Some reflection on academic publishing

Publishing a paper is easy nowadays; there are so many journals and publishers, and anyone can publish almost anything. The question is- do we want to publish just anything? Do we want to publish a paper just to increase the number of publications? Or do we want to publish a paper that answers a relevant research question for societal benefit at some point in time, the project is pre-registered in an open science platform, the data is collected systematically following appropriate guidelines, the texts are written meaningfully without plagiarism and random AI tools, the results are reported clearly, and discussions follow the results not just some random thoughts the author might have in their mind.

In the last few years, being senior editor in two journals and an active author, I have encountered several troublesome publishing practices; luckily, I have managed to withdraw from those so far. But more and more, I am starting to question the publication bubble; most likely, 50% or more of the published papers have used just false data made up by authors. In many cases, people do not even make up the data; they directly make up descriptive, correlations, and hypothesis testing result tables. I think a good use of AI would be to detect fake data in published studies.