Satanic Paper Mills

May 29, 2024 2:07 AM

One of those tools, the “Problematic Paper Screener,” run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases.” Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “gooey stream”; “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.” from Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures [WSJ; ungated]
posted by chavenet (22 comments total)

bet there's a study somewhere on the internet
posted by HearHere at 2:35 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

I hit a paywall, so if anyone else needs it here's an Internet archive link.

A coworker of mine was recently a scientific reviewer on an article that we strongly suspect was one of these paper mill creations. The topic was intervertebral disc degeneration, abbreviated IDD, but sometimes the text would start talking about "Irritable Diarrhea Disorder". My coworker stopped reading it halfway through and informed the editor of her suspicions. This scam business is a drain on resources in multiple ways and is profoundly problematic, but at least we got a brief laugh out of one attempt.
posted by blueskies at 2:42 AM on May 29 [18 favorites]

What's the tortured phrase for "publish or perish"?
posted by nofundy at 2:51 AM on May 29 [3 favorites]

I first encountered this on Bishop’s Mastodon feed. The torture giveaway in my field: “more seasoned grown-ups.”
posted by eirias at 2:53 AM on May 29 [6 favorites]

One person's gooey stream is another's bosom peril.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:19 AM on May 29 [13 favorites]

A bit of a tangent, but one can find plenty of "tortured phrases" in real human-written papers because of the out-of-date idea that reusing any text at all from one's previous publications constitutes self-plagiarism. Papers are too damn long these days, and authors are incentivized to publish individual results as soon as possible rather than combining closely related studies into a longer paper. Unsurprisingly, ESL authors who legitimately struggle to rephrase "We observed an increase in value X, which supported hypothesis Y," end up making bizarre thesaurus swaps like "We descried an increment in value X, which bankrolled conjecture Y", to avoid the automatic plagiarism detectors (and the occasional crusading reviewer or editor).
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 3:30 AM on May 29 [11 favorites]

My final place of work developed a cynical little earner with several Masters in [Technical Area of Interest to MegaPharm]. The students were: ⅓ local kids who wanted to beef up their CV after a marginal first degree; ⅓ workers in MegaPharm whose fee was paid by their employer; ⅓ aspirants from foreign who paid €€€€+ extra-EU fees and were hoping to get a toe-hold in the West. The Institute paid the like of me to mentor these MSc students during their final dissertation research project. One of my first tasks was to wrench the thesaurus from them. If the FDA was really the Nourishment & Medicine Directorate it would be NMD etc. Gotta say that the perp of that mangling, who was a qualified pharmacist back home, shook off his plagiarphobia and wrote up an interesting and solid bit of independent research.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:35 AM on May 29 [16 favorites]

The comments on the WSJ article are full of climate deniers, COVID deniers, evolution deniers (or bots?) etc. who immediately seize on these problems to weaponize them ("See! Peer-reviewed science is all corrupt! We told you!"). That's expected but still disheartening.
posted by elgilito at 3:55 AM on May 29 [10 favorites]

What's the tortured phrase for "publish or perish"?

Release or decease!
posted by JHarris at 4:12 AM on May 29 [19 favorites]

Release or decease!

Excrete or retreat!
posted by eirias at 4:25 AM on May 29 [9 favorites]

Copyist or corpse!
posted by rory at 4:32 AM on May 29 [4 favorites]

Poop or droop
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:52 AM on May 29 [4 favorites]

Post or toast!
posted by notoriety public at 5:05 AM on May 29 [13 favorites]

It is ironic that "counterfeit consciousness" is really good.
posted by adamrice at 5:25 AM on May 29 [16 favorites]

Counterfeit consciousness sounds like a term from Marxist theory, some kind of subtle variant of false consciousness. Like, you think you're avoiding false consciousness but you're actually not avoiding it.
posted by Zarkonnen at 6:52 AM on May 29 [6 favorites]

It is an imperfect copy that dilutes the value of the original. Which is a perfect description.
posted by notoriety public at 7:16 AM on May 29 [5 favorites]

Surely the Wall Street Journal has never hyped a single study that corresponded to what they want to hear.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 7:22 AM on May 29 [3 favorites]

the out-of-date idea that reusing any text at all from one's previous publications constitutes self-plagiarism

Currently being used as a stick to beat women and people of color in leadership positions in academia by bad-faith actors in absurd ways.

If someone doesn't title their study of this "Counterfeit Consciousness" I will be very disappointed in humankind.
posted by praemunire at 8:34 AM on May 29 [8 favorites]

One person's gooey stream is another's bosom peril.

Point that somewhere else you perv!
posted by y2karl at 9:04 AM on May 29 [5 favorites]

It's astounding how absolutely everything, no matter how essential or pedestrian, is now part of a grift. Nothing at all remains earnest and unsullied.

So Wiley publishes science journals that, it turns out, contain thousands of bogus research papers.

“It’s a top three issue for us today,” said Jay Flynn, executive vice president and general manager of research and learning, at Wiley.

I'm curious what two issues he thinks might be more important?
posted by jabah at 3:49 PM on May 29 [7 favorites]

My husband marked university papers for a while, and oh my do students love to do the too-much-thesaurus thing to just lift giant tracts of text. Highlights that I can remember include "sun committees" for solar panels and "warm rampant" for thermal runaway.
posted by Dysk at 5:18 AM on May 30 [1 favorite]

which two issues he thinks might be more important?

AI and crypto, surely.

(Just kidding. Probably pivot-to-AI and SciHub.)
posted by Not A Thing at 6:59 AM on May 30