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Scientists from the University of Ottawa, The Ottawa Hospital and other top-tier institutions across Canada keep publishing their results in fake science journals, tainting the work despite years of warnings. One veteran science publisher warns all the work that produced these studies “is just thrown away.” Until recently, the scope of the problem of “predatory” journals has been hard to measure. Now, one giant in the fake publishing field, OMICS International of India, has improved the search engine for 700 journals. Hundreds of Canadian scientists were found to have published recently with the Indian firm — the same company that accepted this newspaper’s analysis of how pigs fly.

On September 24, 2017 the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reported on an investigation into self-plagiarism (zelfplagiaat) that was conducted by a Nijmengen research group. The sociologist of science and his PhD student analysed 922 publications by Dutch researchers from recent years. In economics, 14 % of the papers contained text from previous publications of the author(s), in psychology the figure was 5 %. They even found a duplicate article republished with just one small change, and two highly similar articles by the same author in the same issue of a journal. They also found that authors who publish more papers are more likely to reuse text.