Fraudulent scientific research is on the rise and is jeopardizing medical research, experts have warned.

A new study has found that networks of bad actors work together to publish bogus research. The findings, published in the journal PNAS this week, came from analyzing more than 5 million scientific articles published across 70,000 journals.

"There are groups of editors conspiring to publish low-quality articles, at scale, escaping traditional peer review processes," said the study's lead author Reese Richardson, a social scientist at Northwestern University in the US.

The research uncovered evidence of networks of scientific journal editors who frequently publish research that is flagged for integrity issues, and "brokers" who connect fraudulent authors to these editor networks.

"This kind of fraud destroys trust in science. It biases systematic and meta-analysis, it delays treatment and delays new research," said Anna Abalkina, a social scientist at the Free University of Berlin, who was not involved in the study.

New scientific research is published as research papers in research journals. There are tens of thousands of........

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