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 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”???