Paper mill
Also called: Research paper mill · Topic: Transparency, Accountability and e-Governance · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
A paper mill is a business that sells fake or low-quality research papers. Its buyers are people who need publications for a job, a promotion or a degree. The papers look like real science, but the data may be made up or the work may follow a fixed template. Paper mills matter because doctors and policymakers trust research that has passed peer review (checking by other experts before publication). When fake papers get past that check, people start to doubt the whole system. AI now makes such papers cheaper to produce and harder to catch.
Example
An AI tool that reads titles and abstracts flagged more than 250,000 cancer studies, because their text looked like papers known to come from paper mills. Researchers also found more than 400 "copycat" papers in 112 journals over about four and a half years. AI had written these papers, and they got past anti-plagiarism software. Five large open-access health databases have also been used to turn out thousands of papers that follow the same template, with only the data changed.
Don't confuse with
- Plagiarism: plagiarism means copying another person's words or work. A paper mill sells whole papers. With AI, it can rewrite the words so that plagiarism checks, which look for copied text, do not catch them.