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A scientific journal was forced to retract a paper it published last month after it was discovered the authors used the artificial intelligence application ChatGPT to write it. The paper, published Aug. 9 in the journal Physica Scripta, was an attempt to uncover new solutions to a complicated math equation, but included the phrase “Regenerate response” on the third page — something one eagle-eyed reader recognized was the phrase of a button on ChatGPT, according to a report from Nature. The authors of the paper have since acknowledged they used ChatGPT to help write the manuscript, something that wasn’t caught...

A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Information Warfare (JIW) confirms a “Loss of Control” breach has occurred in the NYSVoter Database. A peer-reviewed paper of their results in a respected journal is a hard-won and “significant milestone,” according to Marly Hornik, Executive Director of the NY Citizens Audit. The audit of the voter rolls was led by Marly Hornik and Andrew Paquette, Ph.D., Director of Research, who submitted the paper to JIW. Paquette “co-founded the International Game Architecture and Design Academy (now BUAS) in the Netherlands after a career in the feature film and video game industries. He received...

*** Retraction Watch reports: After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned. The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more may come as its investigation continues. They are not yet making the list available.***My own view as someone who left academia after becoming a Harvard professor is that corruption has infiltrated the academy along with careerism and politicization. Correcting the situation...

The journals, which include BMJ Open Science and Royal Society Open Science, say they will accept articles reviewed by a nonprofit “peer community” organization. It’s the first time that journals have guaranteed that they will accept the recommendations of another body with no further review, says Chris Chambers, a cognitive neuroscientist at Cardiff University and one of the founders of the peer-review organization, called Peer Community In Registered Reports (PCI RR). The service—which PCI RR will provide free to authors and journals—will add to the existential questions facing journals, says Jason Hoyt, CEO of PeerJ, an open-access family of journals...

Phenomenon known as virus interference flagged in DOD study just before COVID-19 burst. Just a few short weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic burst into public view, a medical researcher published a study on military members who got the flu shot. At the time, it barely created a ripple but its findings are now likely to have a larger impact on the future policy debate over infectious respiratory viruses. The study published by Dr. Gregory Wolff in Science magazine was entitled, “Influenza vaccination and respiratory virus interference among Department of Defense personnel during the 2017-2018 influenza season" and it addressed a...

Stanford professor David Rosenhan wanted to prove that psychiatric hospitals of his day would instantly label and mistreat even the mildest of symptoms, so he convinced a group of students to go undercover at various hospitals and then wrote an influential study about the results. Rosenhan’s paper “On Being Sane in Insane Places” was published in the journal Science in 1973 and had a big impact at the time. Rosenhan’s eight healthy pseudopatients allegedly each followed the same script to gain admittance to psychiatric hospitals around the country. They each told doctors that they heard voices that said, “Thud, empty,...

If I had known, 20 years ago, that my side in the ideological wars over gender and sex was going to win so decisively, I would have been ecstatic. Back then, I spent many evenings at the pub or at dinner parties debating gender and identity with other graduate students; or, really, anyone who would listen—my mother-in-law, my relatives, or just a random person unlucky enough to be in my presence. I insisted that there was no such thing as sex. And I knew it. I just knew it. Because I was a gender historian. This was, in the 1990s,...

Dr Tim Ball appears to have won the long legal jihad launched against him by climate mullah Michael E Mann. Because his court follows "the English rule" as opposed to the stinkeroo "American rule", the loser (Mann) will have to pay costs - which is as it should be after a decade of entirely meritless litigation. But what if there's a more effective way to silence your critics? Say, by proving scientifically that they should be expelled from polite society. Nature, founded in 1869, is generally regarded (with Science) as one of the two most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the...

When a group of three people set about demonstrating the problems with so-called “grievance studies” in academia they did so by creating spoof papers designed to embarrass the reviewers at leading journals. As I described last October when the story broke, they were very successful. Seven of the 20 bogus papers they wrote were accepted for publication by various journals. More would have been accepted if the group’s plan hadn’t come to light before they had time to complete the work. Of the three people involved in the hoax, only one had a university position at the time it was...

A new Tulane University study questions the reliability of how sea-level rise in low-lying coastal areas such as southern Louisiana is measured and suggests that the current method underestimates the severity of the problem. The research is the focus of a news article published this week in the journal Science. Relative sea-level rise, which is a combination of rising water level and subsiding land, is traditionally measured using tide gauges. But researchers Molly Keogh and Torbjörn Törnqvist argue that in coastal Louisiana, tide gauges tell only a part of the story. Tide gauges in such areas are anchored an average...

In a recent New York Times op-ed, two former EPA officials criticize a Trump administration plan that would require the EPA to reveal the details of studies used to craft environmental regulations. In this piece, Obama’s EPA director Gina McCarthy and assistant director Janet McCabe, claim that: Current EPA director Scott Pruitt and “some conservative members of Congress are setting up a nonexistent problem in order to prevent the EPA from using the best available science.” EPA’s studies “adhere to all professional standards and meet every expectation of the scientific community in terms of peer review and scientific integrity.” the...

You may recall our recent discussion about a new EPA policy which will require all scientific studies used in considering new regulations to make not only their findings but their methodology and underlying data available for public scrutiny and comparative analysis. What’s not to like, right? These are investigations being done by the government and funded by the taxpayer, so the information used to reach any conclusions should be freely available. Everyone’s a big fan of transparency when it comes to those sneaks in Washington so this should roll through smoothly. Not even close. It turns out that a previous...

You know all of those peer-reviewed journals that “prove” man-made climate change is genuine? It seems they may not be so peer-reviewed or accurate after all. A neurology expert has unveiled a sting operation he embarked on to show that many of these journals will publish anything that is sent to them. Using the names “Dr. Lucas McGeorge” and “Dr. Annette Kin,” references to “Star Wars” creator George Lucas and “Star Wars” character Anakin Skywalker, the neurologist was able to have several journals publish a paper he wrote on the fictitious “midi-chlorians.” The midi-chlorians live in the cells of Star...

OLLIE is in many ways a typical dog. She likes going for walks and chasing birds, and is especially fond of having her tummy rubbed. But in one respect, the Staffordshire Terrier differs radically from her canine peers: she has a burgeoning academic career, and sits on the editorial boards of seven medical journals. As you may have guessed, the journals on whose boards Ollie sits are of the predatory variety. These are shadowy, online publications that mimic legitimate journals, but are prepared to publish anything in exchange for a fee that can run into thousands of dollars. Predatory journals...

Is fraud on the rise in peer reviewed scientific journals? PJ Media contributor Theodore Dalrymple points to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that reveals some alarming facts about papers submitted to prestigious publications in the medical field. Peer review is time consuming and it is often difficult for the editors of general journals, such as the Lancet, the New England Journal and so forth, to be familiar with the experts in all fields. The editors of smaller journals do not have resources of their more eminent confrères necessary to find them, and they, the editors, are frequently judged...

A leading scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals, after an internal investigation discovered fabricated peer-review reports linked to the articles’ publication. Berlin-based Springer announced the retractions in an 18 August statement. In May, Springer merged with parts of Macmillan Science and Education — which publishes Nature — to form the new company Springer Nature. The cull comes after similar discoveries of ‘fake peer review’ by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing "reviews from fabricated reviewers". The practice can occur when researchers submitting a...

Springer Publishing, one of the world’s leading publishers of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) books and journals, issued an announcement this week that 64 different professional articles, primarily in the medical field, had been retracted. It turns out that the vaunted peer review process, designed to ensure that multiple sets of experts evaluate the quality of the work before it hits the presses, had fallen apart. The peer reviews in some cases were found to be “highly suspicious” with bogus email addresses and questionable credentials. Springer confirms that 64 articles are being retracted from 10 Springer subscription journals, after...

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. As The Washington Post reports, BioMed Central - a well-known publication of peer-reviewed journals - shows a partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at universities in China. The Committee on Publication Ethics stated, it "has become aware of systematic, inappropriate attempts to manipulate the peer review processes of several journals... that need to be retracted."Peer review is the vetting process...

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, which puts out 277 peer-reviewed journals. A partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at universities in China, including China Medical University, Sichuan University, Shandong University and Jiaotong University Medical School. But Jigisha Patel, associate editorial director for research integrity at BioMed Central, said it’s not “a China problem. We get a...

Academic publishing was rocked by the news on July 8 that a company called Sage Publications is retracting 60 papers from its Journal of Vibration and Control, about the science of acoustics. The company said a researcher in Taiwan and others had exploited peer review so that certain papers were sure to get a positive review for placement in the journal. In one case, a paper's author gave glowing reviews to his own work using phony names. Acoustics is an important field. But in biomedicine faulty research and a dubious peer-review process can have life-or-death consequences. In June, Dr. Francis...