FAKE paper mill cancer studies GET DOUBLE the number of citations AS GENUINE ONES

[SorellaLaBefana]

...In a study posted on the preprint server bioRxiv, the authors report that papers that were probably produced by paper mills frequently cite, or are cited by, other potentially fraudulent articles. Paper mills are businesses that produce and sell low-quality manuscripts — often containing fabricated data and results — designed to resemble genuine research...

Adrian Barnett [et al]... say that their analysis indicates that coordinated citation manipulation is inflating the impact metrics of journals in molecular oncology.

These metrics measure of how often a journal’s papers are cited in other research, among other things. In many nations, having papers published in journals with high impact factors is taken into account when researchers apply for jobs and funding...

Barnett and his colleagues analysed 33,159 papers published between 2012 and 2023 in 20 high-impact molecular-oncology journals. The team used an artificial-intelligence tool called BERT...[which] flagged 4,085 papers — 12.3% of all of the papers examined — as having characteristics associated with paper-mill articles. The researchers identified potentially fraudulent papers in 19 out of the 20 journals that they examined...

You can read pretty far in this Nature article before hitting the paywall