While a tiny minority are AI fakes, note the preponderance from Russia, PR-China and Saudi Arabia, which are all dictatorships. Other major problem countries include Pakistan, Egypt, Malaysia and Iran. Science is under attack from ideological forces.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8

EXTRACTS:
"Among large research-producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China have the highest retraction rates over the past two decades, a Nature analysis has found."

"Retractions are rising at a rate that outstrips the growth of scientific papers (see ‘Rising retraction rates’), and this year’s deluge means that the total number of retractions issued so far has passed 50,000. Although analyses have previously shown that the majority of retractions are due to misconduct, this is not always the case: some are led by authors who discover honest errors in their work."

"Among countries that have published more than 100,000 articles in the past two decades, Nature’s analysis suggests that Saudi Arabia has the highest retraction rate, of 30 per 10,000 articles, excluding retractions based on conference papers. (This analysis counts an article for a country if at least one co-author has an affiliation in that country.) If conference papers are included, withdrawals from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City put China in the lead, with a retraction rate above 30 per 10,000 articles."

I don't think it's idealogical; these countries have always promulgated junk publications. Graduate students in China and Chinese grad students in the west fabricate data at an amazing rate because they think that the number of publications they produce will win them a position, they see it as competition.

It's not just Chinese students by any means. We have collaborated with a researchers at several respected University research labs in the US and have found fabricated data from three different Universities. Two of those involved were born and educated in the US. Fortunately peer review and careful checking by co-authors eventually weeds out the junk.

I used the math ghawd gave to figure out that one in every 333 scientific papers is retracted.  

And according to the article, sometimes it's because an honest mistake was made.


One in every how many tax returns has an intentional error or omission?

Who are better, more honest?  The world's scientists or American taxpayers?


Also, stop speeding!

There seem to be a lot more "honest mistakes" in some countries than others. The USA, Germany and Japan aren't even in the top eight.

When I was in grad school in the early 90s, some educational research was of the conventional variety, and some was what was called, "teacher research," meaning that individual teachers found that a certain curriculum or technique worked in their particular classroom. It has always happened that teachers share what has worked for them, and other educators were free to accept or reject. But in the early 90s, this sort of teacher exchange of ideas was being adopted by university professors and being promoted as real research. Even in grad school I knew this was BS. This "teacher research" led to the ill-advised Whole Language movement, and even to this day, there are still some university educators who promote it. I was let go from my first school system (mid-90s) because I had the temerity to teach phonics, spelling, grammar, and paragraph composition to elementary school students.

Nowadays, university educators are back to mainly conventional research, and phonics, grammar, etc. are back in fashion once again, because (surprise!) those are effective methods of teaching reading and writing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/21/2023 06:19AM by summer.

https://phys.org/news/2018-10-real-fake-hoodwinks-journals.html

##########

Three US researchers have pulled off a sophisticated hoax by publishing fake research with ridiculous conclusions in sociology journals to expose what they see as ideological bias and a lack of rigorous vetting at these publications.

Seven of the 20 fake articles written by the trio were accepted by journals after being approved by peer-review committees tasked with checking the authors' research.

A faux study claiming that "Dog parks are Petri dishes for canine 'rape culture'" by one "Helen Wilson" was published in May in the journal Gender, Place and Culture.

The article suggests that training men like dogs could reduce cases of sexual abuse.

Faux research articles are not new: one of the most notable examples is physicist Alan Sokal, who in a 1996 article for a cultural studies journal wrote about cultural and philosophical issues concerning aspects of physics and math.

This time the fake research aims at mocking weak vetting of articles on hot-button social issues such as gender, race and sexuality.

The authors, writing under pseudonyms, intended to prove that academics in these fields are ready to embrace any thesis, no matter how outrageous, so long as it contributes to denouncing domination by white men.

"Making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest level of academic grievance studies," said one of the authors, James Lindsay, in a video revealing the project.

Lindsay—that is his real name—obtained a doctorate in mathematics in 2010 from the University of Tennessee and has been fully dedicated to this project for a year and a half.

One of the published journal articles analyzes why a man masturbating while thinking of a woman without her consent commits a sexual assault.

Another is a feminist rewrite of a chapter of "Mein Kampf."

Some articles—such as a study of the impact of the use of an anal dildo by heterosexual men on their transphobia —even claimed to rely on data such as interviews, which could have been verified by the journal gatekeepers.

For that "study" the authors claimed to have interviewed 13 men. In the dog article, the authors claimed to have examined the genitals of nearly 10,000 canines.

"If our project shows anything, it shows that what's coming out of these disciplines cannot currently be trusted," Lindsay told AFP.

Their goal however is not to destroy or defund the disciplines. "We think they should be reformed," he said.


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https://www.sciencealert.com/cultural-studies-sokal-squared-hoax-20-fake-papers


#############

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a physicist, a philosopher, and a medievalist got together and decided to hoax cultural studies journals with a score of fake research papers.

The story is familiar, but this time the joke is far bigger. Their intention was to expose the shoddy standards that count for publishing in certain academic fields - but not everybody is convinced this is the solution we all need.

It's fair to say that Portland State University assistant professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay aren't exactly fans of the emerging fields of cultural and identity studies.

Last year they wrote a paper on the 'conceptual penis' as a social construct and successfully saw it published in a social science journal.

The research was a complete sham, and the paper's wording reflected the convoluted, dense language they associated with the field. Its publication – the pair argued – showed these journals will accept just about anything that seems to fit.

The conceptual penis hoax was far from the first to make a statement about the lack of critical review in certain 'critical' cultural research fields.

Just over 20 years ago, New York University mathematician Alan Sokal famously had his nonsense paper Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity published in an academic journal of postmodern studies.

An occasional hoax paper here and there stirs heated debate, but Boghossian and Lindsay saw a need to cast a wider net.

Last year, the two joined forces with Helen Pluckrose, the editor-in-chief of the current affairs magazine, Areo, and "exile from the humanities", and produced what one journalist referred to as Sokal Squared.

#############



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/21/2023 11:41AM by anybody.

Well that was frightening to read. Even more frightening is the fact that the lack of proper vetting isn't even a surprise. And horrific that "academics" will accept anything that fits their own agenda with no verification. But of course that is the general trend of the country politically and religiously as well as culturally and socially. I don't see it being stopped. Because what people want, what they really really want, isn't the hard cold truth.

I remember hearing this story on a podcast a few years ago. The authors claimed that if they just went along with the ideology of the publications they were submitting papers to, and used the right buzzwords, their papers were accepted.

I wonder how many people are still citing these articles.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/30/2023 03:00AM by caffiend.

It is tempting to celebrate the hoaxers here, while denigrating the academic disciples that are their victims, along with their publishers and editors.

Notwithstanding, the most important standard in academic publishing is author integrity, which operates essentially as a rebuttable presumption for any editor and publisher. Even in physics and mathematics, no publisher is expected to conduct independent research on the issues addressed in a submittal, or even confirm the legitimacy of the data associated with a submitted article; much less thoroughly evaluate the nuances of argument and interpretation. In many, if not most, cases, the editorial staff is simply not qualified to do any of this.

Thus, publishers necessarily rely on peer-review. Yet, as a practical matter, the peer reviewer rarely does anything beyond simply reading the article and making a more or less casual judgment about its alleged facts, data, inferences, and conclusions. If the stated conclusion is interesting and appears to be supported by the claimed facts and data, without too much deviation from the established paradigm, it will likely get a green light. After all, a unique perspective and facial credibility are really all the peer-review evaluator is concerned about--unless the conclusion is wildly unconventional, or more cynically it detracts from the reviewer's own preferred position.

In short, when push comes to shove, academic integrity is the bottom-line defense against the unfortunate, but rare, instances of abuse as highlighted in this thread. As such, when some academic -- presumably bored with legitimate research and writing -- assumes a fraudulent and disingenuous stance for the ostensive purpose of showing the weaknesses of the system generally, or the illegitimacy of some academic subject in particular, her own motives (and credibility) seem questionable.

Finally, only those who falsely think that science is somehow sacrosanct in its practice, logic and reasoning, and therefore per se reliable as the source of truth, should be surprised or "frightened" by any of this. No academic paper should be taken at face value, without a lingering and deep skeptical attitude.

It's likely that everybody has their
own definition of "proper vetting,"
and it just might include no vetting
at all, other than reading the title.

IF lack of belief is actually a belief, then isn't not vetting actually vetting? ;)

  
    

When I taught online classes, my students had to write term papers, and the plagiarism was rampant. They obviously used Wikipedia, which was not recognized as a scholarly source. They had access to an online treasure trove of research.

Some students copied and pasted from Wikipedia without even deleting the brackets. Here's an example:

The term "scientific method" emerged in the 19th century, when a significant institutional development of science was taking place and terminologies establishing clear boundaries between science and non-science, such as "scientist" and "pseudoscience", appeared.[16]

The school had a tool that searched for plagiarism. I'd sometimes find that 80-90% of a paper was copied and pasted directly from online articles.

I'd share that report with students and most of them STILL denied plagiarizing their papers. One even threatened to report me for racism if I didn't give he an A.

When we got a new dean of online education, I stopped teaching online. I liked the easy money, but I couldn't stomach being asked to pass students so we could get our accreditation, which the school tricked students into believing was the same as a 4 year University. It wasn't even close.

I could have easily spotted the plagiarism without a fancy tool, though. The parts that some of the student wrote by themselves were full of grammar and spelling errors. The parts that contained no errors were likely plagiarized.

I don't miss that job.

https://xkcd.com/2456/

Various types of scientific papers.

And it helps to pick the right field to publish in:

https://xkcd.com/451/

Shocking if true.

Interesting--falls short of ironic--that this thread appears at the time Prof. Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, is under fire for plagiarism. She gained the presidency of an elite university writing just 10 peer-reviewed articles, and no books--not even a 101-level textbook. Plagiarism has been identified in seven of those ten "scholarly" articles, plus her dissertation.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/30/2023 12:31PM by lousyleper.

I always cited my papers to death when I was in grad school. I figured if I cited it, and either paraphrased or used direct quotations, I'd be okay. There were no complaints from my professors.

Nowadays professors have methods of analyzing papers for plagiarism. So be forewarned. Ask your professor if citing the author will cover you.