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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
- DanBC 5y agoFull title is: "Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals"
- NotSwift 5y agoSome people don't have English as their native language. When such people want to write a scientific article in English they will have to use someone who can write English but probably does not know much about the research. So of course there will be articles with "Tortured Phrases".
- arthur2e5 5y agoDid you even read the abstract of the TFA? This should not even be a cultural background issue. As an L2 English speaker myself I have never ever thought about throwing a thesaurus onto some established phrase so I can turn “artificial intelligence” into “counterfeit consciousness”, or “deep neural network” into “profound neural organization”. These are deliberate use of fancy words without trying to make sense. Heck, we got a word for this sort of rampant plagiarism masking on Chinese internet — 洗稿 (manuscript (or blog post)-laundry). OT: I do appreciate the funny phrase “elite figuring” for HPC. It’s kind of like how they translate things to Anglish.
- alexmcc81 5y agoIf you read the article the authors directly address this and use datasets of machine translated articles as controls.
- wolverine876 5y agoPeople who don't speak English natively could use machine translation, and people plagiarizing could use machine translation. How do they distinguish (if you don't mind saving me digging into the research)?
- ev1 5y agoPhrases like AI and big data are already pretty well defined in almost every major machine translation set. You'd have to forcefully try to thesaurus your way through to make it do that 99% of the time.
- wolverine876 5y agoBut wouldn't the error rate be the same for both legitimate and plagiarized texts? How do these errors distinguish between the two cases?
- Zababa 5y agoNo one would write "colossal information" instead of "big data" because English isn't their first language.
- PhasmaFelis 5y agoI've been seeing this in news articles as well. Swipe someone else's article, run it through a synonym-replacer algorithm, and have Reddit bots post it on a bunch of news subs. Presumably the thesaurus work fools Google's just-a-copy detector. It's the next step in clickbait monetization. Why settle for low-effort content when you can have no-effort content?
- lettergram 5y agoThis is pretty much how corporate news works imo. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen one article then generate a million more. My favorite example, go to google or DuckDuckGo and type: “Xxx number hospitalized” or “yyy new cases” You can type almost any number and get a ton of articles. Not exactly a reprint, but they all seem almost generated
- newsclues 5y agoNext will be a hybrid model where no effort content that begins to trend virally gets a human to tweak it for optimization. Rewriting headlines that bots wrote and A B testing humans vs Software
- withinboredom 5y agoEven more entertaining would be all the traffic being from bots trying to do the same thing.
- coldpie 5y agoThanks to advertising as a business model.
- wolverine876 5y agoCould you share any examples?
- PhasmaFelis 5y agoDon't have any of the actual content handy, but here's an online tool that advertises itself for that specific purpose: https://spinbot.com/ https://spinbot.com/ Google "rewriting tool" for more examples. Apparently it's a lot more common than I'd realized.
- im3w1l 5y agoI wish they had kept the method secret. Getting these papers retracted is less valuable than being able to secretly keep tabs on them.
- _Microft 5y agoIf they are not retracted, they might get cited by other works which themselves might get cited. Suddenly this faked, nonexistent research has been "laundered" into mainstream and nobody knows anymore that there was a problem in the first place.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y agoI’m wondering what happened to good old reading with comprehension. Ain’t nobody got no time for that? If so, doesn’t it make those papers worthless?
- eecc 5y agoNope. Time is the only non-fungible asset being burned here and everyone is desperately defending their own allotment.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y agoThen can we at least draw a border around such "science" so that serious people who have work to do know to not waste time with it?
- wmf 5y agoWe already know which venues are legit (because we've heard of them) and which aren't (because we haven't).
- waterhouse 5y agoWhat would be cool is if they'd figured out two methods, and only published one. Though if they've published a convenient list of the bad papers, then, assuming other markers exist, that makes it easy for others to discover them.
- doubtfuluser 5y agoMaybe a future direction would be to train new models to identify plagiarism by training on this information. Use „non matching backtranslations for training classifiers. It’s again the typical cat and mouse game I guess
- tarboreus 5y agoOr someone could...read the papers.
- wereHamster 5y agoIt's the classical problem of people trying to find technological solutions to social problems. If plagiarism and fake research is still a problem after we've applied technology to fight it, clearly we haven't applied enough of it.
- waterhouse 5y agoSometimes technological solutions work really well to solve social problems. For example, at one point, one person using the internet would tie up the phone line for everyone else in the house, and vice versa. Negotiating this shared resource could be considered a household social problem. But now there's no such interference, and most people have their own cell phones.
- tnzm 5y agoThis is a social problem around the shared use of a technological resource. I'm reminded of the old saying, "computers can only solve problems that are created with computers". But then again you can view _all_ solutions to social problems as inherently technological in the broader sense; I adhere to that paradigm.
- robertlagrant 5y agoThat saying seems silly. Computers (i.e. Zoom) help with the problem of needing socially distanced education during Covid lockdowns.
- Pixelbrick 5y agoThis will come as no surprise to FE/HE lecturers the world over...
- dmos62 5y agoI feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. How long will it take academia to adapt?
- robwwilliams 5y agoNot even those! The impact factor of a journal is a terrible guide to quality. It is more appropriately thought of as a measure of scientific sex appeal. You must read each paper to judge its merits. Lots of junk gets published in top ranked journals.
- raincom 5y agoI thought top ranked journals have good reviewers, since the editorial board consists of researchers/professors from top notch schools. Can you share your thoughts why junk get published in such journals? Has it to do with collusion or reputation-laundering or more?
- wmf 5y agoThere's an order of magnitude difference between the worst paper published in a good venue vs. the "tortured" fake papers in fake journals though.
- AlexCoventry 5y agoThat's a low bar, though. The point is that it's very difficult to judge the scientific merits of a paper without actually reading it. (And even then, it's easy to be fooled.)
- nick__m 5y agoLots of junk gets published in top ranked journals. A lot more get published in vanity journals, so I use the impact factor as a first pass filter: I avoid papers from journals not listed the JCR¹ or those with a factor below 1.000. I assume, maybe naively, that if an important finding were to be published in such low quality journal, it would eventually get published in a more legit publication. 1- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342623066_Journal_Citation_Reports_2020_Impact_factor_Ranking_of_2019 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342623066_Journal_C...
- zozbot234 5y agoNo mentions of tortured phrases in the humanities and softer social sciences? For all their supposed appreciation of les belles-lettres (viz., "fine writing") those researchers sure seem to like their tortured phrasings.
- wmf 5y agoThat's a completely separate issue that shouldn't be conflated.
- zozbot234 5y ago> That's a completely separate issue How so? It seems quite related to me. Anecdotally, one would expect a pretty clear negative correlation between torturedness in the sense of this article and indicators of research quality.
- robertlagrant 5y agoThis is a category error. The article is only about the subset of low quality papers generated by automatic translation.
- twirlock 5y agoSo the way we can tell a computer has generated a scientific paper is... because the computer probably failed to use idiomatic terminology when it referred to concepts.
- guyromm 5y agoBack in 2004 or so, I was building a distributed CMS with the goal of creating artificial "link pyramids" with the purpose of SEO, which was a rather new thing at the time. Content generation was one of our bottlenecks, and as Google was already rather successful at detecting duplicate content, we were looking for a way to "uniqify" posts that would be used to stuff sites intended for googlebot, but not humans. One of the methods that worked was taking source English content, running it through Babelfish, the Altavista translator to French, Spanish or German, and then using the same method to translate it back to English. This resulted in texts that did not make much sense to humans, were full of precisely such "tortured phrases" but which were considered unique by Google.
- arkitaip 5y agoAny HNers who want to join me in creating the dad-punk band Leftover Vitality?
- dghughes 5y agoIt reminds me of scientific an article about Canadian journal publishers are being bought by a shady company (OMICS Group Inc.) so they can seemingly publish whatever they want to. https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/offshore-firm-accused-of-publishing-junk-science-takes-over-canadian-journals-1.3093472 https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/offshore-firm-accused-of-publi...
- jokoon 5y agoWhat's the point of this? To waste the time of foreign scientists? Would we call this science warfare?
- wmf 5y agoIt's resume inflation.
- riedel 5y agoIt is the result of a misguided science system that relies mostly on external quality checks (peer reviewed publication) and flooding the world with so much "novelty" that there is no way to digest it. At least you can use the output to train language models up to now: will machines now have to train themselves...
- native_samples 5y agoThe people in question are paid for writing papers, not the discovery of true knowledge. The root cause is government funding of research, hence this specific paper talking at the end about the "publish or perish" culture. Governments give researchers money to write papers but then don't read the results, only check that it got published somewhere, meaning anyone who can game the publication system has in effect a license to print (taxpayer) money. That's why there's no real fix for this problem beyond defunding government science budgets. Any quick hacks you can come up with like running GPT-2 detectors over science papers are just treating the symptoms of the problem, not the cause. The root cause is that when governments eliminate the free market by subsidizing research they lose reliable signals of genuine utility that come from polling the market, so they have to use proxies that boil down to quantity-over-quality. The fix is for them to stop subsidizing research. The people who apply research to create new technologies aren't reading it anyway.
- gzer0 5y agoThis is anecdotal evidence at best, but it is worth considering. I know of several individuals who were able to complete their entire Master's thesis utilizing a combination of AI generated content (GPT-3) and a paraphrasing tool. The generated text was well over 50 pages, completely bypassed all known content/plagiarism checks and was even included in the Universities "exemplary examples". To this day, it is still there. This is of significant concern as some of these GPT-3 based tools are now integrated within MS Word itself. Word 2021 allows for "add-ons", out of which I have noticed several third party content generation and paraphrasing tools.
- phkahler 5y agoSounds like automated review of automatically generated papers. And people pay money for that...
- 13415 5y agoPlease include a link to these theses, because as it stands this anecdote sounds extremely implausible. I don't know what university you were, but I've been at a few in Europe and at every one of them Master theses were evaluated from the start to the end by several humans. GPT-3 is unable to produce even two pages of coherent text, let alone 50 pages good enough to be accepted as a Master thesis in any discipline at any university I could think of (even the worst ones). I can imagine that plagiators use paraphrasing software quite extensively, though, and that it is a problem.
- gzer0 5y agoLet me clarify: It was not all automated, there was a fair bit of manual intervention needed. I understand your concerns and they are valid and this is why I preface my statement with "anecdotal evidence". What I write is most certainly not the entire story and a fair bit of detail is left out. It should be known that this is widespread across multiple industries and this will only become more of an issue in the future. This is a US-based institution, fully accredited.
- throwawaygh 5y ago> Master's thesis I don't doubt this at all, and I have no doubt that GPT-3 with a bit of human editing can spit out something better than the lower third of masters students at corn row colleges. Masters degrees are cash cows, which is why no one in unregulated industries cares about them. People in regulated/unionized industries also don't actually care; even educators, who at least nominally see intrinsic value in education, go to borderline diploma mills to get that union-mandated raise at minimal effort.
- tasty_freeze 5y agoI ran into something like this in an amazon review once. I was looking for a book of transcriptions for the instrument I play, and two of the handful of reviews used the same awkward phrase: "music goals". I scratched my head and then realized what probably happened. They weren't native english speakers and they were being paid to write reviews and they had gotten the wrong synonym. "music goals" was supposed to be "music scores".
- itronitron 5y agoI like that "citation of non-existent literature" is also a feature of these articles, although I wonder if the non-existent literature was previously cited in other papers. (https://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/the-most-influential-paper-that-gerard-salton-never-wrote/ https://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/the-most-influen...)
- mrfusion 5y agoI wonder if there are any phrases to detect industry funded papers? I know they tell you their funding sources but it doesn’t seem to always help.
- varjag 5y agoFirst thought after the opening paragraph, "these have to be mainlanders". Scrolling down, yup.
- FabHK 5y agoPertinent passage from the preprint: > Out of 404 papers accepted in less then 30 days after submission, 394 papers (97.5%) have authors with affiliations in (mainland) China. Out of 615 papers of which editorial processing time exceeded 40 days, 58 papers (9.5%) only have authors with affiliations in (main- land) China. This tenfold imbalance suggests a differentiated processing of papers affiliated to China characterised by shorter peer-review duration.
- mrfusion 5y agoI wonder if any phrases or styles could detect group think or studies following the crowd.
- dang 5y agoThe paper is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751. (We merged this thread and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28108111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28108111)
- FabHK 5y agoAnd the journal involved, Microprocessors and Microsystems, is an Elsevier journal. Huge surprise. I am glad the publisher earns their outrageous fees by careful screening, peer-review, and editing of submitted manuscripts. /s Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.
- CRConrad 5y agoElsevirus?
- atrettel 5y agoI have encountered something similar to this for a submission that I reviewed for a scientific journal. I will not list any names or give much detail past those generalities, but I pointed out that the authors were misusing a particular technical term. In my review I defined the term and explained it briefly. I asked the authors to revise their submission accordingly. The paper was not bad but the authors did not know English very well, so it was quite difficult to read. That was its main problem. However, when I received the revised submission, I noticed that the authors plagiarized my definition and explanation almost word for word (from my confidential review). I pointed this out to the editors and they said to just reject the paper with the stated reason being plagiarism, which I did. The journal ended up rejecting the article, but I discovered it a few years later in a different journal. The plagiarized section remained, but the authors swabbed out a lot my phrases for these kind of "tortured phrases". That said, the authors did not fabricate their research (as far as I can tell). They just did not know English well, so it was easier to just copy things that you know are phrased well than to learn to write English well. As the saying goes, do not attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance or laziness. That does not excuse it but it makes it more understandable. I agree with the article that this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. There are likely many more lesser evils being committed with similar tools that are just much more difficult to spot. I would not have noticed my particular example if I were not a reviewer for the paper, for example. It makes me wonder how big the problem really is.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago> The paper was not bad but the authors did not know English very well, so it was quite difficult to read. That was its main problem. This seems to confirm my suspicion than these cases are not so much about AI-generated content but rather a result of machine translation.
- aliswe 5y agoit's a common technique/first layer of plagiarizing a text to translate it from english to eg. spanish and then from spanish to english, to get rid of the unique words the author used.
- FabHK 5y agoSome of these tortured phrases are great. My favourites: "flag to clamor" for signal to noise "individual computerized collaborator" for PDA (personal digital assistant) "haze figuring" for cloud computing "information stockroom" for data warehouse "focal preparing unit" for CPU "discourse acknowledgement" for voice recognition "mean square blunder" for MSE (mean square error) "arbitrary right of passage" for random access "arbitrary timberland" for random forest "irregular esteem" for random value ETA: "notoriety examination" for sentiment analysis
- aaron-santos 5y agoI enjoyed finding "counterfeit consciousness" for artificial intelligence. To me it evokes a kind of science fiction that's shown up occasionally on HN[1]. [1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
- Freak_NL 5y agoAlso “haze figuring” for cloud computing. It sounds like something you'd find in 30s, 40s, 50s sci-fi for sure! Like “visiplate” (E.E. “Doc” Smith, Heinlein) for a computer display screen. (Along with ticker tape printouts and tape reels in the far future of course.)
- slowmovintarget 5y agoMakes me want to put smog-hosting in my CV.
- synquid 5y agoThe smog is just the Chinese cloud.
- laurent92 5y agoAh, vapordecisionware. But that might be confused with regular management.
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- rusk 5y agoIn telecoms they call all the backend infrastructure “back haul” and have never read a satisfactory explanation. I’m convinced that somebody once coined “back hall” with the intention of invoking the image of service passages like what you see in the mall, it was misheard (as is often the case in Telecomms given it’s global nature) and the metaphor of the bulldozer tail stuck for ever after
- robertlagrant 5y agoIME I think backhaul is just sending data to the main internet, not all backend. I thought it just meant it hauled the data back into the core network.
- rusk 5y agoMain Internet, across main Internet, between networks, intra-domain. Intra-station. Anything that joins it all together that isn’t “front facing” i.e wireless network towards handsets
- vericiab 5y agoIn freight "backhaul" typically refers to transporting goods during the return journey. During the principle (non-return) journey, often the starting location is more central, like a distribution center, and the destination is a smaller satellite location like a store. So when something is backhauled, that tends to mean it's transported from the smaller satellite location to the central location. Maybe that's where the term came from?
- rusk 5y agoMaybe actually, or at the very least it could explain the confusion. Better than some of the other explanations I’ve heard for sure.
- Animats 5y agoI've heard that term used where an ISP is piggbacking on a larger service. Sonic.net offers some of their services over AT&T infrastructure. Data to and from home DSL lines is "backhauled" to Sonic HQ in Santa Rosa, CA and then goes out over the bulk Internet backbone from there. This is a different path the data would take than if handled entirely by AT&T.
- FabHK 5y agoGot to agree with the conclusion of the paper: > In our strong opinion, the root of the problems discussed in this work is the notorious publish or perish atmosphere (Garfield, 1996) affecting both authors and publishers. This leads to blind counting and fuels production of uninteresting (and even nonsensical) publi- cations.
- ksaj 5y agoI noticed this happening in other areas a few years ago, but with faked blogs. The titles and subjects would sound interesting, but then when you tried to read them, you'd need a specialized decoder to get through the utterly baffling word replacements. But they already got their ad revenue by the time you notice the article is complete gibberish. The first one I found was about dog illnesses. They kept referring to dogs with phrases like "Your domesticated canine," and it was quite a chore trying to figure out most of the symptoms that they were listing. "Heart worms" was translated to "love snakes," which I thought was delightful.
- dimatura 5y agoYes, this may be a specific example of a more widespread phenomenon. There's certain websites out there that republish articles from well-established publications (e.g., New York Times) almost word for word, except that they are rife with synonym swaps that may or may not make sense in context, presumably to escape some kind of automated copy detection. Results can be amusing. For example, the copied article said "“Drukqs” acquired a blended essential response..." where the original said "“Drukqs” received a mixed critical response...".
- armchairhacker 5y agoNowadays too many real blogs are padded with weird phrasing and sentences which don't really mean anything. In this case, sometimes you get lucky and can actually find meaningful information between the padding. But sometimes you just read an article that takes 5 paragraphs and 500 words to say "we don't know".
- _kst_ 5y agoI've seen this kind of things in articles posted to social media sites (Quora and Facebook, but it probably exists elsewhere). I don't have a specific example at hand, but it's typically an article a few paragraphs long with really strange phrasing, so strange that it's not explainable by the author not knowing English well. In a handful of cases, I've managed to find the original source. Common phrases are systematically replaced by ill-fitting synonyms. I suspect the motivation is to avoid accusations of plagiarism (though I don't know what benefit the posters derive from doing this).
- ipsum2 5y agoA high profile case (on the internet) similar to the one described in the article is when Siraj Raval plagiarized a paper on quantum ML and made some amusing replacement phrases: complex Hilbert space -> Complicated Hilbert space Quantum gate -> Quantum door https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/14/ravel_ai_youtube/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/14/ravel_ai_youtube/
- etempleton 5y agoI often wonder while reading an academic paper how the writing could be as hopelessly bad as it is. This type of manipulation and plagiarism may be partially to blame, but the academic writing style has also gone completely off the rails to the point that half the journal articles being published today read as if written by some kind of paper writing AI robot even when I am quite certain that that isn't the case. And no, I am not talking about cases where the author is writing in a non-native language. I have a theory that it may have to do with imposter syndrome and a need to sound smart. The author, fearing that they don't really belong and at any moment will be found out, therefore never making tenure, starts jamming academic sounding words where they don't belong and stretching sentences with commas and semi colons until the whole thing is just as insufferable to read as it was to write. There is also the possibility that there are just a lot of terrible writers out there.
- zwaps 5y agoI am sure this was not your intention or meaning, but please be aware that it is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to write perfect English. English is a language you have to intuit. In contrast to other languages, it has very few fixed rules. Writing elegantly in English is most certainly an art form. Of course, writing good science is hard enough for native speakers. It is very difficult for the vast majority of people on the planet - no matter how good their research. And just so we are clear: Not everyone can afford professional editing services at every point in their career. We meet in English under the premise that it allows for universal communication. In this, we accept that English natives are almost infinitely more privileged in writing, speaking, conferencing and networking. We also have to accept that the level of English proficiency varies, and - especially English - is easy to learn and so difficult to master.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoI think at least skimming some edition of the [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style and some of what is available under [2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=military+writing+guide https://duckduckgo.com/?q=military+writing+guide would be useful for american english and technical writing.
- dash2 5y agoI get this with students a lot. Papers which have been copied from some website, but then they've gone through and altered a few bits of vocabulary to disguise it.
- vmilner 5y agoI've a horrible premonition that the paper describing this problem (and those that cite it) may eventually end up being flagged for containing too many tortured phrases...
- gunfighthacksaw 5y agoA colleague in an unnamed field, attending an unnamed Polish university mentioned that this kind of thing was rife: publishing Polish papers translated from English texts and occasionally vice versa. Poland is a country with a strong academic tradition and similar enough institutions to others in the EU so I can only imagine this happens in more ‘peripheral’ countries with even less globalization.
- Animats 5y agoThis is a major failure of Elsevier. Here's "Microprocessors and Microsystems."[1] This is supposed to be about embedded systems, which is generally a no-bullshit field. I'd never heard of this journal. People read Electronic Design, EE Times, "Embedded.com", maybe Control Systems Journal, etc. Those have either articles about how to do something, or "why what we're selling is great" articles. Now look at the article titles in Microprocessors and Microsystems.[2] Here are the first three. - COPS: A complete oblivious processing system - A perceptron-based replication scheme for managing the shared last level cache - Efficient underdetermined speech signal separation using encompassed Hammersley-Clifford algorithm and hardware implementation Now those might be legitimate, although what they're doing in an embedded systems journal isn't clear. They're all behind a paywall, so it's hard to tell if they're any good. "Oblivious processing" is a security concept. That belongs in a journal on security and encryption, where the crypto people will know what holes to look for. (Microsoft was doing work in this area in 2013, but I don't think a product emerged. If you can make it work, some cloud computing company can use it.) Cache management belongs in a journal on CPU design, where people who have struggled to make caches work will take a look. There are people using perceptrons for this, which makes sense; a cache has to guess which things will be reused. (If this works well, someone should be trying it in web caches such as NGINX to improve cache hit rates.) Signal separation is an active field, but this isn't a journal where you'd expect to find articles on it. Wikipedia has a good article on signal separation. The history of that article indicates attempts to sneak in citations to sketchy articles. No idea if the Hammersley-Clifford algorithm is even relevant. (If it's a significant advance, there's commercial value in this in improving audio quality for conferencing systems.) So these papers were all sent to a journal where the odds of getting published are good, and the odds that the editors have no idea about the subject matter is high. Why is Elsevier even publishing this journal? [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/microprocessors-and-microsystems https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/microprocessors-and-mi... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/microprocessors-and-microsystems/vol/85/suppl/C https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/microprocessors-and-mi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Signal_separation&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Signal_separation...
- jszymborski 5y agoAs someone who has had to write technically in a second-language (French, funding agencies in Quebec), this rings particularly true. Luckily, I'm fluent enough to recognise the particularly egregious examples, but finding good translations for technical words is hard! One example that comes to mind is when trying to translate the phrase "data feed" which came back as "alimentation données" which ostensibly means "animal feed data". If you're looking for a lot of English-to-French translations of technical terms, check out the theses any English University in Quebec (McGill, Concordia, etc..). They're made public online [0]. Can't vouch for the quality as I'm sure there are plenty that just use Google Translate, but everyone I know has their abstract edited by a francophone in their field. A good way to validate translated technical terms is to just give them a quick internet search on e.g. DuckDuckGo or Semanticscholar. [0] McGill's is https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/ https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/
- mdp2021 5y agoI cannot understand: those articles should have been carefully examined before publishing - I understand they are in the set of those "Under the Warranty of the Publications' Authority". But if anyone read them, the rubbish involved would have emerged. What am I missing?
- maficious 5y agoAs much as it is sad that such a thing is happening, this is hilarious.
- neoCrimeLabs 5y agoI'm very tempted to introduce tortured phrases at work for occasional humor. For example, who needs "continuous integration" when you have "ceaseless incorporation"? Sometimes it's nice to see if anyone reads my notes. In all seriousness though, I've experienced something similar before at a Japanese run American corporation as far back as the 90's. The problem was Japanese executives and executive assistants who didn't know American tech-jargon often resulted in accepting mangled suggestions by the spell-checker. A notorious example was the "Data Whorehousing" presentation, which somehow made it through several reviews and rehearsals before being presented to the entire American IT department at an all-hands meeting. Clearly this made an impact as I remember it 23(ish) years later!
- thisrod 5y agoAuthorship is the metric that scientists get paid for, so of course it has been thoroughly corrupted. Fake papers and plagiarism are the most blatant form of corruption. They tend to come from certain, let's say, large countries with less developed scientific cultures. Those countries need to put an end to it, because the rest of us keep having to work harder to suppress the racist impressions that we're bound to form of colleagues who look and sound like the cheats. In more traditional scientific countries, the corruption is more subtle. Today, many groups publish every paper with half a dozen authors, and no indication of what each of them contributed. This enables the professors who run those groups to manipulate authorship more or less as they please, and have total control over who gets to have a career in science. It turns out that absolute power corrupts senior scientists as absolutely as it does other people. No doubt there are more clever ways to game the system, that I haven't noticed. As long as million dollar grants and first-world citizenship keep being doled out for something as contrived as scientific paper authorship, corruption is inevitable.
- 8bitsrule 5y agoIt's long been fairly normal for formal paper writers (of any age, in any discipline) to try to 'jazz up' their lingo to make it sound more erudite/learned. (Apart from specific collegial shorthand like 'lacustrian' or 'normalization'.) Readability suffers, meaning is softened, euphemisms fluorish, mistakes are made. 'Colossal information' in place of 'Big data' ... wow - so wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdZyZu81UMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdZyZu81UMw
- burlesona 5y agoI love “counterfeit consciousness.” I’ll have to try and skip that into conversation sometime :)
- aaron695 5y agoBlack hatters abusing the Google Translation API - https://www.seroundtable.com/auto-translated-content-spam-google-26380.html https://www.seroundtable.com/auto-translated-content-spam-go... Example- Unknown Source -> stolen using Machine Translated English and Published -> Stolen again, Machine Translated language X -> Machine Translated English -> re-publish on another web site - Result - https://m-eng.ru/en/plumbing/sinii-kit-vesit-150-tonn-zhivotnoe-sinii-kit-opisanie.html https://m-eng.ru/en/plumbing/sinii-kit-vesit-150-tonn-zhivot... So people are using machine translate to steal stolen machine translated articles.
- qwerty456127 5y ago> software that attempts to disguise plagiarism AFAIK today it has became necessary to "disguise plagiarism" even when you are not plagiarizing anything because bullshit "anti-plagiarism" software would detect many phrases similar to what somebody else already used. I believe the war on plagiarism brings little good in exchange for the hassle.
- blowski 5y agoSomeone cloned one of my blog posts, relocating us from “Old Street” to “Ancient Road”.
- spoonjim 5y agoDoes this kind of scientific fraud actually matter? I would think it gets published only in journals so lousy that they influence nobody who matters.
- Sebb767 5y ago> [...] the editor of Microprocessors and Microsystems began having concerns about the integrity and rigour of peer review for papers that had been published in some of the journal’s special issues. > The journal’s publisher, Elsevier, launched an investigation. This is still under way, but in mid-July the publisher added expressions of concern to more than 400 papers that appeared across six special issues of the journal. I hate to open up this topic and I hate to pick on people that are trying to fix their mistake even more, but oh boy. Elsevier has been a pain in the butt for universities and researchers alike. They leech money from both sides of the community, they sue people trying to bring science forward and they gate scientific success. And their literally only reason to keep existing was to prevent exactly this. I've never been a big fan of the current scientific publishing model. But Elsevier is a top publisher. It's pretty damming that they have one - highly overpaid - job and they don't even do it.
- segfaultbuserr 5y agoI searched the keyword "SEO" and didn't find any match in the comments here, I'm surprised. For anyone who has been a webmaster, one can immediately recognize it's an extremely common technique in the blackhat SEO scene for decades, used by content farms everywhere. One just copies articles from somewhere else, replace all words with dictionary synonyms to evade the search engine penalty, and fill the resulted websites with spam. Perhaps it's not as popular in the English world, but common in China, and is a standard tool included in all blackhat SEO software. And no, it doesn't work well, the output is gibberish too in spite of the language differences. Oh, and the article says: > A high proportion of these papers came from authors in China. Exactly what I expected. The spammers found a new market, apparently. It's sad to see that some scientific papers and journals are literally becoming blackhat SEO spam and content farms.
- funfunfunction 5y agoThis is called content spinning.
- buu700 5y agoI discovered something similar a couple days ago. After googling the title of a paywalled article (that I didn't care enough about to actually pay to read), the closest thing to the unredacted article in the search results was a version that that clearly been automatically rewritten in this exact manner. It was barely decipherable, so I gave up immediately.
- jcims 5y agoApparently "haze figuring" is a tortured phrase but "fog computing" is a term of art, despite searches for the former returning many pages containing the latter. So maybe 'fog computing' is a hybrid.
- heurisko 5y agoI was reading an article on Nature and noticed their definition of "woman" didn't make sense. Tortured phrases isn't confined to plagiarism avoidance. > Unfortunately, fibroids are just one of many understudied aspects of health in people assigned female at birth. (This includes cisgender women, transgender men and some non-binary and intersex people; the term ‘women’ in the rest of this editorial refers to cis women.) The article says it only refers to "Cis women" (presumably "cisgender women"), however the article continues to talk about rugby and brains, in which case the word "woman" would not only refer to "cisgender" women, but also to those people who identify as non-binary or transgender men, as surgery and hormone therapy (if that is undertaken by the individual) won't change brain axons, or the person's physical stature. The article then talks about "male animals", not "animals assigned male at birth". There's no explanation given why animals are not similarly "assigned" a sex. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02085-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02085-6