Manufacturing (Dis)Trust: Predatory Journals, Paper Mills, and the Crisis of Research Integrity

Open Sessions (Paper Presentation Sessions)

Predatory journals, industrial-scale paper mills, and escalating retractions challenge the normative and institutional foundations that, since Merton, have been understood to underwrite the credibility of scientific knowledge. This session approaches these phenomena not as isolated deviance, but as revealing the social architecture of contemporary knowledge production—its reward systems, evaluation infrastructures, and the political economy of academic publishing.

On the theoretical side, we welcome contributions that mobilize and contest established frameworks: Mertonian norms and counter-norms, boundary-work and demarcation, the social construction of credibility, and STS accounts of how facts, errors, and frauds are made and unmade. How do fraud and retraction reconfigure the relationship between science and its publics in an age of misinformation and contested expertise?

On the policy side, we welcome analyses of governance responses: research-integrity regimes, journal indexing and "whitelisting," reform of metrics and rankings, open science, and AI-based detection—alongside the new risks that generative AI introduces.

We particularly encourage work attentive to global inequalities, examining how center–periphery hierarchies shape both vulnerability to and stigmatization of misconduct, in keeping with the Congress theme of global sociology in turbulent times.

We welcome empirical, comparative, conceptual, and case-study papers, as well as methodological contributions on studying and detecting fraud.