> 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.”
> As highlighted by the Chronicle of Higher Education in August, when the 400-odd papers in the geosciences journal got expressions of concern attached to them, many suspicious papers appear to have been written by scholars affiliated with Chinese institutions, where researchers are incentivized (sometimes financially) to publish in notable journals and where many doctoral students must publish a paper before graduation. The founder and editor-in-chief of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences told the Chronicle at the time that he reads every paper published in the journal each month (which would mean about 10 papers per day, including weekends), and that he thinks the fabricated research got into the journal through hacking.
Could someone with more familiarity in this area explain, what do the 'perpetrators' (for lack of better word) gain out of generating and publishing nonsensical (farkaktical?) papers?
It's about juicing the publication metrics by which academics are evaluated these days, especially in developing countries with less mature research cultures and heavy publish-or-perish pressures. It's especially effective if you have co-conspirators who will cite your nonsense papers. So long as you publish and get cited, the metrics don't care about the content of your papers.
The measurement requirements come from politicians and funding agencies, and "what you measure is what you'll get" is a truism in organizational behavior.
It's hard to tell because we don't seem to have any institutions private of public who will investigate things anymore. For instance someone could email the people who's names are on the paper and ask.
But a good guess would be the people who's names are on the paper paid someone to get them published papers.
The person paid, outsourced it to different people, also paid.
That's one possibility.
Researchers often get paid for published work. Is it an academic getting a yearly bonus or a student needing to just pass their degree and moving on? This is two very different things.
How were they generated, was it translation software, Markov Chains, GPT.
The researchers were not in Geosciences, this is why the starkly different topics. Mashing the researchers field and Geosciences.
But this makes it worse, it needs to be basket ball and Geosciences to get caught?
> Could someone with more familiarity in this area explain, what do the 'perpetrators' (for lack of better word) gain out of generating and publishing nonsensical (farkaktical?) papers?
There are circumstances where getting a paper published is a prerequisite for something else (graduating, getting hired, receiving a bonus or promotion, etc.). The general shape of the issue is similar to how and why nonsensical or trivial patents are conceived, submitted, and granted, except that the attack surface is ginormous by comparison.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 41.3 ms ] thread> 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.”
> As highlighted by the Chronicle of Higher Education in August, when the 400-odd papers in the geosciences journal got expressions of concern attached to them, many suspicious papers appear to have been written by scholars affiliated with Chinese institutions, where researchers are incentivized (sometimes financially) to publish in notable journals and where many doctoral students must publish a paper before graduation. The founder and editor-in-chief of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences told the Chronicle at the time that he reads every paper published in the journal each month (which would mean about 10 papers per day, including weekends), and that he thinks the fabricated research got into the journal through hacking.
> An alternative spelling of the Yiddish word verkakte that can mean either goddamn or crappy - the literal translation is "becrapped".
But a good guess would be the people who's names are on the paper paid someone to get them published papers.
The person paid, outsourced it to different people, also paid.
That's one possibility.
Researchers often get paid for published work. Is it an academic getting a yearly bonus or a student needing to just pass their degree and moving on? This is two very different things.
How were they generated, was it translation software, Markov Chains, GPT.
The researchers were not in Geosciences, this is why the starkly different topics. Mashing the researchers field and Geosciences.
But this makes it worse, it needs to be basket ball and Geosciences to get caught?
There are circumstances where getting a paper published is a prerequisite for something else (graduating, getting hired, receiving a bonus or promotion, etc.). The general shape of the issue is similar to how and why nonsensical or trivial patents are conceived, submitted, and granted, except that the attack surface is ginormous by comparison.