambiguity.

Beware!

• The purpose of scientific phishing emails is not to trick the recipient into revealing sensitive information, but to draft them into the parallel universe of fake science at a low level.
• Fraudulent journals often misuse the names of well-known researchers without their permission to create a false impression of credibility and legitimacy.
• Fraudulent journals often have bad publishing practices: not publishing accepted articles, taking articles or journal websites offline without notice, publishing submitted articles before authors have signed a publishing agreement, and not reacting to emails.
• ‘Hijackers’ create web pages of existing, well-established journals to lure people into submitting to their fake journal; predatory journals often choose names that are similar to those of existing prestigious journals.

Strategic Recommendations: Alternatives needed –

• We may need to create “low entry” options of publication for papers that might not be of the highest level, but nevertheless are original and interesting.
• Whenever you have the opportunity, advocate and fund serious science journalism. It happens all too often that journalists stumble across a non-reliable source and make a “scoop” out of it.
• Governments should support efforts for greater transparency over fraudulent publications and systematic large-scale monitoring of misconduct.
• A culture change in academia is needed that scientific misconduct is not acceptable at any level.

Team Maverick