The work, posted on arXiv on August 31, examined the fate of nearly 2,000 academic papers with one common factor: At least one coauthor lists the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network (PNN) as an institutional affiliation. But there’s one problem: the PNN is not a real network of scientists. Instead, it’s an authorship-for-sale scheme, as Retraction Watch reported in 2022.

To learn what influence paper mill studies may be having, Federica Silvi and Leslie McIntosh of scholarly services firm Digital Science in London studied 1,975 articles by PNN-affiliated authors and examined where those papers were cited. Using the scholarly database Dimensions, the authors found that 480 papers mentioning PNN were cited in patents, 57 were referenced in policy documents, and 12 appeared in clinical guidelines.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/09/17/paper-mill-studies-get-cited-by-clinical-guidelines-policy-docs-and-more-analysis-finds/

Another high-profile case has interested scientists. Read now