This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Scientific papers are a researcher's most valuable currency, and a paper published in a respected journal can represent several years of work. After noting a surge in citations of her work, statistician Andrea Riebler discovered a vendor in China selling a tool that enables rapid paper mining of public health data.
The new software allows anyone to produce ready-to-publish research papers in under two hours. Riebler is concerned about the growing trend of buying ready-made research tools online. "We found evidence for decentralized mass production of papers based on secondary analysis of public health data.
In their tools they also seem to use our work, which is how we found out about the software and how the research started." "In our case, we're talking about software that makes it possible to quickly produce simple, standardized analyses and research papers using public health databases. The analyses may be methodologically sound, but the development is worrying nonetheless," says Riebler, a statistician at NTNU's Department of Mathematical Sciences. The work cannot be properly checked for quality because the authors do not share their source code.
The papers are based on secondary analyses, which present challenges. The data were originally collected by other researchers, and Riebler questions whether every possible combination of the different types of data available in these databases produces relevant or interesting research. Riebler herself uses data from large registries to identify patterns and potential trends in disease, child mortality and survival analysis across different geographical regions.
In 2017, she published the paper "Projecting the future burden of cancer: Bayesian age–period–cohort analysis with integrated nested Laplace approximations" together with professor Leonhard Held at the University of Zurich. Riebler had developed software for calculating age-specific forecasts of disease incidence or mortality based on historical data. The source code was freely available, and she had documented how to use it.
In the years that followed, the paper was cited frequently enough to demonstrate that it had made an impact among other researchers. The number of citations suddenly soared, from 70 in 2024 to more than 250 the following year. Researchers are usually delighted when their work attracts large numbers of citations.
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