KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Keynote Talk I -  Why should we care about paper mills?

Paper mills are one of the pressing challenges in science today. The mass production of fraudulent research has changed the nature of misconduct, turning it from individual to commercialized industrial-scale business.

However, paper mills are not only an integrity problem. Our knowledge on paper mills remains fragmented, often limited to certain countries, disciplines or entities. It creates the challenge of identification, as paper mills show different red flags and they adapt their tactics as soon as they are identified. Another challenge is the correction of the scientific record. The retraction gap is huge, and the question of whether the scientific record needs an audit and who is responsible for it remains largely undiscussed.

The consequences reach far beyond trust in science. Papers originating from paper mills are included in systematic reviews and meta-research and can bias scientific conclusions. They may also distort results of scientometric and bibliometric studies, affecting citation, authorship and collaboration indicators.

Forensic scientometrics can play a significant role, because many paper mills leave traceable patterns, for example in text, citations, authorship and collaboration. The talk will discuss how bibliometric and scientometric approaches can be suitable for the detection of inconsistencies and paper mills, and for measuring how they bias the scientific record.

Keynote Talk II -  Pasteur’s Quadrant beyond STEM: How academics engage with society, and whether it matters

Policymakers increasingly expect academics to engage with society and universities to demonstrate their societal impact. This lecture examines academic engagement through the Pasteur’s Quadrant framework developed by Stokes, which distinguishes basic research, detached from application, from applied research, which has immediate uses but often has little connection to fundamental scientific questions. 

Pasteur’s Quadrant is the sweet spot: research that pursues fundamental understanding while being inspired by use. Existing work has largely confined this idea to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), where use-inspired research yields patentable technologies and commercial products. We argue that the social sciences and humanities (SSH) also occupy Pasteur’s Quadrant but express use-inspiration differently. STEM fields tend to produce codified knowledge suited to intellectual property protection, so their engagement flows through patents and spin-offs. SSH fields tend to produce interpretive, context-dependent knowledge that shapes policy and professional practice, so their engagement flows through consulting and public dissemination, but is harder to document. 

We test this using a population survey of academics at all eight Danish universities, representative by discipline, seniority, gender and institution, linked to bibliometric data. The results show systematic disciplinary differences. Applied STEM fields concentrate their engagement in formal knowledge transfer to the private sector, SSH fields engage mainly through public dissemination and public-sector consulting, and the medical sciences combine both patterns. Does engagement come at the expense of research? Across all fields, engagement goes hand in hand with research productivity rather than competing with it.

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