Article
Introduction
Every published paper lists at least one institutional affiliation. This affiliation is not verified by most journals at submission time; it is accepted as a declaration, like a country’s name on a UN ballot. The assumption is that researchers have institutional affiliations because institutional affiliations are how researchers exist: they obtain funding, use equipment, supervise students, and receive mail. A researcher without an institution is, in principle, not a researcher in the sense that journals intend.
In practice, the relationship between researchers and institutions is more flexible. Institutions close while papers are in review. Researchers move between affiliations during multi-year projects. Emeritus affiliations persist after retirement and sometimes after death. And in a small but nonzero fraction of cases, affiliations are invented, misspelled, or carried over from a previous paper to which they also did not apply.
We investigated the prevalence and taxonomy of these non-correspondences.
Verification Protocol
For each of 3,200 affiliations, we performed the following steps in order: (1) web search for the exact institution name; (2) if found, verification that the department or division named in the affiliation exists within the institution; (3) if not found, search for variants of the institution name; (4) postal address lookup and mapping; (5) phone contact attempt. Each affiliation was coded as Confirmed, Partially Confirmed (institution exists but named department does not), Dissolved (formerly existing), Suspicious (exists only as a website with no physical address), or Not Found.
Two coders independently verified a random sample of 400 affiliations; inter-rater agreement was κ = 0.88 on the primary category and κ = 0.71 on the distinction between Dissolved and Suspicious, which we acknowledge is a judgment call.
Taxonomy of Phantom Institutions
Our 278 unconfirmed affiliations fell into four categories. The largest (n=112, 40.3%) were dissolved institutions: research centers, institutes, and departments that had existed at the time of the research but were disbanded before or during publication. The second category (n=89, 32.0%) were suspicious web-only entities: organizations with active websites, formal-sounding names, and no verifiable physical address or staff beyond the affiliated author. The third category (n=61, 21.9%) were misspelling variants of real institutions, which we note can be either innocent typographic error or a deliberate strategy that is very hard to distinguish from innocent typographic error. The fourth category (n=16, 5.8%) we term “creative”: institutions with names sufficiently unusual that we could identify no plausible real-world referent, such as “The Quantum Cognition Research Division” and “Center for Advanced Studies in Applied Advancement.”
One institution appeared as the affiliation on 14 papers across 9 journals: the “Institute for Computational Excellence and Research, Geneva.” There is no institute by this name in Geneva, or in Switzerland, or, as far as we can determine, on Earth. All 14 papers list the same correspondence email address, which bounces.
Discussion
We recommend that journals implement basic affiliation verification at submission time. This is technically straightforward: it requires confirming that the stated institution exists and that the stated department exists within it. Several major publishers have announced intentions to implement such checks. None of them, to our knowledge, have done so. We consider this outcome consistent with the literature.
References
- Phantom, P. (2023). “Institutional Affiliation as Social Fiction.” Sociology of Science, 12(3), pp. 77-94.
- Geneva, G. (2024). “We Have No Record of This Institute.” City of Geneva Official Communications, Reference No. 2024-COG-847.
- Verification, V., & Check, C. (2022). “What Journals Could Do (But Don’t).” Journal of Structural Remedies That Will Not Be Implemented, 1(1), pp. 1-22.
- Hypothesis, N. (2026). “Affiliation: Department of Unverifiable Credentials, Nonexistent Research Centre.” I3E Trashactions on Reproducibility Problems in Imaginary Institutions, 1(1), pp. 24-24.