Misinformation and Disinformation

Predatory Publishing

Predatory journals and book publishers are primarily interested in revenue and advertising. In that sense, some publications are less interested in making rigorous scientific works accessible and more committed to attracting attention. Because of this, one major source of misinformation in academia is predatory publishing. There is no formal accountability structure for academic publishing, and this makes identifying and removing misinformation from unscrupulous publishers a community effort.

Academic Fraud

As academic publications and the underlying research methods evolve, new forms of fraud emerge. Fraud can be thought of as falling mainly within the following categories in academic context:

• Fabricated or misleadingly edited datasets
• Manipulated data processing routines
• Interpretations which knowingly do not line up with the collected data
• Misattributed, stolen, or improperly cited writing or data
• Sabotaging other people’s experiments or research processes
• Helping others with any of the above

Some fields have recently been reckoning with a “reproducibility crisis” when a meaningful portion of the findings on which the field is based are found to be difficult to corroborate independently (Bausell, 2021). This is often seen in medical sciences, since although experimental procedures may seem objective and rigorous to the scientists that author them, specialization and isolation across different niches mean that much of the practical, “tacit” (non-verbal or non-written) knowledge used in the undertaking of experiments and the analysis of results may be hard to communicate to others. Reproducibility is important because it confirms that a field’s pre-existing knowledge is in fact demonstrable and verifiable. In this complex knowledge creation and consumption environment, malicious behavior becomes difficult to detect and even more difficult to keep people accountable for.

In the same way that predatory publishing is in practice quite field-specific, modes of knowledge maintenance and creation which depart from the so-called “scientific method,” do not focus on verifying predictive hypotheses, and do not collect data via measurement or ethnographic means tend to have a more complex relationship to identifying fraud and keeping its authors accountable.  There, arguments can be in fact made in bad faith and still find practical use to scholars, regardless of their awareness of the fraud.

Industry funded research and conflict of interest

Sometimes academic research may appear to legitimate and carried out with accepted standards of accuracy and reliability, but closer examination reveals that the study was funded by a company, industry collective, political lobbyist, or other group that benefits in some way from the research having a particular outcome. One example is the Weinberg Group, a firm that has been tied to organizing and funding centres, publications, and individual researchers that published research that minimized health impacts of tobacco, chemicals, and alcohol on behalf of companies making profit in those industries (Thacker, 2006).

Most reputable journals require disclosure of funding sources and authors’ conflicts of interest. The fact that a study is funded by a particular industry, company, or interest does not negate the results—it must be read carefully—but often the interpretation, extrapolation, or communication of the results may be spun in a direction that is favourable to the funder.

Fake papers

One of the most straightforward types of academic misinformation to identify is fake papers. This can include articles that are completely fabricated and/or ghost-written (that is, written by someone hired by the named author(s)) or generated by AI. The paper is then submitted to a journal in order to get a publication credit for the named author(s), or in some cases, as a deliberate hoax. Some hoaxes with fake papers have been intended to demonstrate flaws with journal publishing systems or to make a commentary on a particular academic field (Reilly, 2020).

The old yet burgeoning phenomenon of “paper mills” is also plaguing journals. Paper mills are companies that write academic articles on order from “customers”—scientists and scholars who then submit the articles for publication in journals (Else and Van Noorden, 2021). It is often difficult for reviewers and publishers to detect these papers, but image manipulation and similarities in data features across submissions can be signs of paper mill production.

Academic Misinformation

According to the World Health Organization, vaccination programs currently prevent 4 to 5 million deaths every year (WHO). This is just one example of why research, even though it can be difficult, is worth the effort of learning how to find the information you need. In this section, we discuss a spectrum of academic misinformation so you can be better prepared to distinguish a good reference from a bad one. As an undergraduate student, you are not personally responsible for uncovering all problems with everything you read, especially as you are introduced to traditions of knowledge you are not familiar with. Learning how to be critical of media, journalistic or scientific, is just one of the skills that secondary education teaches.