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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

nature.com

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

#191

Post by da39a3ee »

lugged wrote: post #165
petschge wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write papers too and hate finding a new way to say "my X is a Y that does Z". Especially if it is your tenth paper on the topic and you should even sound like the previous nine times. But about three sentences into the introduction (where you explain all the background) you start going into "there is also Y's that do Z backwards". Which Y's you compare and connect with is important and says alot about how you think…

I'm so glad I skipped PhD level and got straight to work. I would have hated that level of navel gazing.

Yes, I think you showed great wisdom there. It must have been hard, since I imagine there were many top research universities trying to get you to enter their PhD programs. And after all, what have people with PhDs ever done for the world?

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

#193

Post by rjbwork »

samplatt wrote: post #167
Freak_NL wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also “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.)

Puts me in mind of Pratchett's parody of 'fuzzy logic', "Woolly Thinking".

I'll certainly be watching this debacle play out with a hot fresh bag of Banged Grains!

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

#194

Post by zamfi »

FabHK wrote: post #62

Some 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…

Reading this list, it almost seems like these were created by looking up each individual word in a thesaurus, which of course destroys much of the meaning.

E.g.,

  Signal -> flag
  To -> to
  Noise -> clamor
…and…

  Data -> information
  Warehouse -> stockroom
This would be a lot easier than running through multiple translation steps (as proposed elsewhere here).

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

#195

Post by slapfrog »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #169
sunshineforever wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. How can you plagiarize a definition?

I was pondering the same thing until I realized the person you are replying to is somewhat stretching the meaning of definition to mean a multiple paragraphs long explanation of a complex concept which was as I understand it lifted verbatim.

Even if you only copied a typical one-sentence dictionary definition verbatim without attribution, that would still clearly be a clear-cut case of plagiarism...

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

#196

Post by matz1 »

atrettel wrote: post #190
anchpop wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand what the problem here is actually. If you plagiarize on an assignment for school, that’s bad, because the goal of assignments is to test your knowledge and plagiarism makes it a less effective test. But here the goal (I think) is to produce an informative and accurate paper. You told them the definition - what would have been gained by rephrasing the definition you told them? Especially if they’re…

As I have said in another comment, the authors did not just copy my short definition but my entire paragraph-length explanation of the concept. I might have let the short definition slide but an entire paragraph is just inexcusable. I agree that this is not a school assignment, so the nature of plagiarism is a bit different. But you hit the nail right on the head. We should be worried that they are pretending to know…

>Now maybe they did spend some time learning it and looking into, but there is no way to know for sure

Why are you so concerned on this ? Isn't the goal of a paper is to communicate information?

>It only proves that they have copy and paste.

Yes they copy paste but it doesn't prove that they don't really understand it.

They may very well found your definition is the best way to describe it.

As long as the reader of the paper understand what being communicated, imo it should be fine?

I can understand if its a school assignment where the goal is specifically to prove that the author know their stuff.

For a scientific paper, requiring a concept to be described in different way for the sake of it seem to be inefficient and wasting time.

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

#197

Post by Sebb767 »

> [...] 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.

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

#198

Post by atrettel »

wombatmobile wrote: post #188
atrettel wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I did not suggest the definition and explanation as content for them to use. I was trying to explain a concept that they discussed incorrectly multiple times in the paper. It is an advanced concept that might not even appear in graduate-level courses on the subject, so I can understand why they did not understand it fully. That said, I did not give them permission to copy my words there. If there are any particul…

> What the authors should have done was ... In the absence of an explicit directive or request from you, given that the authors are from a different culture, how do you expect them to know what was required by them? I don't mean to be snarky or accusative. Your comment was thoughtful, articulate and detailed, which tells me you are a sophisticated communicator.

It's a fair question. They were foreigners submitting to an American journal, so there is always the possibility for some sort of cultural misunderstanding in addition to any language difficulties. Nonetheless, the journal's submission process provides authors with a page listing ethical standards they have to follow, and it says that plagiarism of any form is not allowed. In fact, this journal's particular set of standards even mentions that authors cannot copy anything obtained during the peer review process without the "explicit permission" of the reviewer. So I just expect them to follow the rules that they were told about when they submitted the paper.

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

#199

Post by davrosthedalek »

rowanG077 wrote: post #157
aliswe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it'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.

What that phrase again? Oh yeah innocent until proven guilty. Whew almost forgot it. Why would you assume bad faith when this could be much more easily be explained by non-english speakers just using a machine translator.

There is 0 probability that an academic author who wants to write about artificial intelligence does not know the English term. Just from the fact that a properly written paper requires the author to know/cite the relevant literature, which at least to some non-0 percentage is in English. Same goes for the referees.

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

#200

Post by stan_rogers »

bjt wrote: post #87
throwawaygh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> ... masters students at corn row colleges. First time I've heard the term "corn row colleges". Google's not bringing up anything that looks relevant. I suggest picking something else. Given that "cornrows" are a predominantly black hairstyle, the term reads like a racial slur.

The hairstyle is named after its resemblance to the agricultural arrangement, not the other way 'round, and the name of the hairstyle only makes sense if you're aware of how fields are planted. You have to look really hard to make a racial slur out of it.
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