Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

Yes, I deliberately chose something that just above trivially simple to show that there was diversity of expression even at that level.

That is, even given a technical term with a precise agreed upon definition, the description of that term (eg, in English) does not have a precise agreed-upon form.

Incorrect use of the latter may imply plagiarism, and this thread appears to concern that aspect.

Most definitions are not as simple as "cosine similarity".

Your statement, if true, would mean that most dictionaries would use exactly the same words to describe a given, well-specified scientific concept, yes?

What's "Frame dragging" in general relativity?

Wikipedia: the effect on spacetime caused by a rotating mass ... Frame-dragging is an effect on spacetime, predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, that is due to non-static stationary distributions of mass–energy.

doi:10.1126/science.aax7007 : the mass-energy current of a rotating body induces a gravitomagnetic field, so-called because it has formal similarities with the magnetic field generated by an electric current (1). This gravitomagnetic interaction drags inertial frames in the vicinity of a rotating mass. (quoting from the preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.11405 ).

einstein-online.info: a mass’s rotation influences the motion of objects in its neighbourhood

doi:10.3390/universe7020027 : The term "frame-dragging" usually refers to the influence of a rotating massive body on a gyroscope by producing vorticity in the congruence of world-lines of observers outside the rotating object.

doi:10.1142/9789812564818_0002 : A major consequence of General Relativity and related theories of gravity is that all inertial frames are local. These local frames are accelerated, warped and stretched, and rotated with respect to each other due to the surrounding mass-energy distributions. While only their relative rotations are typically called frame dragging effects, this phrase describes a broader range of gravitational influences on inertia.

Very different definitions, because it's hard to express that concept in English. And I think re-using a few of the more extensive definitions, without attribution, is a minor form of plagiarism. (Reusing any follow-up explanation is, as you've agreed, definitely plagiarism.)

You might recall that atrettel wrote "the authors were misusing a particular technical term".

If you dig in to the papers on frame dragging, you'll note similar complaints, like https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0509025 : "Many accounts of these experiments have been in terms of frame-dragging. We point out that this terminology has given rise to much confusion and that a better description is in terms of spin-orbit and spin-spin effects."

> I would find that laughable

So would I, which is why I commented 'that's a different issue than re-using someone else's definition without attribution'.

The issue here is not bad English in the sense you'd expect from a learner or someone who just isn't fluent. Nobody minds that, although you say not everyone can afford professional editing services: that's what journals are theoretically for!

The actual problem here is fluent English that is written in a totally bizarre style only found in academic papers. I've found that academic-ese is less of a problem in good computer science papers (like the one this article is about), but it crops up in some fields a lot. A trivial and not very important example is the way minor things are routinely described as "novel", a word you rarely find in everyday English, but in the research literature everything is "novel".

The 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.

> 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.

Learning to write well in any language is difficult. English is not exceptional as a language. Its influence in economic activity is what gives it prevalance.

My understanding is that something like the following happened:

1. authors submit a paper with expository sections about (eg) some materials being flammable and others inflammable

2. reviewer tries to explain that they have incorrectly understood the meaning of the terms, explains the meaning carefully and maybe suggests the terms they might mean.

3. Authors copy in the explanation and maybe replace incorrect usages with weird tortured phrases

4. Rejection

Obviously this description reads a little bit silly and things were probably more nuanced in practice. I think I’m probably also being uncharitable towards the authors in the example.