| Transcript |
| · | Intro |
| 0:01 | · | Science has a big problem and it's been getting rapidly worse in the past two years or so, |
| 0:07 | · | to no small part because of recent advances in artificial intelligence. Fraudulent papers |
| 0:12 | · | are getting published more than ever, and the fraudsters are getting increasingly |
| 0:17 | · | aggressive. In this episode I want to give you an update on the recent developments. |
| 0:23 | · | [sponsor ad text redacted] |
| · | Fraud in Science |
| 1:43 | · | According to data collected by Nature magazine the number of retracted papers hit an all time |
| 1:49 | · | record in 2023 with more ten thousand. Most of these papers were not retracted |
| 1:55 | · | because of honest mistakes, but because they contain fabricated crap. Sham data, |
| 2:00 | · | AI generated text, repurposed figures and images. |
| 2:05 | · | The number of retractions is rising faster than the total number of publications. About |
| 2:10 | · | 2 in a thousand scientific papers is now being retracted. The number of retracted papers isn't |
| 2:16 | · | the same the number of fraudulent papers, but it is unlikely that the identification |
| 2:21 | · | of fraud has suddenly gotten much better. More likely it's become more difficult as AI |
| 2:27 | · | gets better. This also means that the number of fraudulent papers has been skyrocketing. |
| 2:33 | · | But this number might look more alarming than it is, |
| 2:36 | · | so let me give you some context. Most retractions happen in Saudia Arabia |
| 2:40 | · | followed by Pakistan Russia China and Egypt. It is predominantly an Eastern |
| 2:46 | · | problem. And most of these retractions come from one publisher, Hindawi, and they mostly come from |
| 2:52 | · | special issues. Special issues have become a special issue in publishing so to speak. |
| 2:58 | · | The idea of special issues was that you'd have collections of papers on one particular topic, |
| 3:04 | · | typically some kind of recent development for which there wasn't a dedicated journal. This makes |
| 3:11 | · | sense. The problem is that the editorial process of these special issues was outsourced to "guest |
| 3:17 | · | editors" who then basically invited their friends to submit papers that were essentially guaranteed |
| 3:23 | · | to get published. As time went on, special issues became basically junkyards of scam papers that |
| 3:30 | · | were waved through by those guest editors which were not accountable to anyone or anything. |
| 3:35 | · | The journals didn't do much about it, because you see they sell subscriptions |
| 3:40 | · | to their content, regardless of what that content is. So researchers were |
| 3:46 | · | constantly getting spammed with calls to contribute to those special issues, |
| 3:51 | · | and if you had a need to get some paper published without much effort this was the way to do it. |
| 3:57 | · | Now Hindawi is a subsidiary of the publisher Wiley and Wiley has meanwhile recognized the |
| 4:04 | · | special issue issue. They have announced some major changes and say they'll stop |
| 4:10 | · | using the Hindawi brand altogether. I'm not sure that's going to solve the problem, |
| 4:15 | · | but this makes me think that the rapid increase in retractions will probably not continue like this. |
| 4:22 | · | However, there's more trouble at the door. A lot of this increase in rubbish publications in |
| 4:28 | · | driven by what's become known as "paper mills" in academic publishing. These are semi-legal |
| 4:35 | · | networks of people who produce scam papers and guide them to publication. They usually |
| 4:41 | · | do this for academics who pay money. Typically, they'll be offering authorship on a paper with |
| 4:47 | · | a particular topic, and the price depends on where you want to be in the author list. |
| 4:53 | · | These paper mills are believed to first have been originated in China where academics are |
| 4:58 | · | often paid for papers or even if not, papers are required for promotions. But the practice |
| 5:05 | · | has since spread to Russia and India, and reportedly also to Iran and eastern Europe. |
| 5:11 | · | A lot of these papers are published in areas that concern public health, such as drug development |
| 5:17 | · | or psychology. Drug development in particular seems to have been a target because papers on |
| 5:23 | · | this topic all look and sound more or less the same, you just need to swap out the name |
| 5:28 | · | of the drug. This makes these paper mills very dangerous because these fake papers can get cited |
| 5:36 | · | in support of useless drugs, as seems to have happened with the controversial drug Ivermectin. |
| 5:43 | · | In the past they have been easy to spot because the language is sometimes funny. This has become |
| 5:50 | · | known as tortured phrases, probably stemming from automated systems trying to rewrite |
| 5:56 | · | technical terms. For example in some cases the word "magnetic resonance" became "attractive |
| 6:03 | · | reverberations". An article from Times higher education has more funny examples. Fuzzy logic, |
| 6:10 | · | a research area in mathematics, turned to "fluffy rationale", breast cancer into "bosom peril", |
| 6:16 | · | renal failure became a "kidney disappointment" and an ant colony |
| 6:21 | · | turned into a "subterranean insect province". The most recent worrying trend is that the |
| 6:27 | · | paper mills evidently make enough money to simply bribe journal editors into accepting |
| 6:32 | · | papers. Frederik Joelving from the database Retraction Watch recently wrote an article for |
| 6:38 | · | Science magazine in which he reports an alarming trend. Among recent retractions, those related to |
| 6:44 | · | bribed editors or other peer review manipulations, such as simply pretending to review a paper with |
| 6:51 | · | AI generated text, have steeply increased. And this problem doesn't just affect niche |
| 6:57 | · | publishers you've never heard of. According to Joelving, "A spokesperson for Elsevier |
| 7:02 | · | said every week its editors are offered cash in return for accepting manuscripts. Sabina Alam, |
| 7:09 | · | director of publishing ethics and integrity at Taylor & Francis, said bribery attempts have also |
| 7:15 | · | been directed at journal editors there." The problem is ultimately driven by a |
| 7:20 | · | scientific system that values the quantity of results and publications over the quality. |
| 7:26 | · | This is not a new insight of course, but despite it being well known not much has |
| 7:32 | · | been done to address it. And so I'm afraid that as AI becomes better, |
| 7:37 | · | fraudulent work will creep into more and more scientific disciplines and |
| 7:42 | · | become increasingly hard to identify. You know maybe we're actually better off if |
| 7:46 | · | we just leave science to AIs entirely. Thanks for watching, see you tomorrow |
