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Spoof research paper is accepted by 157 journals

BMJ 2013; 347 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f5975 (Published 04 October 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;347:f5975
  1. Nigel Hawkes
  1. 1London

A spoof medical paper full of easily detectable flaws was submitted in a sting operation to 304 open access journals and accepted by more than half of them.

The results, reported in Science1 by journalist John Bohannon, reveal “an emerging Wild West in academic publishing,” he says, with mushrooming numbers of new journals profiting from the open access model, in which authors rather than readers pay the cost of publication.

Bohannon invented the names of authors and affiliations—such as Ocorrafoo Cobange of Wassee Institute of Medicine—and submitted in their names variations of the same basic paper claiming to have found anticancer properties in a molecule extracted from a …

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