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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

#201

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

slapfrog wrote: post #195
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Hardly. Plagiarism is passing someone else idea or work as your own. Most terms especially technical ones have precise agreed upon definition. Calling quoting them plagiarism is stretching the notion to its limits. Thankfully there is no philosophical conundrum to be had when people are lifting complex explanations.

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

#202

Post by segfaultbuserr »

I 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.

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

#203

Post by davrosthedalek »

08-15 wrote: post #88
dmos62 wrote: post #18

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

Why do you feel that, though? My favorite counter example is "A Draft Sequence Of A Neandertal Genome". The article was accepted by both Nature and Science before it was written . The authors chose to publish in Science, because Science offered more on the side: the title page and an unlimited(!) number of "contributed" (this means unreviewed) companion papers. The article itself was about 20 pages of drivel; all the…

For physics, Physical Review Letters is pretty good.

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

#204

Post by funfunfunction »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #202

I 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 websit…

This is called content spinning.

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

#205

Post by throwawaygh »

OminousWeapons wrote: post #152
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 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. I don't mean this rudely, but it is attitudes like this which cause the CS interviewing process to b…

CS definitely isn't the only field where Master's degrees don't really confer any additional trust.

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

#206

Post by throwawaygh »

analog31 wrote: post #177
throwawaygh wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name originates as a perforative for small tuition-dependent non-research teaching colleges. Those colleges mostly catered to pastors, teachers, etc. and were located in small towns. The historical reasons that these institutions are now "in the corn fields" provides an interesting topic for historical inquiry. Perhaps many are in old rail-road or factory towns that have since languished, but schools that were si…

As I understand it, the Northwest Ordinance provided for the funding of schools, resulting in the "land grant" college system that still exists today. The most well known land grant colleges are of course the "flagship" universities of the Midwest states. But the states also chartered many smaller, regional, and specialized schools. I live in Wisconsin, and the state university system is chartered to serve the needs…

Yes. As far as I understand, "corn row colleges" wasn't originally a reference to branch campuses of state schools. "corn row college" referred exactly to those tiny private places.

I agree with your assessment that most of Wisconsin's land grants are quite good, btw. YMMV in other states, unfortunately.

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

#207

Post by throwawaygh »

myself248 wrote: post #156
throwawaygh wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name originates as a perforative for small tuition-dependent non-research teaching colleges. Those colleges mostly catered to pastors, teachers, etc. and were located in small towns. The historical reasons that these institutions are now "in the corn fields" provides an interesting topic for historical inquiry. Perhaps many are in old rail-road or factory towns that have since languished, but schools that were si…

> The point is that they are small, inconsequential institutions that are predominately located in rural and semi-rural towns. Wow, coastal elitism much? There are surely many degree mills and garbage universities, but to conflate their worth with their location is both injurious to discourse, and incorrect.

> Wow, coastal elitism much?

I didn't say anything about geographic regions.

I said rural.

The coasts of plenty of rural areas, and plenty of institutions that fit the "corn row college" mould.

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

#208

Post by nerdponx »

Anon1096 wrote: post #172
craftinator wrote: post #104

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 It's also a common technique for people who don't speak English to translate it... In fact, quite a bit more common.

I find it unlikely a machine translator would spit out phrases like "counterfeit conscience" and "haze figuring" over AI and cloud computing with 1 pass. Plagiarism via multiple pass throughs seems much more likely.

Ironically this is exactly what I would have expected from machine translation 15 (edit: 20?) years ago. My friends and I used to get a kick out of running phrases through several rounds of machine translation in different languages and finally back into English, and then playing them with the Mac OS 9 text-to-speech system.

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

#209

Post by jimmaswell »

throwawaygh wrote: post #52
gzer0 wrote: post #35

This 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 t…

> 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…

Why is a Master's not seen as at least marginally better than a Bachelor's?

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

#210

Post by slapfrog »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #201
slapfrog wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Hardly. Plagiarism is passing someone else idea or work as your own. Most terms especially technical ones have precise agreed upon definition. Calling quoting them plagiarism is stretching the notion to its limits. Thankfully there is no philosophical conundrum to be had when people are lifting complex explanations.

If you want to quote a dictionary's definition, you should cite the dictionary you're quoting. If you're passing the dictionary's definition off as your own, word for word, that is plagiarism.
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