Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics. Then I joined it and realized its even more cutthroat than corporate politics, I guess you cant escape human fallibility no matter the system since all systems are reflections of human nature.
Academia these days is a lot like industry, but with worse pay, better schedule, and low consequences/verification if the data that is published is "wrong", intentionally or unintentionally.
I was planning on going into academia in the early aughts and this was also around the time that there was a groundswell to take away tenure from professors. "They" wanted to set out a quota for how many times you needed to have your research published on a yearly basis to show you were still doing your job.
I opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics to go work for the government.
These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after. It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for exactly what you described and what I was warned of.
I viewed academia as altruistic and relatively enlightened. And I've certainly met many who live up to that.
I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud.
Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.
That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
It seems to me that the "elephant in the room" no one has mentioned yet w.r.t. academia is the model of modern academic administration, where universities are run like cruise ships (look at the perks kids are paying for these days!) with hedge funds attached, and have no "skin in the game" with regard to the incredibly high financial risks that students take when they pay for tuition.
If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold, etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every 50 students, (c) tuition went directly to professors, research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the game with regard to the success of their graduates[0]
then I'm positive the academic system would become far more effective at educating students and preparing them for life, and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific research and the politics there.
[0] State-funded secondary education in European countries costs far less than university education in the US. There's a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt, the government won't pay such exorbitant fees.
[1] A very rough stab at an idea for making universities have skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that guarantee for some majors, that would be a very helpful signal for prospective students.
But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the presence of such a lever (and its absence at some universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to prospective students, better align the university's incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.
Former solar researcher here, had the same experience.
I'll summarize it like this:
- join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's thesis in the world
- be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab by a previous researcher
- can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes, still nothing
- randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it before because you need some very intimate experience with those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important) point.
- ask why this happens
- she explains that only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid
- she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge number of citations can find good funding
- only good funding can allow you to get the material, equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the scientific world
Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore the cheating for all the people involved.
And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows each other toxic things happen all around.
I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7 months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds -> no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and politics I called it quits.
I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
Another ex-researcher here. Similar experience. I went in with hopes of a lot of rationality and intense cooperation between people who would be there mostly for a shared curiosity. Fast forward years and... Good grief - so, so many people publicly being shouted down, shamed, bullied, insulted. So many serious abuses of power - up to sexual and bodily - essentially without consequences for the abusers (often with way more negative consequences for the victims if they complained). So many tears, so many ends to academic careers of people who were really smart and really cared - in quite a few cases accompanied by burn-outs and other long-term health consequences. So much tax money down the drain with questionable accounting up to outright lies. So, so many utterly absurd intrigues and wars between mini-kingdoms based on nothing but the feelings of the biggest, loudest and most vicious narcissists. So many publications of questionable methodology that are sliced as thinly as they possibly can be and are hyper-targeted towards all-important journals or conferences. And so much more soul-destroying nonsense.
I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).
The article hints that medical residents are a large source and it could be effects like competition and visas… does that account for the rate of growth?
Are these unscrupulous editors making “payola” or something?
This is more concerning than the usual paper mills as the crap papers are published in otherwise legitimate journals. The pure paper mills are less destructive as people are much less likely to read and use those papers. But if you have ever growing numbers of crap papers mixed in regular journals that will be a problem.
Nobody cares. State pays the salaries, BS conferences, BS journals, BS patents. Everybody is happy, no one can be fired. As long as stats look good (R&D per capita, publication, science indexes etc. ) gravy train will move on.
This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative. It has become much more about cushy white collar jobs, than the brightest minds being laser focused on understanding and bettering mankind.
“Trust the science” is a terrible slogan. It almost turns science into a religion. Most people that use it seem to think that science is whatever a scientist says. We should be saying “Trust the scientific method”.
Agreed. I have never heard a scientist use this phrase, but I've heard plenty of left leaning folks use it. As left wing politics absorbs science as it's cause - and not a cause that everyone is for - I fear it actively turns right leaning folks against science solely because of it's mindless support by progressive folk.
I haven't seen the "trust the science" narrative since covid honestly.
Junk science has been around since, well, even before we coined the word science really. In some ways I think the situation has improved. People seem far more aware of misconduct, and willing to make retractions than they used to.
> This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative.
Even more like undermining trust in journals.
With Science.org doing it to its own self.
Which should be living up to a higher standard than most so they can set an example.
At Science.org I think they have the responsibility to reverse the forces that are trying to build hatred for scientific endeavors across-the-board.
Looks like the haters are most concerned with climate and vaccines, and are perfectly willing to let everything else go down the tubes if that's what it takes to purge every last trace there is concerning progress in those areas past, present, and future.
So when you get the direct opinion of the most hateful where they explain why they don't trust vaccine and climate research, they can often further explain why they don't really trust very many scientists at all, not even NASA, so this is where the most concentrated anti-scientist effort can be found.
The worst of the haters are the ones painting with the broadest brush.
But it has already "trickled" outward from there and naturally the hatred is so extreme (and undesirable) that is the part that fortunately gets watered down as it spreads, but that can leave the anti-science momentum seeming more credible than where it emanated from. When the source hatred & superstition are less prominent, the non-haters and non-superstitious laypersons are more likely to be persuaded.
This fraud needs to be exposed, but the way it looks to me it just gives haters another arrow in their quiver.
This article looks very well researched itself and seems like the authors are on the right track and will only gain more expertise on the subject if they try.
What bugs me is that they're painting with as broad a brush as you can get, themselves.
With the resources at their disposal, they should be breaking down in great detail which fields of science are the most effected and least effected by the growing fraud industry. The numbers of scientists in these fields and the locations their research was conducted in, as well as the estimated fraud in each of the fields. We want University and institution affiliations, correlations with educational histories, numbers, why not?
If they try, and stick with it for a number of years, progress in one direction or the other should become measurable for each field.
So the most egregious fraud can be targeted first & strongest.
If there was a time when there was no fraud "industry" at all, I would say that some of most questionable findings were still heavily concentrated on the social sciences, and least of all on the natural sciences.
It would be good to know if this trend still holds based on true statistical data, this could indicate if or when the fraud industries are disproportionally targeting natural science. It would be good to have a sign whether fraud in natural science is on the increase or not independently, whether initiated for the purpose of promoting the lesser scientists or their institutions, or perhaps a source of uncertainty & doubt that can be put on steroids without any intention to promote scientists or their work at all, just the opposite effect could be intended.
You know natural sciences like climate and vaccines are in their cross-hairs so you can expect those to take a big hit without any proven or rumored fraud, but if you're not careful everything else will be equally destroyed even though it was not the primary target of the hate.
One of the worst ways to discredit natural science is to lump it in with social science or anything else.
But I think the worst are the Science Fans who go around saying "Science, bitches!" just because something has a two-column layout and never actually read the shit. Then they go around saying "There is some evidence that" and they've never read the paper.
In fact, there is so much bullshit that you would never accept if you were the one making a decision. It's why so many outsiders frequently make the right decisions on things.
e.g. Bezos closed flights to/from China to/from his offices a month before the pandemic. Bezos isn't a scientist. Trump tried to do the same. Trump isn't a scientist. But what did the scientists say? That it would hinder a coronavirus response: https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/31/as-far-right-calls-for-c...
The "far right" non-experts said one thing while the scientists said another thing and now we know that the "far right" non-experts were right. It's not even because the "far right" has some exclusive access to truth. It's just that there is a certain kind of blind spot imposed upon science by the fact that scientists have certain political persuasions. This causes them to self-censor and blatantly lie so as to preserve those politics.
Even if some racist view were true, you would be hard pressed to find a liberal scientist who would espouse it. Even if some sexist view were true, or xenophobic view were true, or whatever. Which is a dirty stain on science as practiced today.
you should not trust science. I mean look where the article is published. It's not Vox nor The New York Times, etc. It's in Science, one of the most reputable journals in the world. So the community of scientist is aware of the problem and in the end science is self-correcting. It's just a slow process. Science advances one funreal at a time.
ya know... i wonder if this is how a religion is formed. at the start, science was about identifying and explaining the things that were true, observable, and agreed upon by all. anyone who was present at the birth of an event that caused a religion would have had that same mentality. over time, generations pass and the concept that held the group together has shifted - it now attempts to explain new concepts, and the scientists/priests that make up the governing body decide tge truth based on opinion, rather than fact.
the point is, we're on a dangerous path. if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.
Not at all. Research that appears useful is going to be picked up by others, and if it's really a fraud it will be exposed eventually.
That is the check you are looking for and indeed how we realized there's some fraud and reproducibility issues, btw. I'll be waiting for the day actual religions gets the same level of scrutiny.
Religion - cargo cult et al. It is quite clear that religions arose from tribalism to aggregate tribes into pan religious groups. They are de-facto control mechanisms = toe the line = give us your $$ = fight/kill as ordered.
> if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.
Except if you base things like planes, computers, or medicine on science they provably work.
Obviously it's not perfect and probably never will be as science is a human endeavour and humans are not perfect. But dismissing all of it as "just a religion" fundamentally misunderstands both science and religion.
Hasn't scientific fraud always been an industry and we rely on signal to noise ratios to be good enough to get by?
Alternatively, in times of high wealth inequality are we putting a higher burden on our academics to survive, and forcing them to do more and more, thereby increasing the likelihood they will turn to cheating to survive?
A cool new indicator is "tortured phrases". These are turning out to be a gold mine for detecting fraudulent papers.
"In December 2023, a PubPeer user commented on 13 tortured phrases the Problematic Paper Screener had flagged in the article, such as the use of “Parkinson’s illness,” “Parkinson’s infection,” and “Parkinson’s sickness” rather than Parkinson’s disease.
"“These typically result from an attempt to avoid plagiarism detection using a paraphrasing software,” the commenter wrote about the phases. “How come these incorrect wordings survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”"
It's all about what we measure for, right? Publish or perish is like telling programmers they need to output 1,000 lines of code per week. What do you think will happen?
Unsurprising. It's the natural byproduct of overproduction of scientists, brutally competitive job markets, and the shortsighted decisions to use publications as the primary metric for hiring and promotion decisions.
Anyone who is alarmed by this hasn't been paying attention to the perverse incentives scientists have been facing for decades.
Well, maybe we should not trust authors that make vauge unsubstantiated claims?
The ingress: "Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities..."
The article: nothing
The ingress overreaches, oversimplifies and mixes hypotheses with results. Is this a test?
EDIT: Refers to the paper referenced by the article.
Another problem: Publishing in good journals is for the rich. Open science is a paradox. They require such huge amount of money to publish.
My next manuscript is still going to Plos One ( :(given the reputation) bc it's free to publish. It's such a messed up system that prevents me from even trying to publish in good journals.
Government subsidies enable fraud and largess. Individuals and organizations are inherently less careful and results-oriented with Other People's Money. That is starting to be rectified, for better or worse.
> First-author paper published at a top conference
I now find that requirement in most AI-related high-tech jobs. Starter salary for these jobs is often $150k+. When someone is willing to pay you $150k+ for having published a paper, fraud definitely makes (financial) sense. Basically, the problem is the demand, and the demand corrupts the metrics (h-index).
I think that having a paper published would become less and less significant in the future. With time, businesses will also move onto other signals of success.
The particular type of fraud described here (paper mills etc.) is less common in the U.S. (different types of fraud may exist but that's more subtle and complex). There tend to be specific geographic clusters associated with this behavior that have to do with how university expansions have been done in many countries.
Oddly enough, pre-LLMs, I would have said most of these crap paper mill papers didn't really affect the actual fields. Yes, they cited each other but outside the citation ring didn't really alter the field in a knowledge sense. But now.. if these get picked up in Deep Research it's a problem.
Again, at what level of fraud do we consider defunding if not now? When 90% is irreproducible crap? 95%? 98%? Yes, you will lose out on 'healthy tissue'. That damage is necessary when the cancer is spreading.
I remember "fondly" when a professor in China stole my paper from my PhD thesis; equations, pictures, and everything. I only found about it because a Chinese student in another lab came across both papers and was puzzled by the extreme similarities. I tried to contact his/her university to let them know about the fraud and never got a reply. Good times ...
With the dynamics of publish or perish being what they are, what’s the way out? As long as there is high demand for papers (not knowledge) then some market will pop up to feed that demand.
I hate to say it, but cutting off the money spigot of government funding for papers seems like a good start.
It feels like our society has been optimized to game a few metrics like this (government wants to raise GDP, CEOs want to increase shareholder value, university deans want to increase funding to write papers), and all of them have toxic second order effects that make society worse.
82 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 99.3 ms ] threadI opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics to go work for the government.
These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after. It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for exactly what you described and what I was warned of.
I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud.
Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.
That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold, etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every 50 students, (c) tuition went directly to professors, research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the game with regard to the success of their graduates[0]
then I'm positive the academic system would become far more effective at educating students and preparing them for life, and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific research and the politics there.
[0] State-funded secondary education in European countries costs far less than university education in the US. There's a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt, the government won't pay such exorbitant fees.
[1] A very rough stab at an idea for making universities have skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that guarantee for some majors, that would be a very helpful signal for prospective students.
But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the presence of such a lever (and its absence at some universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to prospective students, better align the university's incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.
I'll summarize it like this:
- join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's thesis in the world
- be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab by a previous researcher
- can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes, still nothing
- randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it before because you need some very intimate experience with those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important) point.
- ask why this happens
- she explains that only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid
- she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge number of citations can find good funding
- only good funding can allow you to get the material, equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the scientific world
Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore the cheating for all the people involved.
And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows each other toxic things happen all around.
I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7 months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds -> no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and politics I called it quits.
I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).
In Canada the education system was abused as a immigration path, in part because the schools were greedy and corrupt.
The article hints that medical residents are a large source and it could be effects like competition and visas… does that account for the rate of growth?
Are these unscrupulous editors making “payola” or something?
But the findings are often not replicated.
Junk science has been around since, well, even before we coined the word science really. In some ways I think the situation has improved. People seem far more aware of misconduct, and willing to make retractions than they used to.
Even more like undermining trust in journals.
With Science.org doing it to its own self.
Which should be living up to a higher standard than most so they can set an example.
At Science.org I think they have the responsibility to reverse the forces that are trying to build hatred for scientific endeavors across-the-board.
Looks like the haters are most concerned with climate and vaccines, and are perfectly willing to let everything else go down the tubes if that's what it takes to purge every last trace there is concerning progress in those areas past, present, and future.
So when you get the direct opinion of the most hateful where they explain why they don't trust vaccine and climate research, they can often further explain why they don't really trust very many scientists at all, not even NASA, so this is where the most concentrated anti-scientist effort can be found.
But it has already "trickled" outward from there and naturally the hatred is so extreme (and undesirable) that is the part that fortunately gets watered down as it spreads, but that can leave the anti-science momentum seeming more credible than where it emanated from. When the source hatred & superstition are less prominent, the non-haters and non-superstitious laypersons are more likely to be persuaded.This fraud needs to be exposed, but the way it looks to me it just gives haters another arrow in their quiver.
This article looks very well researched itself and seems like the authors are on the right track and will only gain more expertise on the subject if they try.
What bugs me is that they're painting with as broad a brush as you can get, themselves.
With the resources at their disposal, they should be breaking down in great detail which fields of science are the most effected and least effected by the growing fraud industry. The numbers of scientists in these fields and the locations their research was conducted in, as well as the estimated fraud in each of the fields. We want University and institution affiliations, correlations with educational histories, numbers, why not?
If they try, and stick with it for a number of years, progress in one direction or the other should become measurable for each field.
So the most egregious fraud can be targeted first & strongest.
If there was a time when there was no fraud "industry" at all, I would say that some of most questionable findings were still heavily concentrated on the social sciences, and least of all on the natural sciences.
It would be good to know if this trend still holds based on true statistical data, this could indicate if or when the fraud industries are disproportionally targeting natural science. It would be good to have a sign whether fraud in natural science is on the increase or not independently, whether initiated for the purpose of promoting the lesser scientists or their institutions, or perhaps a source of uncertainty & doubt that can be put on steroids without any intention to promote scientists or their work at all, just the opposite effect could be intended.
You know natural sciences like climate and vaccines are in their cross-hairs so you can expect those to take a big hit without any proven or rumored fraud, but if you're not careful everything else will be equally destroyed even though it was not the primary target of the hate.
One of the worst ways to discredit natural science is to lump it in with social science or anything else.
But I think the worst are the Science Fans who go around saying "Science, bitches!" just because something has a two-column layout and never actually read the shit. Then they go around saying "There is some evidence that" and they've never read the paper.
In fact, there is so much bullshit that you would never accept if you were the one making a decision. It's why so many outsiders frequently make the right decisions on things.
e.g. Bezos closed flights to/from China to/from his offices a month before the pandemic. Bezos isn't a scientist. Trump tried to do the same. Trump isn't a scientist. But what did the scientists say? That it would hinder a coronavirus response: https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/31/as-far-right-calls-for-c...
The "far right" non-experts said one thing while the scientists said another thing and now we know that the "far right" non-experts were right. It's not even because the "far right" has some exclusive access to truth. It's just that there is a certain kind of blind spot imposed upon science by the fact that scientists have certain political persuasions. This causes them to self-censor and blatantly lie so as to preserve those politics.
Even if some racist view were true, you would be hard pressed to find a liberal scientist who would espouse it. Even if some sexist view were true, or xenophobic view were true, or whatever. Which is a dirty stain on science as practiced today.
If a thing is true, it is true.
the point is, we're on a dangerous path. if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.
That is the check you are looking for and indeed how we realized there's some fraud and reproducibility issues, btw. I'll be waiting for the day actual religions gets the same level of scrutiny.
Except if you base things like planes, computers, or medicine on science they provably work.
Obviously it's not perfect and probably never will be as science is a human endeavour and humans are not perfect. But dismissing all of it as "just a religion" fundamentally misunderstands both science and religion.
Alternatively, in times of high wealth inequality are we putting a higher burden on our academics to survive, and forcing them to do more and more, thereby increasing the likelihood they will turn to cheating to survive?
"In December 2023, a PubPeer user commented on 13 tortured phrases the Problematic Paper Screener had flagged in the article, such as the use of “Parkinson’s illness,” “Parkinson’s infection,” and “Parkinson’s sickness” rather than Parkinson’s disease.
"“These typically result from an attempt to avoid plagiarism detection using a paraphrasing software,” the commenter wrote about the phases. “How come these incorrect wordings survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”"
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11/11/all-the-red-flags-sci...
Anyone who is alarmed by this hasn't been paying attention to the perverse incentives scientists have been facing for decades.
The ingress: "Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities..."
The article: nothing
The ingress overreaches, oversimplifies and mixes hypotheses with results. Is this a test?
EDIT: Refers to the paper referenced by the article.
My next manuscript is still going to Plos One ( :(given the reputation) bc it's free to publish. It's such a messed up system that prevents me from even trying to publish in good journals.
It's not peer reviewed in either case.
Replicated studies can likely be replicated under the same conditions.
N=1 means you might be able to believe it, but if the results contradict reality, toss it out.
I no longer feel like I need to 'trust science'. No need to trust. Use it if its useful, don't if its not.
This has eliminated those grandiose happy papers that propose a pretty popular fair world that contradict what we actually see.
I now find that requirement in most AI-related high-tech jobs. Starter salary for these jobs is often $150k+. When someone is willing to pay you $150k+ for having published a paper, fraud definitely makes (financial) sense. Basically, the problem is the demand, and the demand corrupts the metrics (h-index).
I think that having a paper published would become less and less significant in the future. With time, businesses will also move onto other signals of success.
Oddly enough, pre-LLMs, I would have said most of these crap paper mill papers didn't really affect the actual fields. Yes, they cited each other but outside the citation ring didn't really alter the field in a knowledge sense. But now.. if these get picked up in Deep Research it's a problem.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ras_VYgA77Q
I hate to say it, but cutting off the money spigot of government funding for papers seems like a good start.
It feels like our society has been optimized to game a few metrics like this (government wants to raise GDP, CEOs want to increase shareholder value, university deans want to increase funding to write papers), and all of them have toxic second order effects that make society worse.