I'd love to read it, but it's blocked. Anyone can summarize?
Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
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Re: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
#12> 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
> so results still need to be confirmed by skilled reviewers
So there is some human review involved. Which is presumably how they got to the headline figures of 34% of neuroscience papers and 24% of medicine papers are fake.
Still, flagging 44% of genuine papers as fake doesn't sound very useful. The process only about halves your workload compared to just checking all the papers. In any large-scale rollout they would have to set a way higher threshold, and hope they still catch a useful number of fraudulent papers when using a threshold that detects 10% or 1% of genuine papers as fake.
Re: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
#13Sadly, 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.
Re: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
#14I'd love to read it, but it's blocked. Anyone can summarize?
Re: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
#15[dead]
Re: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
#16The 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…
Ironically, this would mean that this paper is "fake".
Re: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
#17> Such manuscripts threaten to corrupt the scientific literature, misleading readers and potentially distorting systematic reviews.
Is treating "the scientific literature" as a single thing perhaps a habit worth giving up?
As convenient as it would be to be able to just blindly trust something because of where it is published, that model hasn't shown itself to be especially robust in other cases (e.g. the news media).
Elsewhere, this is a red flag:
> I trust it because of which aggregator aggregated it
Should we really make an exception for science? I think that academia is a bit biased towards optimism about publisher-based root-of-trust models because scientific publishing is a relatively unweaponized space. Sure, shenanigans happen, but not at the same scale as elsewhere. The fakers are just trying to get another published paper, they're for the most part not trying to mislead. It's only fake news with a lowercase-f.
Sure, let's try to create a medium we can trust, but let's not get our hopes too high about it. That's energy better spent augmenting the ability of a reader or researcher to decide whether to trust a paper based on it's content or based on it having been endorsed or authored by somebody that they explicitly (or transitively) trust.
Re: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
#18> 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.
Re: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
#19Just wait until ChatGPT starts writing them.
>A Doctor Published Several Research Papers With Breakneck Speed. ChatGPT Wrote Them All. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-this-doctor-wrote-dozens-o... https://archive.ph/u9wyq
Yeah, if the incentives are to publish convincing papers with less emphasis on quality or, you know, good research then this is going to happen and it’s going to happen a lot.
The article you link doesn’t say if the papers are any good. It does suggest that they were in smaller niche journals so I suspect not.
On the upside, I can see the potential though for literature review type papers.
Re: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
#20The 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 a…
As one who published primarily in the 1970s and 1980s [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5DdrMc8AAAAJ&hl=en] I can confirm that I mailed reprints of my requested papers to whomever requested them, for free.
Note: I paid for the reprints and the postage, often expensive foreign rates.