I would not be surprised by this number given the sheer volume of crap journals that publish anything. However I would expect that the proportion of fakery in papers with >20 citations is much lower than 1 in 7, which should be somewhat reassuring. Remember that a p-value of 0.05 means that 1 in 20 studies cannot be replicated by random chance alone without any malicious intent.
Side note: the “1 in 7” claim from this paper is based on a straw-poll of N=12 existing forensic metascientific papers. I find it somewhat ironic that the author makes some strong conclusions based on this number which to me, though very plausible, is itself lacking scientific rigor.
Side note: the “1 in 7” claim from this paper is based on a straw-poll of N=12 existing forensic metascientific papers. I find it somewhat ironic that the author makes some strong conclusions based on this number which to me, though very plausible, is itself lacking scientific rigor.