The whole academic world is a sick joke and has been for a while. The money and power driven culture has distorted everything. It's hard to determine what's fake, what's fraud, what's BS and what is good work. I've seen corruption at an extensive scale. About 30 years ago, my (then) department chair was publishing experimental results from non-existing labs. I've literally seen him tell a (then) junior faculty collaborator on a paper to "put a data point here ... no move it a bit to the left ..." on a plot.

The perverse incentives have distorted all academics and promoted the sleaziest most psychopathic people rather than scholars. There are scholars but very few of them are flourishing.

To illustrate, the following 'fun' article (a bit old now) is this quote:

“In 2010, he used SCIgen to create 102 bogus papers by a fictitious scientist and added these to the Google Scholar database, an index of science prestige.

For a time, "Ike Antkare" ranked 21st on the database's list of most-cited scientists in the world—higher than Einstein, who ranked a lowly 36th.”

http://phys.org/news/2014-02-science-publisher-gibberish-papers.html