Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.
“It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”
When idiot bureaucrats hold the purse-strings to research, this is what you get. Surprised it isnt higher.
Eisenhower said it best:
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
…
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
You can see here how I found several fraudulent research papers published in climate journals:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3304901
Corruption and deception. Tow of the keywords that reflect the times that we live in. Should we be surprised?
As the saying goes, “You are what you eat”. One only needs look at the political leadership to see that the trend to misinform has been literally spread like a wildfire for decades, and certainly accelerated since the public adoption of the internet – professional liars haven’t just taken over medical research. The U.S. has their plagiarizer-in-chief, who’s been caught copying speeches multiple times and constantly prostitutes his power to the highest bidder. Canada has it’s sock-puppet communist loving dictator that’s never had an original thought in his head since showing up suddenly on the political stage not long after something not so good happened at West Point Grey Academy. Heck, even look at Alberta’s NDP leader who unabashedly uses lies and character assassination in her attempts to score political points solely to win political power. No doubt being fed lies and deception is toxic for society and with the Media’s help the feeding has been ramped up to 24/7. It used to be that a lot of people went to get fed at least weekly with messages that didn’t consist of cooked up recipes of bs. Healthy words like “edifying”, “wholesome”, “inspiring”, “purifying” and “strengthening” could be used for those messages of hope, love, charity, responsibility and forgiveness. But the connection to such great sources of character building nutrition stopped when so many of us stopped going to its source: Christian Churches. There is indeed a Pandemic that’s afflicting our society that consists of the deterioration of morals and absence of character. If we want the lying to stop, we have to hold ourselves and others to higher standards. This doesn’t get better unless we fix ourselves, demand better from those around us, and come together again with a strong voice of Truth aimed squarely at those determined to do wrong against us. Do yourselves a favor and stop consuming toxic crap information by replacing it with the good stuff. Then we all might see a lot more sunshine in the future.
Martin B –
“It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”
Apparently Steven Gilbault thinks that is the case and wants to ban it. Ban everything.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/forever-chemicals-canadian-blood-samples-1.6850049
Gawwwd … “Forever chemicals” and “micro plastics” are killing us … unh huh … our lifespans have all been shortened. Utter propaganda.
I’ve read recently some articles re this subject:
1. Apparently there’s a trend of less and less new ideas in all scientific research, globally. PhDs, Masters etc – lots of scientific papers nowadays just copy & regurgitate things already discovered.
2. Scientists really into research are using pseudonyms and fake ids when it’s about a scientific pursuit going against the grain.
These things + the fact that all leaders nowadays are imbeciles and/or scumbags – it suggests that us-humans are past due/ripe for an army of AIs to take over.
Why are many of my posts thrown into moderation?
Kate, if you want people to post then you need a sound moderation system.
Hmmm, have you paid any attention to those who respond to you?
What?
“What” indeed? Moderation is one thing, but are you being deleted?
I was hoping you’d show up on this thread.
Now, at long last, are you starting to understand why your blind faith in “peer-reviewed” studies and public data is so misplaced?
I don’t have “blind faith” in peer reviewed studies. I have never claimed that they are flawless.
What I do say is that they are better than the alternatives. They are certainly better than some guy with a blog and an attitude. This is especially so when you have multiple independent peer-reviewed studies reaching the same conclusion — in short, when an important result is repeatable.
Now if you have a better system, let’s hear it.
It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”
Uhm, I may have some bad news for folks . . . and even worse, we’re not at all confident about which 30% we’re talking about.
I suspect grants are the generating factor here. But, let us not forget the trickle down malaise associated with insistent diversity. Individuals without the intellectual tools are being hoisted up and presented opportunities in the medical (and scientific) fields without the necessary tools to succeed based on merit. They are given slots in the educational field. They are being given positions based solely on heritage and melanin skin content. As a result, those positions that require the best and the brightest are receiving mediocre candidates whose whole career climb was based on the same lack of integrity that they now apply to their work.
“Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators—authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and those who list an affiliation with a hospital. It isn’t a perfect solution, because of a high false-positive rate.”
That’s a terrible system. I use a private email address in my papers because institutional addresses tend to be temporary. I suspect an increasing number of (legitimate) researchers do as well, for the same reason. I do, however, specify my institution after my name. I also give my ORCID identifier.
Killer
Yup, that probably accounts for the under count of fake papers!
Apart from outright fradulent papers (including plagiarizations of legitimate papers) is the problem of incremental papers; that is to say, the authors make some minor and incremental advancement that’s really not worth publishing. That the advancement is minor is hidden by not being completely clear in the paper about what parts are novel and what are not.
Researchers can churn out such papers endlessly, as it requires no great leap of innovation.
Agreed entirely. There’s a vast mass of supposed scientific research which adds nothing new to human knowledge of any importance or substance.
Sorry but I won’t believe that Science article until it’s been peer reviewed. /s off
Dr Iain McGilchrist, in a recent interview on the UnHerd YT channel, said this about peer review:
Peer review is the basic idea of science, you send it to another scientist, what do they think about it? There are all kinds of pitfalls in this. It can be corrupted. And there are journals that will publish for a fee, and a lot of them now have come into being, they’re called predatory journals.
In order to survive as a scientist and have a career you have to publish. One of the problems for many scientists is finding anyone who’s willing to publish what they’ve done. And there are now journals, a lot of them based in China, I regret to report, that solicit articles and will basically publish anything as long as you pay them to publish it. So that’s not how science should work.
There’s an amusing example of this. There’s a computer scientist in Australia who was annoyed by constant solicitations from the International Academic Study of Computer Science or something like this. And so he wrote to them, finally, to ask them to take him off their mailing list. He submitted a paper, which was called ‘Take me off your effing mailing list’. And the paper was seven pages long and consisted only of the sentence ‘take me off your effing mailing list’, repeated to the end of the paper. It also had a diagram in it, a flow diagram with little circles leading with arrows, ‘take me off…!’ It was brilliant. He was flabbergasted to discover that the journal wrote to him and said that his paper had been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, for a fee, which he declined to pay.
This is an extreme example, but there’s an awful lot of this now. You’d be very credulous to believe that everything that you read that is said to be science is really science. This is a problem of living. Intuition is a very important faculty, but people have now been programmed into distrusting it. And in fact, this has made us as stupid as we are.
Sure, but I’m not sure what that has to do with peer review, as parasitic journals don’t do peer review. That’s one of the hallmarks of parasitic journals — they barely read the article in the first place, and acceptance is usually a day or two after submission.
It appears that the indifference to lies VS truth shown in politics, law & advertising, is
infecting other areas.
In that spirit the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [the Doomsday Clock people] added to their
two greatest threats list, climate change & nuclear war,
a third “a corrupted information ecosphere that undermines rational decision-making”.
Also from the Bulletin:
// Many fraudulent scientific papers contain “tortured phrases,” standard scientific terms paraphrased into gibberish.
Breast cancer is a scary disease, but what is bosom peril?
These phrases are likely popping up because scientists, to boost their article count,
are running texts through paraphrasing software, which helps them avoid plagiarism accusations.
And new AI technologies may be crafting some article text from whole cloth. //
&
// There’s a ‘ChatGPT’ for biology. What could go wrong? //
From what we’ve seen over the last twenty or thirty years…..THIS AIN’T NEWS!
More like fifty years, Gerry. When I was an undergraduate in the early seventies, the university hired a researcher for us. He was highly acclaimed. He went to work dissolving copper plates in various chemicals until one day it was noticed he was scheduled to give a paper at an international forum. When questioned regarding his travel plans, he said “no, no, that is the famous Dr. Rao. People are always getting us mixed up!”
Corruption is not a error or mistake.. Its monopolies for your friends.. Both so called good and bad people fall into this hole..
In my younger days I used to enjoy reading Popular Science magazine. Lots of interesting articles for a wanna-be geek.
Vintage Popular Science Magazine April 1963 Auto Testing Cars Ford, Chevy, Dodge
Peer review became ‘pal review’ several years ago, and has been worse than useless ever since.
Not so.
For one, it’s the editors, not the authors, who pick the peer reviewers, and they try to choose reviewers who will properly critique the paper, as they want to maintain high standards for the journal.
Second, many reviews are blind. The author doesn’t know who the peer reviewers are, and vice versa.
Third, a lot of reviewers are rather cranky. They don’t trust any research except their own.
“For one, it’s the editors, not the authors, who pick the peer reviewers, and they try to choose reviewers who will properly critique the paper, as they want to maintain high standards for the journal.”
LOL…good one!
(oh, wait…you actually *believe* that, don’t you? Wow…)
Follow the money if you actually want the truth. Works every time.
Follow the money? Neither editors nor reviewers typically get paid.
I should know. I’m an associate editor for a journal, and have never been pressured to accept or reject any paper. My recommendations are my own.
So where is this evidence of money influencing the editorial process?
Hi, my name is Pierre Revue, were you calling me just now?