Briefing Chat: Top researchers are being misled by sham academic societies

Benjamin Thompson (0:04)

Hi, listeners, Benjamin here, welcome to The Friday Show. Something a bit different this week. We've got a really interesting story that we wanted to get on the show, but because of the nobels and conference attendances, things like that, we couldn't quite get the diaries to line up. But we've got a story by reporter Max Kozlov, who's been doing some investigative work diving into the world of sham academic societies. Now, it turns out there's a network of these organizations that are in several cases misleading senior researchers, and they've been looking to swell their ranks through deceptive practices. Max is here to tell me more about it. Max Kozlov, thank you so much for being on the show.

Max Kozlov (0:41)

Happy to be here.

Benjamin Thompson (0:42)

So before we start on your journey then, many of our listeners will be members of learned societies, sometimes known as academic societies, of course. Let's define what these organizations actually are.

Max Kozlov (0:54)

Yeah, so we're talking about organizations like the Royal Society, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. These are organizations that are collections of scientists, usually about a specific topic or field of study, and they can give out awards for their members. They can support policy based on research in their field. They serve as a networking opportunity for other scientists. And these organizations have been around for decades and centuries.

Benjamin Thompson (1:28)

Right, and folk listening to this, whatever field they're in, there is probably an academic society for them. And these organizations organize conferences and stuff like that as well, right? But your reporting has revealed that there are a large number of these sham academic societies, which is a new one to me, Max, I have to say. Tell me about how this story came about.

Max Kozlov (1:48)

It all started because I received an email from a researcher at the University of Michigan. He has this very special job because Michigan is such a big university. He is the Director of Faculty Honorifics. So essentially, it's his job to seek recognition for the achievements and research that the faculty at Michigan are doing. So he's seen many awards, many fellowships, many of these societies. He's very familiar. And he got an email about this society, the European Academy of Engineering, that he was a little suspicious of. I mean, mainly because he had never heard of the organization before. And he went on to the website.

It looked like every other society he's heard of. It listed many members, many of whom are Nobel laureates.

And he wanted to provide some advice to his faculty who were getting these invitations. He did some initial digging and some of the claims on their website just didn't hold up for him. You know, this was an organization, for example, that was supposedly founded in 1992 in Sweden, and seven Nobel laureates, all now deceased, helped establish it. But all of this information was later removed from the website. But anyway, when he looked on those seven Nobel laureates Wikipedia pages, this organization wasn't on there. And this organization didn't even have a Wikipedia page.

So that started to ring some alarm bells for him. And he went so deep into this rabbit hole of, is this thing real or not? That he sent me an email essentially saying, you know, you're the reporter here, maybe you look into this, let me know what you find out. And that's what I did.

Benjamin Thompson (3:36)

And how many of these organizations have you subsequently come across then? And what do they all seem to have in common?

Max Kozlov (3:42)

So my reporting has found dozens of these websites. We only mention a few in the story. And what's common among them? Well, it's this lack of transparency. You know, organizations like the ones I mentioned, the US. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, if you wanted to find out who the president is, how they select members, this information is available online, their bylaws, their constitution.

Now, these other societies that I've uncovered, they are typically missing this information. Or sometimes when I contacted people who are listed on their website, they tell me that they have never even heard of the organization, and they didn't know that their name was listed. When misleading information was pointed out, someone quickly made those changes to the websites of some of these organizations. But in some cases, people did know and just assumed it was harmless because they were told they were elected as members and nobody asked them for money. So they didn't think it was a big deal.

And the way that I found other organizations and I linked them together was oftentimes a person who maybe listed the European Academy of Engineering on their CV, they also had other organizations also listed on their CV that I'd never heard of. And so, well, I would Google every single one of them and try to see if they had these common traits. And I would add them to my list and try to confirm details about them.