31–40 of 105 posts
> Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators — authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and [...] Uh huh. I didn't realize until today that all my papers are fake because I give contact information that won't go stale in 3 years, instead of my work email.
Sadly, this doesn't even include the studies with authors who produce poor experiments and theories, or go out of their way to prove their results; effectively, generating additional scientific publication waste we have to sift through to find genuine material, or worse off, that people then use to create policies impacting large populations that are doomed to fail in the long-run. The image this creates for me, is b…
In essence, there's more than enough to deal with regarding bad science that was done in good faith. There have got to be better ways to filter out bad science offered in bad faith.
Even the article makes it clear that this is just a wide net for an automatic first pass. Of course, it is biased towards countries with lax standards.
> Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators — authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and [...] Uh huh. I didn't realize until today that all my papers are fake because I give contact information that won't go stale in 3 years, instead of my work email.
I would allow just one valid paper with that inability.
I'd love to read it, but it's blocked. Anyone can summarize?
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/conferenc…
> Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators — authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and [...] Uh huh. I didn't realize until today that all my papers are fake because I give contact information that won't go stale in 3 years, instead of my work email.
That’s not what the paper says, I think (even though the badly written article can easily be understood that way).
> To identify indicators able to red-flagged fake publications (RFPs), we sent questionnaires to authors. Based on author responses, three indicators were identified: @@@“author's private email”@@@, “international co-author” and “hospital affiliation”.
> For Studies 1 to 6 we identified two easy-to-detect indicators, where a publication was labelled as RFP: @@@if an author used a private email@@@ and had no international partner.
> Then we combined the two best indicators (@@@“author's private email”@@@ and “hospital affiliation”) to form a classification (tallying) rule: “If both indicators are present, classify as a potential fake, otherwise not” (the “AND” rule) (Katsikopoulos et al., 2020).
Fun bonus there with the 2020 book citation for the concept of an AND gate in a classifier.
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 scien…
You know what's funny? Even if the numbers are hot garbage, they proved the point about how easy it is to publish fake science papers, since it got published. Kinda similar to those researchers years back who proved how easy it was to go into certain social science journals as long as you copied their ideology.
Not by the definition of "fake" used in the article, as the data wouldn't be plagiarized or fabricated. It'd just be shitty data.
The researchers in this paper use an astonishingly biased "fake paper detector", requiring only two conditions to be met for any paper to be considered "fake": 1. Use a non-institutional email address, or have a hospital affiliation, 2. Have no international co-authors. And they acknowledge 86% sensitivity and 44% specificity. It's a coin-toss which biases massively against research from outside the US and Western Eu…
No. They use 400 known fakes and 400 matched (presumed) non-fakes to estimate the sensitivity and specificity of their indicator, then apply that indicator to the full universe, then employ the estimated sensitivity and specificity to the obtained measurement to estimate the approximate actual rate of false papers. If you know the true prevalence of a disease in a population, and the sensitivity and specificity of yo…
Then they and science should change their sensationalist headline. It's ironic that a paper about fakeness of something uses a borderline misleading title.
> Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators — authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and [...] Uh huh. I didn't realize until today that all my papers are fake because I give contact information that won't go stale in 3 years, instead of my work email.
I suspect all your papers are fake, simply because you don't understand the number "two". I would allow just one valid paper with that inability.
The meat of my complaint remains even when they're intersecting with other rules. We should not be incentivizing people to use emails that predictably go dead in O(years). It is quite a common annoyance to read a paper, want to contact the author, and not be able to because the email they listed is dead, requiring searching for where they currently work and trying to find their email at that new place, with mixed results.
Yes, a private email is predictive of a paper being fake, in the literal sense that P(fake|privateemail) > P(fake|institutionemail). I get weird looks at work for using my permanent email address because of it. And probably if we select on that as a way to discard papers, it will initially appear to work and then start to look like it's working even better because anyone trying to give permanent contact info will be forced to switch to be published/cited/taken-seriously. But that's a bad outcome. Also, if you systematize this rule, paper mills will just start using emails that appear institutional, because this is a simple rule to defeat.