Recently, I was peer reviewing a paper, and it cited one of my papers.
Except... it wasn't anything I had written. The title sounds like something I'd write. It included coauthors I work with, and was in a journal I've published in.
But it wasn't real.
AI is not good for science.
Yup
Yup
and
We can't even get journals to agree on whether or not the volume number in citations should be bold or italicized so I am not holding me breath on a unified policy
But also, research misconduct announcement followed by a K99 award to the same person the following week
So, like, it’s not all journals’ fault. Nature is basically a preprint server with a $30K processing fee nowadays; biorxiv puts more effort into typesetting than Nature does lately
Have discovered “lazy” referencing several times during editing /proofing manuscripts by grads to PIs. Many errors in author names, journal names, etc.
Citations garner the least attention in pre-submitted manuscripts.
💯 and this is why DOIs, etc exist… if only people would use the tools already in hand to address both problems at their root 🤦♂️
There’s really no reason for it to be this way, aside from laziness and inertia and maybe a little gatekeeping.
Thus I predict that academia will sooner perish than fix it
It’s not just typos; that’s the least of it. e.g. “I added that citation because its title looked good.” And, “Well, no, I didn’t really read that [cited] paper.” Or, “I mixed it up with another citation.” (Real explanations)
My point is that ALL the blame should not be dumped on journals.
I worry that we might all be talking past each other.
AI “research,” publishing subgroup analyses of pivotal trials secondary endpoints, sloppy work from junior scholars, paper mills: all symptoms
The root of the disease is measuring the wrong things. We can’t just ask junior people to be martyrs.
