By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
“it seems the AI used for an anonymous commenter is not able to read the article and randomly comments on the article. […] Sometimes, we feel that some random person commenting on the article may not have the insight or technical expertise to evaluate the article. It seems your AI model used to write such comments is not fully operational and is making mistakes” – a scholar opines on Smut Clyde
“This is unedifying but illustrative on so many levels of how quickly papermills have parasitised the Open Science paradigm and strip-mined all its resources. It also illustrates how quickly the incantatory Worship Words of Machine Learning shut down the critical faculties of reviewers when included in a manuscript, convincing them that its ludicrous claims are merely restatements of what they already know.” – Smut Clyde
“On one side: late-career scientists resorting to purchased promotion of their early-career papers. On the other side: whole new genres of paper-shaped artifacts that are little more than packaging for ever-larger citation cargoes, and papermillers no longer bothering to find buyers for naming rights on their products.” – Smut Clyde
“This bullshit is a form of greenwashing, as policymakers might believe that with growing amount of “research” we are making progress. Except we are heading nowhere.” – Alexander Magazinov
“For that marketplace is a labyrinth as large as the academic world, and the Ariadnean thread that traces the path back out of its interior seems to sprout subsidiary threads that lead into plant-based green nanoparticle synthesis or some other side-alley of parascience.” – Smut Clyde
“The preference of Thippa Reddy Gadekallu et al. (Abdul Rehman Javed, Celestine O. Iwendi, Sharnil Nitin Pandya and Gaurav Jay Dhiman) for coercive citation and copy-pasting their review comments” – Maria de los Ángeles Oviedo García
“Does this mean it’s time for an update on the bogus-citation economy? Leonid thought it is, and now you all must suffer for his misdirected priorities. ” – Smut Clyde
“There are no capital requirements or significant technological barriers, anyone can create papers by rewriting already published works, either themselves or with the assistance of ChatGPT or other software. With a Telegram channel or WhatsApp group the papermiller can easily organise the sale of authorship” – Nick Wise
“There are therefore grounds for suspecting that there have been such serious deviations from good research practice that the matter should be referred to the National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct for further investigation.”
“It’s not as if the Special-Issue Guest Editors or the imaginary ‘Peer Reviewers’ pay attention to the provenance of the images that fill the Figure-shaped gaps, or care whether the supposed alternatives in these horse-races are even algorithms at all.” – Smut Clyde
For Better Science