A biologist was shocked to find his name was mentioned several times in a scientific paper, which references papers that simply don’t exist.
Stupid question: Why can’t journals just mandate an actual URL link to a study on the last page, or the exact issue something was printed in? Surely both of those would be easily confirmable, and both would be easy for a scientist using “real” sources to source (since they must have access to it themselves already).
Like, it feels silly to me that high school teachers require this sort of thing, yet scientific journals do not?
Because scientific journals exist to profit off science, not bolster it. Fact checking costs money so they do the bare minimum they deem necessary to preserve their reputation.
It’s always greed
Many of the journals I’ve published in do require a link, usually a PMID or DOI, but they’re not usually part of the review process. That is, one doesn’t expect academic content reviewers to validate each of the citations, but it’s not unreasonable to imagine a journal having an automated validator. The review process really isn’t structured to detect fraud. It looks like the article in question was in the preprint stage - i.e.: not even reviewed yet - and I didn’t notice mention of where they were submitted.
Message here should be that the process works and the fake article never got published. Very different than the periodic stories about someone who submits a blatantly fake, but hand written, article to a bullshit journal and gets published.
Well that used to be a thing called a bibliography but it appears that these journals don’t require such. Funny when even my old 7gr essays required those
As someone who just submitted an article for review I am gobsmacked by how brazenly the authors have done this. The absolute disregard for integrity and the knowledge production process is astounding. But also the balls to just submit a paper like this without fear of the consequences says something more profound about the state of academia.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As Retraction Watch reports, Natural History Museum of Denmark myriapodologist Henrik Enghoff suspected the authors of the paper from China and Africa used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to dig up academic references — and as it turns out, his hunch was right.
The offending paper was initially taken down by Preprints.org, a preprint archive run by the academic publisher MDPI, in June after Enghoff’s colleague, the University of Copenhagen’s David Richard Nash, notified editors of the errors.
Earlier this year, reporters at The Guardian noticed that the AI chatbot even made up entire articles with bylines of journalists who had never written these non-existent pieces.
“We will withdraw it immediately and add the authors of this preprint to our blacklist,” Preprints.org’s editor Lloyd Shu told Nash in an email back in June.
Kahsay Tadesse Mawcha of Aksum University in Ethiopia, who was originally listed as a corresponding author on the offending preprint, admitted to Danish newspaper Weekendavisen back in July that he indeed used ChatGPT, adding that he only realized later that the tool was “not recommended” for the task.
Powerful but flawed AI tools like ChatGPT are a bull in a china shop of almost every knowledge domain, academia included — and it’ll be fascinating to watch everybody involved try to find a new sense of equilibrium.
The original article contains 547 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This all sounds very House of Leaves.
Assuming this is carelessness, this just goes to show that working in academia isn’t an indicator of critical thinking skills IMO
Honestly, I bet he has the skills, he just didn’t use them because he didn’t care, or is overworked, or for whatever reason.
You make a valid point, and there are certainly more considerations than my original reply would lead one to believe. Cheers.
A lot of people don’t understand the limitations/weaknesses of AI. The carelessness was probably more in not actually learning about the tool he was relying on (and just assuming it was reliable information).
Your assumption is wrong. This was not carelessness. Academic dishonesty and lack of integrity is an ongoing issue in research. China is one of the biggest culprits for blatant plagiarism and IP theft, although recently even academics from Ivy league universities have been implicated in fraudulent publications. The simple fact is that number of publications is the main metric used in academia for hiring and promotion. This leads to a perverse incentive model where academics prioritise publishing over conducting good science, thus all we get is a shit load of noise (poor articles) that obscure the signal (good articles).
China is one of the biggest culprits for blatant plagiarism and IP theft, although recently even academics from Ivy league universities have been implicated in fraudulent publications.
Sure, let’s make this about China when 4 out of 5 of the authors credited for the original article are from Africa.
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kahsay-Tadesse-Mawcha
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hategekimana-Athanase
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joelle-Kajuga
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dennis-Ndolo-Obonyo
While only one of which was from China. This doesn’t even address the fact that the republished paper came from Mawcha which describes a study on millipedes in… Africa. Guess what, Wenxiang Yang wasn’t even credited in this version. Was your reply carelessness or dishonesty and lack of integrity? I don’t care where the misinformation and carelessness comes from as long as we’re making efforts to stop it, but this is highly ironic.
In academic publishing you look at the order of authors and the author contribution statement to determine the hierarchy of the research group. In this case the Chinese author is the most senior, and was the member who approved the submission. In such niche areas as this most senior academics will know most of the relevant authors and literature. Thus carelessness is too kind a word where negligence and lack of integrity would be more fitting.
Further, with regards to the primary author my assertion still stands, it was not carelessness but rather brazen academic misconduct, as demonstrated by the resubmission (not republication as you suggest).
