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The primary objective of any research, regardless of its domain such as health, technology, psychology, or any other subject, is to enhance the overall well-being of individuals. Rigorous processes are involved in conducting research ethically and in communicating its outcomes to society. However, as publishing research has become a mandatory requirement for career advancement and appointments, academics are resorting to several unethical practices to get substandard work published quickly. Consequently, predatory publishing markets have emerged, which publish data that is falsified and fabricated, along with plagiarised textual matter. The emergence of "paper mills" is a further step in the corruption of research, where a group of persons or automated systems generate papers for publication. Anyone desirous of publishing a paper can purchase one, akin to any desired fast-moving consumer product, with the added guarantee of publication in indexed journals. Therefore, paper mills and their unethical modus operandi are discussed in this paper in detail, with relevant examples. The article unfolds the consequences of publishing such fraudulent research papers and concludes with the challenges in combating paper mills.

The paper compares the characteristics of URLs cited in Indian LIS conference proceedings papers. A total of 15,745 references appended to 1,700 articles published in three Indian LIS conference proceedings published during 2001-2010 were selected. From these references we extracted a total of 5698 URLs and were further classified according to their top level domains, file formats and path depths for further analysis. The results showed that the percentage of articles with at least one URL increased from 39.10% in 2001 to 91.67% in 2010. There was a constant and continuous increase in the number of articles with URLs over the years during 2001-2010. Of the 1,700 articles published in conference proceedings, there were 1,011 (59.47%) articles with URLs. Study also reveals the fact that, of the 5,698 URLs, more than 50% were shared by .org and .com domains which accounted for 1,799 (31.57%) and 1,474 (25.87%) URLs respectively. The highest percentage of cited URLs belonged to HTML (68.50%) followed by .pdf files (8.86%). The path depth levels 0 (no path), 2 and 3 collectively accounted for 67.67% of the extracted URLs. URLs with path depth 1 and 4 put together accounted for 25.31% of all the 5,698 URLs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]