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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

nature.com

21–30 of 263 posts

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#21
post #18

I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. How long will it take academia to adapt?

Not 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.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#23
post #3

Some 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".

No one would write "colossal information" instead of "big data" because English isn't their first language.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#25
post #18

I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. How long will it take academia to adapt?

Not 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.

I 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?

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#26
Back 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.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or someone could...read the papers.

It'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.

Sometimes 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.
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