Page 21 - The lraternational Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand.indd

The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XV-2023

Discussion

Paper mill services have increasingly impacted academic communities
globally in recent years, giving rise to various forms of research misconduct, including
authorship-for-sale, data fabrication, fake peer review, and citation rings (Christopher,

2021). In this study, we illustrate how the authorship profiles and co-authorship
networks of researchers involved in authorship-for-sale activities through paper
mill services may differ from those of other researchers in their academic circles
within the context of Thailand.

Among the 120 researchers in our analysis, authorship profiles generally

followed a trend where junior researchers, with less academic experience, published
fewer articles compared to their senior counterparts. Whereas both Index Researchers
and some other High-Performance Junior Researchers deviated from this trend by
publishing a substantial number of articles. For instance, High-Performance Junior
Researcher HJR_01 has published up to 105 articles in a year. Our findings were in line

with previous reports suggesting that paper mill services primarily operate in certain
countries in Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and Southern Asia (Abalkina, 2022;
Christopher, 2021; Patnaik, 2016; Stone, 2016), as reflected by the high proportions

of co-authors on Index Researchers from these regions.
While High-Performance Junior Researchers exhibited proportions of

co-authors from Western Asia and Southern Asia similar to those of Index Researchers,
their proportion of co-authors from Eastern Europe was notably lower. Interestingly,
unblinding the identity of HJR_01 revealed that this researcher had also been confirmed

to be involved with paper mill by the integrity committee of his/her affiliated
organization, despite having some dissimilar authorship profiles from the two
Index Researchers. This compilation of evidence suggested that Index Researchers
and HJR_01 may have been involved with separate paper mill service platforms
operating in different countries or regions.

Our study demonstrates that quantitative analysis techniques applied to
researchers’ authorship profiles can identify distinctive profiles that raise suspicions
of research misconduct involvement. However, these techniques are effective when
profiles show clear signals, such as unusually high annual publication counts early in
one’s career. Moreover, certain authorship profile indicators used to identify suspicious

researchers, such as the proportions of co-authors from specific regions, may be unique
to Thailand’s academic communities. Consequently, it is not advisable to directly
generalize the suspicious authorship profiles suggested by our study as the definitive

method for confirming if individual researchers have purchased authorship from

Phrutsamon Wongnak et al. 13