Sadly, this doesn't even include the studies with authors who produce poor experiments and theories, or go out of their way to prove their results; effectively, generating additional scientific publication waste we have to sift through to find genuine material, or worse off, that people then use to create policies impacting large populations that are doomed to fail in the long-run. The image this creates for me, is building a house on quicksand.
In essence, there's more than enough to deal with regarding bad science that was done in good faith. There have got to be better ways to filter out bad science offered in bad faith.
I think the incentive structure has to be fixed - either making paper mills unnatractive, or removing the demand for their services, whichever.
I think filtering out bad faith efforts is too challenging because the pool of people capable of doing so is so limited, hell it might take longer to review and reject such a thing than to make it.
An author and journal rating services evaluating merits across time. While poor scientists become evident to competing authors in their respective fields, a policymaker or journalist may not take the time to figure out if the results are meritable or a background of the authors and utilize the results to support their position. In a perfect world, these authors should be filtered during the "peer review" process, but the process seems... corrupted?
