An international working group led by Professor Ilka Agricola of the University of Marburg has conducted an extensive investigation into malpractice in the publication of mathematical research. Commissioned by the German Mathematical Society (DMV) and the International Mathematical Union (IMU), the project documented years of systematic violations and published its findings on the preprint server arXiv.
The researchers highlight a troubling trend: the quality of scholarly work is increasingly judged not by its substance but by quantitative indicators—publication counts, citation statistics, and journal “prestige” metrics. These benchmarks are generated by private commercial companies without input from the professional community, then sold to universities and research institutions alongside their databases.
This environment has given rise to a flourishing market of services offering to boost such metrics for a fee. For individual scholars and entire organizations, the incentives are obvious: higher rankings increase funding opportunities, while universities can attract international students and raise tuition fees. Yet the cost of this system is a surge in publications produced solely to improve statistics—papers that contain no genuine discoveries, are written mechanically, and are scarcely read.
The report cites striking examples. In 2019, Clarivate, the dominant force in the metrics market, proclaimed a Taiwanese university—one that did not even offer mathematics instruction—as the global leader in “world-class mathematicians.” Another case involves so-called megajournals, publishing tens of thousands of articles annually in exchange for payment, while all respected mathematical journals combined release only a fraction of that number. At the same time, anonymous intermediaries profit by arranging publication, fabricating citations, and manipulating references, all of which directly distort the indicators.
IMU Secretary-General Christoph Sorger warned that such practices endanger not only academia but society at large: it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish genuine results from fabricated ones, eroding trust and preventing mathematicians from building on each other’s work. DMV President Jürg Kramer added that the commission’s recommendations should be seen as a call to reform the system itself.
The report offers practical measures, including a call to abandon blind reliance on commercial indices and to restore substantive peer evaluation as the core of academic assessment. It advocates for the development of open, transparent databases under the control of the scientific community, as well as a stronger role for independent peer review. Only by shifting these priorities, the authors argue, can the flood of “empty” publications be stemmed and the true purpose of publishing—advancing authentic scientific knowledge—be restored.
The problem of academic fraud in scholarly publishing demands a comprehensive response. As the study shows, artificial intelligence and new technologies can either exacerbate the issue or help resolve it—but only when applied responsibly and under rigorous quality control.