From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
So much for the “Science”!
The publisher Springer Nature was forced to retract over 40 papers from its Arabian Journal of Geosciences after realizing they were nothing more than garbled jargon. This is just the latest in a series of shoddy research papers getting past the publisher.
First reported by research journal watchdog Retraction Watch, the slew of retractions comes on the heels of other issues at the publisher, where hundreds of papers were previously flagged with “expressions of concern” for research integrity breaches.
The retraction notice on one of papers reads as follows: “The Editor-in-Chief and the Publisher have retracted this article because the content of this article is nonsensical. The peer review process was not carried out in accordance with the Publisher’s peer review policy. The author has not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction.”
The journal is intended for geoscience research; discussion of volcanoes, soils, and rocks are par for the course. But these questionable papers’ topics were further afield, with many discussing sports, air pollution, child medicine, and combinations of the aforesaid.
Some titles of the farkakte research: “Simulation of sea surface temperature based on non-sampling error and psychological intervention of music education”; “Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and physical fitness detection of basketball”; “The stability of rainfall conditions based on sensor networks and the effect of psychological intervention for patients with urban anxiety disorder.” A complete list of the retracted papers can be found here.
Chris Graf, the research integrity director for Springer Nature, told Retraction Watch that “As previously stated, we are developing new AI and other-tech based tools and putting additional checks in place to identify and prevent attempts of deliberate manipulation.”
“Moreover, we are gathering evidence into how these subversions are being carried out to share with other publishers, [the Committee on Publication Ethics], relevant institutions and other agencies to help inform the development of industry-wide practices and ensure that culpable parties can be held to account,” Graf added.
Whether such measures are effective or not remains to be seen. Based on the previous issues seen at this and manyotherjournals, there’s not much reason to be hopeful.
https://gizmodo.com/science-publisher-retracts-44-papers-for-being-utter-no-1848004690
They claim to be developing AI to guard against this, but it sure looks AI was used to submit.
Are we going to see an AI bot-war?
Actually the connection with earthquakes and basketball is hilarious!
Still, Greek Mythologists knew earthquakes were caused by Hephaistos (Vulcan) dancing with one short leg. Just shows AI is mindless.
Maori mythology knows that Mother Earth is pregnant and earthquakes happen when the baby is kicking.
Right, but the kids father Maui had harnessed the Sun. What a family!
and pulled the fish which became New Zealand out of the ocean and caused the mountains by clubbing the fish
We know comparable effects about bridges and soldiers crossing in lock-step.
That could lead to dancing!
Whoa there! According to the Scots reformed presbyterian church dancing is most definitely forbidden – it’s sinful and leads to lust and fornication. Let’s just all take a step back from that slippery slope shall we?
Given the rate at which birth rates are falling, maybe we need more dancing.
no the presbyterians are correct to stop climate change we need a smaller population
What my children call, “The Horizontal Polka!”
That’s why having sex while standing is forbidden. It leads to dancing!
Tony Handcock: “Dancing is sinful!”
Sid James: “No it isn’t!”
Tony Hancock: “It is – the way I do it!”
The Scottish Reformed Presbyterians should have checked the Old Testament first :
http://www.jokes4us.com/ethnicarchive/rabbicounselorjoke.html
Modern Woke army platoons take note!
“According to the Scots reformed presbyterian church dancing is most definitely forbidden”
King David danced before the Lord. Of course, his wife Michal was unimpressed. Maybe she was Scots Reformed Presbyterian? 😉
Was she one of the MacCabees?
I happen to like slippery slopes no to mention lust and that other thing.
Well, perhaps the enlightenment is gaining ground:
https://dailybonnet.com/mennonite-church-allows-dancing-now-that-everyone-has-to-keep-six-feet-apart/
It sort of reminds me of “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog”. A book created by marketing and using popular topics to determine the title and story.
This was my first thought as well. A human behind the idea but an AI doing the writing.
Sort of like romance novels.
Just missing a link to CC 😀
To cite Gore Vidal, the Byzantines thought earthquakes were caused by sodomy.
I guess you could say the retracted papers were created by screwing the system. 😉
Soooo, how about having a human being with more than two functional brain cells actually read the submissions? I know, I know, pretty radical idea.
Editors are too busy being woke to get any work done.
Hard to find one.
Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. Such research may achieve simulated intelligence at most.
My first question is not about the editors and their earlier acceptance of such paper, but is what happend to the brains of these authors of such papers to research and write papers about such subject as the mentioned.
Looks like an insider hack – Saudi targeted because of Aramco, or something more insidious.
Just imagine the brains of Aramco engineers reading that stuff after translation back to Arabic!
(Maybe submitted in Farsi?)
it sounds as plausible as a butterfly flapping it’s wings causes a hurricane
Will they be refunding the money they were paid to publish those papers?
Of course they will.Just as all those climate scientists did after all heir predictions turned out to be shit.
Oh wait,they didn’t as they need the money to buy front beach properties .
44 Papers were retracted from the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, many thousands are still candidates for retraction in the field of ‘Climate Science’.
Maybe those papers were machine-translated into Arabic from other languages? The titles sound like it.
Arabian Nights wet dream.
Chris Graf or Chris Gaf?
Or just plain Griff?
So the oversight process is working -which means we can have even more confidence in papers on climate science
Be sure, your comments allways will be retractet, no need of AI, general “I” is enough. 😀
Griff,
The papers passed peer review but they were rubbish.
Got that, the papers were rubbish and they passed peer review.
Laughter at the published papers was so great that they had to be retracted.
Meanwhile, much other completely discredited rubbish (e.g. the MBH ‘Hockey Stick’) has not been formally retracted.
The “oversight process” known as peer review is working as presently intended by allowing publication of fashionable rubbish while blocking publication of informative research findings.
Please remember this the next time you are tempted to spout the falsehood that peer review demonstrates worth of a published paper.
Richard
More likely it’s only beginning to work beginning with this example.
That’s entirely correct, Griff. Peer reviewed climate science is about as good as it gets, as we can see from Climategate email dated 6/5/1999 from Phil Jones, head of CRU at that time, to Michael Mann:
‘You may think Keith or I have reviewed some of your papers but we haven’t. I’ve reviewed Ray’s and Malcolm’s—constructively, I hope, where I thought something could have been done better. I also know you’ve reviewed my paper with Gabi Hegerl very constructively.’
Just what the scientist ordered – anonymous, third party, disinterested referees with no dog(s) in any fight.
Hide the decline!
Well trolled my friend. You are truly a master of the art. 🙂
The art of baiting?
Always the optimist. Haha.
Why are you impersonating a singer…. griff?
“Griff placed fifth on the latter list, which was won by Pa Salieu. Along with this, Griff can add a BRIT Rising Star award to her collection”
https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/celebs-tv/who-griff-winner-brits-rising-5402497
You can find fretslider on spotify, deezer, iTunes, Amazon etc etc etc
I am me, you are fake.
“even more confidence”. The only thing griff could have done to be even more truthful would have been to finish with /sarc.
The Guardian an the BBC will publish the papers.
How do you retract idiotic, mis-formed opinions developed from reading rubbish science, outright falsification, and pure nonsense? You can’t, but you can keep “spreading the news” about AGW, infecting half the planet with this garbage and keep the foolishness (social disease) alive.
If the “oversight” process was working, those papers would have been rejected after just reading the titles.
I’m feeling grumpy this morning so …
Griff is right. His timing is just a bit off. Sooner or (decades) later science will indeed correct itself, after the guilty have gone on to meet their maker.
In the mean time, the damage is being done.
A hundred years from now folks will talk about CAGW the same way they do about Tulip Mania. They will feel much wiser than those benighted people of yore (ie. us) and they will turn around and do something equally stupid.
They must be using AI reviewers, too.
The oversight process is working,the way your brain works.
Slow,incompetent and corrupted.
If the process was working there would never be more than 3 BS papers at once inside the system.
Your logic is kind of claiming that communism works just because they shut down the gulags after 50years and because there was food to buy on the 14th of June 1967 in St Petersburg.
Well yes, the oversight of RetractionWatch.com is working. Except I can’t acess them right now. I fear they are being hacked by Big Pharma or BigGreen. You can only ridicule the settled science for so long before you catch the jaundiced eye of BigMoneyInc.
Up and running. Maybe your browser is faulty.
Griff, Sorry to read that they are now retracting your paper, “Renewable Energy Successes and My Journey to Transgenderism.”
Griff, this time you must be joking!
“So the oversight process is working … ”
Yes, but NOT the peer review inner system of the publishing group “Nature”!
The barber shaves all the village. But who shaves the barber, griff, who shaves the barber?
Griff: You probably should use a <sarc> tag. Folks might think your serious. Good one though.
The point being, if peer review was working as intended and expected, they never would have been published in the first place. Since these papers got past the gatekeepers, how can we be sure that there aren’t many more that haven’t yet been found?
Au contraire, we can be sure there are many more yet to be found.
The scandal is in publishing this garbage.
I am starting to think he’s just trolling us for fun. There’s no way a real person can actually believe this is the key takeaway.
He’s doing the best he can. He doesn’t have much to work with.
He is paid to spout this nonsense.
you forgot the /sarc
It is obvious that peer review is close to worthless now. How did these “papers” even get past being read by human reviewers?
I recently reviewed a paper for Elsevier, recommending publication. The other day I got an email from the editor telling me they decided to reject the paper based on the appended three negative reviews. I read them and each one was openly from a CAGW believer! I was surprised that these other reviews were shared with me and even more surprised that I was told the paper was rejected. The other three reviewers went to great lengths to nit-pick the paper and accuse the author of poor science. Basically, the paper was about the LACK of accelerated SLR as demonstrated by tide gauges….
To me one of the best peer review processes is to be found on the better sceptical Sites.
Big Brother cannot tolerate this so goes to great lengths to see that these sites do not appear in the media.
I’ve been saying for quite a while that sites like WUWT do a much better and much faster job of peer review than do any of the major so called science publications.
I’ve had similar experience. Working in a relatively small field word can travel. After reviewing a recent paper I came to find out who the other two reviewers were. In this case all three of the initial reviewers, including myself, recommended publication. But the editor disagreed for some unknown reason and found another three reviewers to provide negative reviews. I suppose that’s their prerogative as editor, but it just seems rather base, particularly given the editor selected the initial three reviewers. I won’t be reviewing for that editor again without a satisfactory explanation.
Since you didn’t provide the review the editor was looking for, it’s unlikely he/she will ever ask you to do another review.
The most serious fault is if a paper is reviewed by a peer whose own paper was not cited.
By the way :
¨Arabian Journal of GeosciencesISSN: 1866-7511 (Print) 1866-7538 (Online)
DescriptionThe official journal of the Saudi Society for Geosciences, the Arabian Journal of Geosciences examines the entire range of earth science topics focused on, but not limited, to those that have regional significance to the Middle East and the Euro-Mediterranean Zone.¨
Anyone note that this a Saudi publication? There the worlds largest petroleum firm Aramco, for sure needs geological research.
Is this, as the editor suggested a hack? Were Saudi’s represented at FLOP26, or Aramco? And what about those financial ghouls that blame energy prices on OPEC+.
This reeks like a bucket of crude….
These retracted articles made as much sense as using computer modeling to predict the future.
But wait! I’m a militant CAGW skeptic who also suffers from urban anxiety disorder, which by default proves AGW to be settled science. Or something.
“…development of industry-wide practices [to] ensure that culpable parties can be held to account,” Graf added.
Right, it was them pesky AI nonsense authors that are culpable here. Surely it couldn’t be the fault of an editor asleep at the switch, if there even was an editor.
Perhaps the publisher had switched to using AI editors as an experiment, and someone with inside knowledge thought that was BS, and either perpetrated or encouraged this heinous crime to prove a point. :O
I have the feeling that Sacha Baron Cohen has recruited some who infest this blog and successfully sneeked a few articles across the publishers desk.
If any of you are asking if I “is talking to you like that because you is a denier” the answer is, yes, I am. Well done…_
Nah, we just assumed that was the normal way you spoke, use of the word “denier” indicates gullibility and and lower than average brain function.
The Artificial Stupidity is strong in this bot.
Use of “denier” means he doesn’t have an argument. So name-calling is the fall back.
You are posting like that because you have mistakenly assumed that all readers of WUWT are ‘deniers’ and thinking really isn’t your strong suit. Might I suggest that you ask a grown up for advice before posting in future – might save you from a public exhibition of your ignorance and obvious defects.
I personally take no offence at being called a Denier, I’m proud to be described as such, especially because it pisses the Alarmists off when I do so.
I can truthfully claim that some of my best friends are Deniers and that I would have no problem if Deniers moved in next door.
But somehow I feel the irony would be wasted.
I do plead guilty though to missing how many snowflakes visit this site…_
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/599602
Dude, your psychological projection is showing. It was the folks at the long-forgotten “Ozone Action” environmentalist group who sneaked in one fake name to the Oregon Petition Project (and subsequently falsely claimed there were more in it) in order to trash the entire collection of petition signatures of scientists who questioned the IPCC’s reports.
They developed AI techniques …. clearly the real intelligence at Springer Nature was a bit under par. Even a total novice would have picked up on such titles and suspect something fishy. Or do editors nowadays not read the submitted papers?
First reported by research journal watchdog Retraction Watch,
Wanted
Scientifically trained proof reader…
Isn’t that the truth!
“Global heating induced excess sweat and it’s impact in accelerating the degredation of various gauges of plain and wound Nickel guitar strings”
For the paper contact fretslider c/o spotify, iTunes, deezer etc etc etc
degradation
Paper returned for revision….
: > )
Without an error it isnt authentic
Humour by-pass detected…
That really is a green trait
Humour
Un-american spelling detected. Author’s credentials enhanced….
Wait. I thought “nothing more than garbled jargon” was the new, peer reviewed, settled science.
Yep. “Garbled jargon” is a nice phrase, but generally I prefer “eco-babble”. The retracted papers were obvious hoaxes, but eco-babble papers are the norm, in fact required for publication in most (all) enviro-science journals. Actual science is rare if not deliberately banned.
Instituting new AI? Great idea, especially because there appears to have been a severe lack of actual human intelligence. Merely reading the titles should be a sufficient clue that everything below it is ridiculous nonsense.
They dont need AI, but EI – editor with I
When did Greta and AOC begin writing scientific papers?
These titles read like the pranksters who make careers out of writing nonsensical complaints letters.
It does not need AI, a reasonable high stream primary school kid could spot them a mile off.
Note that the general principle that will subsume these editorial failures is not quite equivalent to deliberate language misuse. It must be emphasized, that a deceptively adequate ersatz grammar is unspecified with respect to an abstract underlying translation, if any. Of course, the descriptive power of the Arabic language components does not affect the structure of a corpus of nonsensical utterances upon which conformity to climate change theory has been defined. Nevertheless, relational information can be defined in such a way as to impose irrelevant publication contexts in selectional rules, particularly of peer reviewers. It may be, then, that an important property of these types of AI is rather different from the levels of acceptability from fairly high (eg (99a)) to virtual gibberish (eg (98d)).
http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl
Maybe they could read the papers before they put them in print? Just an idea.
Good suggestion. Reading them might have saved them a lot of trouble.
“The journal is intended for geoscience research; discussion of volcanoes, soils, and rocks are par for the course. But these questionable papers’ topics were further afield, with many discussing sports, air pollution, child medicine, and combinations of the aforesaid.”
That’s about par for the course these days. It often seems like every man and his dog has to mention global warming and climate change, however irrelevant it is to their real area of research.
The very first level of report quality control is to read it for spelling, grammar, and content consistency. So these were never proof-read by anyone.
Is it too much to ask that the publishers read what they publish?
It sounds like someone was having too much fun with websites like this one: 🙂
Communications From Elsewhere
Ooh! Excellent!
Absent was the phrase “due to climate change” or it’s close cousin “linked to climate change.”
Were these papers written by the Biden teleprompter team?
They should do a review of CliSci papers that nonsensically average chaotic results of models, calling these absurd averages “projections” and studies that find that the drop in milk production in Wisconsin (fill in any undesired occurrence) is a direct, well “10% more likely” becuase “climate change”.
And calling the model runs themselves “experiments.”
And the output “data”.
I’m certain there will be much more oversight at Springer publications in the future.
I wouldn’t be too sure of that.
Oversight, noun:
They are completely aware of what was going on. It wasn’t of interest to them until they got caught because it was expedient. The don’t need better oversight. They need greater vigilance so they don’t get caught again.
Reading through the list of titles on the linked PDF from Springer is really good for a laugh. After reading this, I have the distinct impression that a few people got together to test their abilities to get garbage published. The authors succeeded and Springer is the butt of their joke.
” … we are developing new AI and other-tech based tools … ”
Why not try natural stupidity?
I wonder how many of those papers were submitted on April 1st?
I think this journal and others published by Springer are not peer-reviewed. This is what science journalism has come to: algorhythms
Not only are 60% of soft science papers not replicable….but not-replicable studies are quoted in the media more than 150 times as often….
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210521171203.htm
Nothing learned from Sokal, nor from the “Grievance Studies Affair” that followed.
Reminds of a great blog, Spurious Correlations. For instance, a recent entry: “US Spending on Science, Space and Technology Correlates With Suicides by Hanging, Strangulation, and Suffocation.”
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Just look for a list of the names of those who have done the peer review and their place of work. If you do not find this then you should question the honesty of the journal editor and publisher.
““Moreover, we are gathering evidence into how these subversions are being carried out to share with other publishers, [the Committee on Publication Ethics], relevant institutions and other agencies to help inform the development of industry-wide practices and ensure that culpable parties can be held to account,” Graf added.”
Maybe the solution is to actually read the papers, and also of course to know something about science.
No surprise they are all by chinese.. its not new china is flooding stuff with bot generated content, look at patents.
China want to be a world leader and in their mind quantity is the metric by which they go, but especial in science a single work can be more important than thousands of other works.
This may be a side effect of superficial bureaucracy, indeed. Or this may be allowed and encouraged on purpose.
It could be all about dropping signal/noise ratio. In recent history this technique proved far superior to primitive things like security by obscurity.
Also, spam of data that should be eliminated by sanity checks can be used as quality control test.
Or a denial of service attack. In general terms: if quality of a process cannot be maintained while raising performance, and spurious demand for performance can be created, it’s a vulnerability, as spam trivially degrades quality. In this case, it may accelerate corruption.
So there are multiple possible objectives, both decorative and real. Or maybe they just don’t care and it’s just supply answering demand.
A better question is: why this nonsense is allowed on the publishing side? Perhaps the editor is pressured by an outside power, then the buck stops one step further, but the question remains: for what purpose?
Well, we have an example from another area. From what’s seen on Internet, it appears that American judicial and law enforcement systems were blatantly subjected to combination of DoS and demoralizing inefficiency (spam the courts + revolving door prisons), as a result it was subsumed into the rest of oligarchy and remains useless for anyone else (what antinomian judges are good for, really?). So why Harvard & Time crowd would not do this anywhere else for the same reasons?
“The peer review process was not carried out in accordance with the Publisher’s peer review policy. The author has not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction.”
They make it sound like the author was responsible for the failure of the review process. What a cop-out.
Sounds to me like Chris Graf should quit playing with AI and just read some of the article titles. He doesn’t even need to read to entire article to see that it is BS.
Sure, but then he would be responsible for the decision to accept… and worse, to reject. One day he will throw out similar nonsense written by a genuine moron, or something that looks like this after being translated by Google. And the next day inquisition grills him for maybe doubting someone’s Most Equal Holiness. Does he need this? Conversely, with magic of “AI” the buck does not stop there: shoo, it’s not us, it’s the Algorythm. Which is not a new approach at all, of course.
I can only conclude the journal editors don’t/can’t read the papers they publish. Peer-review is so broken that it adds nothing to the process of scientific publishing.
I can sympathise with not wanting to read the papers but did No one even bother to read the titles? This is not a science journal it’s a joke!
you couldnt make this up…oh they did;-)
I have written technical papers for the IEEE and have done peer review on others
As a result I get deluged with requests to review papers from all over the world, most on subjects I have no clue about and it would likely be highly unethical for me to submit a review.
This is STEM
I assume climate Scientology is far worse
Be shocked if it wasn’t
And also, how is this different from how they arrived at the new consensus of scientists number of 99.9%?
Preselect 3000 alarmist papers, do a content search of words deemed skeptical, find 0.1% and proclaim to the world 99.9% consensus!
I’d be embarrassed to have my name appear with any of that
“ “As previously stated, we are developing new AI and other-tech based tools and putting additional checks in place to identify and prevent attempts of deliberate manipulation.””???
The obvious nonsense of the titles was not obvious to the “editors”???