Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common

> STM hasn’t yet generated figures on accuracy or false-positive rates because the project is too new. But catching as many fakes as possible typically produces more false positives. Sabel’s tool correctly flagged nearly 90% of fraudulent or retracted papers in a test sample. However, it marked up to 44% of genuine papers as fake

Unfortunately, it's an open secret that fake or low-effort almost useless papers are very common in every area of scientific research.

Typically, it doesn't affect people working in that specific area - they develop/have a sixth sense to detect bullshit papers - it comes with experience but depends on several factors including the authors reputation, their institution (for the first screening), what journal/conference the paper was published in, authors other work, and sometimes things as simple as how much effort was put into the figures, polishing the text, etc. Some of these things are LLM proof, some of them are not - e.g. a senior professor I was talking to, who's been getting like 50-100 emails a week from non-english speaking countries (primarily India, China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) mentioned that the quality of the text in the emails went up significantly almost overnight after ChatGPT was made open to public. It'll be interesting to see how things change in the next few months/years.

So's fake science.

The cash cows, AKA Elsevier et al, need to do more to stem the flow of BS. The problem is the proliferation of well crafted, but fake, papers has grown enormously over the past 25 years as the cows rely on free paper editors - who are swamped by this duty = time for paid scientists to winnow the chaff. Sadly the cows are a greedy lot. Only way out is fully open. Back in the day when Nobel was born, the journals and authors circulated as near free resources, with authors mailing free copies on request, and now emailing them (often this is interdicted by the cows) and journal fees being modest - covering production costs. Nobel would be (IMHO) royally pissed at the present state. So I suggest the Nobel Committee introduce a policy that only openly published papers would be read and considered by the committee - This would put a tiger among the pigeons(Cows) and change things - say, after Jan 1 2024?

The metrics used in this paper are... deeply flawed, to the point that the authors admit that they label nearly half of known good papers in a curated sample as "fake" -- and particularly likely to generate false positives for researchers whose institutions don't, say, run their own email systems (as is common in large chunks of the world). Here's a rundown of the flaws from an epidemiologist with a sideline in scientific communication:

https://fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/110357259338364341