5 ms·
Wiley shuts down 19 science journals and retracts 11,000 gobbledygook papers
- tithe 2y agoIt seems most of these are the result of a poor application of a thesaurus with no regard to context, but here are some tortured phrase gems from these "gobbledygook sandwiches" [0]: "artificial intelligence" => "counterfeit consciousness" / "man-made brainpower" / "fake knowledge" "mean square error" => "mean square blunder" "sensitive data" => "touchy information" "signal to noise" => "flag to clamor" "breast cancer" => "bosom peril" "big data" => "huge information" "ant colony" => "underground creepy crawly region" "Navier-Stokes" => "Navier-Stocks" "NP-hard" => "NP-difficult" "end-users" => "stop-customers" "phising attack" => "phishing assault" "emission of CO2" => "excretion of CO2" "deep learning" => "profound education" "decision tree" => "choice bush" "system failure" => "framework disappointment" "real time" => "genuine time" "fuzzy logic" => "feathery rationale" "child nodes" => "tyke hubs" "state-of-the-art" => "United States of America-of-the-cleverness" "directional (graph) axes" => "directional tomahawks" "magic mushrooms" => "wizardry mushrooms" "max pooling" => "Georgia home boy pooling" (!?) "malicious parties" => "compromising get-togethers" [0] https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:5 https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:5
- voganmother42 2y ago"choice bush" is amazing, and I like to think describes a particular class of decision shrubs.
- tithe 2y ago"I arrange, design, and sell (decision) shrubberies!"
- tbrownaw 2y agoThat one is something you get from a high-end landscaper.
- jsemrau 2y agoThere is some Monty Python joke about shrubbery somewhere in there.
- deadbabe 2y agoBetter to be a programmer in a garden, than a gardener in a program.
- unixhero 2y agoChoice bush? What it's like to shop at Amazon?
- rodface 2y agoI think you win the comment thread
- ant6n 2y agoFor stop customers, purchasing at Amazon can indeed feel like dealing with a compromising get-together. The find procedures appear very much not United States of America-of-the-cleverness, to the point where it seems some counterfeit consciousness built on some profound education is used not to minimize the find blunder, but to maximize lucre. For stop-customers, the flag to clamor ratio for find appears destitute.
- ivalm 2y agoHas to be a low depth random forest
- geodel 2y agoAmazing for compromising get-togethers.
- vsnf 2y agoI actually love counterfeit consciousness as a way to describe AI as we have it presently.
- userbinator 2y agoI like "counterfeit consciousness", it's catchy and probably captures the sentiment of those who are anti-AI. "excretion of CO2" reminds us that biological processes also emit it.
- labster 2y agoI thought all of the peer reviewers were stuck in their tusk material skyscrapers, but I guess not. That’s how the biscuit disintegrates.
- ssss11 2y agoDirectional tomahawks lmao!
- bhaney 2y ago> (!?) "Georgia home boy" and "max" are both slang terms for the drug gamma hydroxybutyrate
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoBosom peril! Wizard shrooms!
- orionblastar 2y agoThis is why AI won't replace human scientists: https://www.popsci.com/technology/ai-generated-text-scientific-journals/ https://www.popsci.com/technology/ai-generated-text-scientif... AI has been generating random peer-reviewed papers.
- vlovich123 2y agoDoesn’t this suggest the opposite? The people submitting AI-generated papers were likely also previously submitting bunk papers written by hand and have just automated this, unless this is all just pranks to show that peer-review has outgrown it’s usefulness (if it had any). Since paper mills exist, I suspect many of these were written by unscrupulous authors to begin with.
- frereit 2y agoWebsite seems down. Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20240527041229/https://joannenova.com.au/2024/05/so-much-for-peer-review-wiley-shuts-down-19-science-journals-and-retracts-11000-fraudulent-or-gobblygook-papers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240527041229/https://joannenov...
- tbrownaw 2y agoIs 11,000 a lot?
- hiddencost 2y agoThis source rapidly veered into a polemic against universities. The original WSJ source might be a better link. I'm surprised to find myself saying that.
- _delirium 2y agoHere's the original WSJ source: https://www.wsj.com/science/academic-studies-research-paper-mills-journals-publishing-f5a3d4bc https://www.wsj.com/science/academic-studies-research-paper-... Imo the WSJ's science and tech reporting is actually top notch. Just make sure it's a real newsroom article, not an op-ed, since op-eds don't go through the same fact-checking.
- userbinator 2y agoGood. Now find every paper that cited them and audit those too.
- ggm 2y agoInteresting story, but the author is a bit "edgelord": > The ABC is part of the reason science is corrupt to the core. The ABC Science Unit is paid to hold junk-science’s feet to the fire, instead it provides cover for the pagan witchcraft that passes for modern research. Please. That's hyperbole. It's extremely unfair to the ABC science team.
- marcus_holmes 2y agoJo Nova is anti-vax, anti-govt, libertarian, climate-skeptical, etc. Totally on form for her to be bagging the ABC, one of her favourite targets. Interesting reading sometimes, but also read the sources. Her interpretations can be wild. Thankfully, she usually cites the sources.
- kybernetyk 2y ago>anti-govt, libertarian oh god, no
- defrost 2y agoMeh, corporate shill masquerading as a "science presenter" is closer to the mark. Nova is happy enough to sing the praises of the Australian Liberal | National coalition when it comes to climate (or lack thereof) policy. They (husband and wife) jumped on fossil fuel funded think tank money some decades back and make bank as "voices of reason" casting FUD on the waters and rehashing the greatest hits of How to Lie with Statistics in new(ish) and innovative ways, mostly her anti-climate science stuff is straight up misdirect which both herself and husband are qualified to know is incorrect.
- marcus_holmes 2y agoI get the "corporate shill" angle, but I'm not so convinced by it. It's entirely possible to be both convinced of a cause's rightness and also funded by other people who think the cause is right. I don't agree with her take on any of it, but I'm also glad that someone is out there saying it (while citing their sources, obviously). We need this. We may not like it, but we need it. <prepares to be downvoted to oblivion> ;)
- tommykins 2y agoStrong recommendation is to read any other source of this news, not the Jo Nova nonsense spin of it.
- resolutebat 2y agoContext for the non-Aussies in the audience: Jo Nova is a prominent antivax/anti-climate change/anti-science fruitcake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanne_Nova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanne_Nova
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- roenxi 2y agoThere is a lot of evidence of crankery in the linked article. It isn't well written and reads to me like she doesn't believe what she is writing about is important. There was a lot of space wasted ranting.
- masklinn 2y agoI would hope that was rather obvious as soon as the second section (on the ABC and universities), as that was classic crankery.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoSome more discussion a few weeks back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40369412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40369412
- subroutine 2y agoWall Street Journal article: http://archive.today/eiPl5 http://archive.today/eiPl5
- dools 2y agoThis appears to be horrendous libertarian propaganda. Whatever the case is with peer review/Wiley or whatever, get the story from somewhere else.
- jeisc 2y agoAI written papers about AI >> "all your base are belongs to us"
- oefrha 2y agoOriginal reporting quoted in TFA: https://www.wsj.com/science/academic-studies-research-paper-mills-journals-publishing-f5a3d4bc https://www.wsj.com/science/academic-studies-research-paper-... Archive non-paywall link: https://archive.is/WZLQp https://archive.is/WZLQp Why submit blogspam with snarky “commentary” with no substance at all.
- nurettin 2y agoI wonder how many equally interesting commits go through merge requests. A lot of people are deathly scared of merging code into their open source repositories. They will make sure even the idea of adding a single function goes through scrutiny in a published paper (a pip, a boost proposal) and go through the crucible of internet forums. Why can't we show the same rigor with scientific papers?
- em-bee 2y agothat's what peer review is supposed to be for. the difference is that at the end of the day the code has to actually work and not just look good. papers are only reviewed to look good. to get the same scrutiny as code the reviewers would have to reproduce the findings in the paper.
- bernardlunn 2y agoNew headline “AI robot takes psychedelics and messes up a scientific publisher”
- dbcooper 2y ago>The 19 journals were all previously owned by Hindawi, an Egyptian publishing company with a portfolio of about 250 journals that Wiley purchased in 2021. A Wiley spokesperson acknowledged that some of the journals had been impacted by fraudulent studies, but attributed the closures to other factors, such as low submission rates. Hindawi is well known as a publisher of complete junk. No one takes any of their journals seriously. Baffling that Wiley would accept the risk.
- stogot 2y agoIs there a list of journal ratings? Howwould I know what is junk and not ?
- Animats 2y agoDo these fake papers have real authors trying to take credit for them? Or are they just noise to break science?
- ant6n 2y agoPerhaps the San Ti at work? This is much easier than breaking every accelerator experiment at an atomic level.
- em-bee 2y agogood theory, but the san ti can not lie or deceive. breaking the accelerator is honest work. faking papers isn't.
- gus_massa 2y agoIn most universities you need some ammount of papers to get a position or to not be fired. So I guess it's real people in places where the administrators are morons and can't check the quality of the journals. (Checking the quality of the journals is a very difficult task. We have that problem from time to time to select the graduate teaching assistants. Let's say that each time the list of good journals is sligtly differentand every time nobody is happy.) (Checking the quality of the papers is even harder. Just count them, or count the citations, or something.) Another posibility is borderline crackpots. You can spot them when the journal has too many single author papers. They essentialy pay and get a very credulous peer review and later nobody reads the paper, but the author is happy to have a published article. (From time to time there are good single author papers. It's geting rare, but it's possible. Anyway, it's a red flag, and if you see many of them in a journal you should get suspictious.)
- abalone 2y agoThe muckraking blog For Better Science has been sounding the alarm on this for years. Here's a great investigation into a "paper mill industry"[1] which apparently this researcher also traced some of the fraudulent papers to. It gets into some of the economic forces that drive it. P.S. scanned 130 million papers! WTF! [1] https://forbetterscience.com/2021/05/26/the-chinese-paper-mill-industry-interview-with-smut-clyde-and-tiger-bb8/ https://forbetterscience.com/2021/05/26/the-chinese-paper-mi...