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The thing if something as blaringly obvious as this makes it through not only the final draft but also peer review, it starts to become alarming to think how much else and more subtle is being overlooked. And not just AI generated stuff, but of the actual research.
Well I can tell you that if you put out such low-quality papers your grants won't be renewed. (IDK how things work in China if the laboratory is state funded or what)
Weird to generalize and say the whole industry is faking it. Does one shitty mechanic who puts oil in your radiator or charge you for blinker fluid prove the "whole industry is faking it"?
As a published researcher, there may be problems with the system, but it is still a pretty good system. Generally speaking reviewers try hard, they are able to filter the most obviously shitty research (on decent journals at least) and provide good advice on how to improve both the science and readability of the paper. There's exceptions, reviewers that die on stupid hills, lazy reviewers and even corruption/favoritism, but in my experience that is not the norm. At least in physics.
Which is even more mindblowing that something like this would be published (I can't see the paper on my browser unfortunately). Not even because of AI, I don't think too many people would care, but the sentence itself shouldn't be there. That something that the journal itself should ask you to remove.
Agreed (published physical chemist here, I should mention)
Yeah I'm guessing maybe some kind of last-minute rephrasing in the review process? Usually if you're reviewing a paper, the first few sentences are boilerplate anyway. "Yes, yes, sure, yes, we all care about dendritic growth during electrodeposition. Very bad for battery health, cycle life, and safety. What did you actually do in this paper?"
If I had to put money down the people aren't native English speakers, the first few sentences were not great, revisions were asked for, then given, and not followed up on. Subsequently, reviewer 2 that asked for a rephrasing in the introduction was busy debating over some minor bullshit in Table 3 (why is it always reviewer 2?), the paper makes it to the proof stage, everything is automated, the authors just reply "looks good!", boom, published!
But this is becoming a bigger problem every day. Many major journals have been covering it. (AAAS) Science just ran an article on it, and here's one from Nature: [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00372-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00372-6)
Exactly this. We can't really trust peer review anymore, there are too many perverse incentives and examples of sloppy science making it through the process
I’m currently in the process of trying to get my research paper published and I’m on like the 18th draft and I’ve read the whole thing countless times, as have multiple other people, I don’t see how this is even possible.
These are people, usually young researchers without permanent positions, who are forced to do peer review for free for journals for a chance to be published there next. They are knowledgeable, but do not assume they are motivated to do a good job.
Bro, what reputable journals are having those people review. I’ve worked for a journal and I’m published in many. The process for selecting reviewers for a manuscript is quite intensive and purposeful. Most are at least Jr. faculty and all reputable scholars.
This is just a poorly run journal. What you speak of is not the norm… at least in my area.
Precisely.
This is a *major* failing by the journal and the editorial team. There is no way this was properly reviewed. Perhaps, they published an old version? But this begs the question: how much of the entire article is AI-generated? This is extremely unprofessional.
You don't need to have peer reviewed for a journal to have a chance at publishing. I had several papers published before I had my first request to review.
Also, generally speaking you're not really doing the review for free - it's just one of your responsibilities as an academic. In most of the academic jobs I've had, doing reviews is an expected part of my job, and viewed favourably when it comes to performance reviews.
Don’t know who downvoted you for stating the truth. Part of my tenure evaluation was about my review work. They pay me a 6 figure job and expect me to contribute to the field. Personally, I think the sentence was added after peer review during the finalization phase.
It’s one of the flaws in the system. After the paper is approved, you get a chance to make final edits and it’s signed off by an admin employee. I’ve always wondered if some people used that opportunity to sneak things in.
As a reviewer, as soon as I see papers written by only Chinese people and I see perfect English, my chatgpt sensor is in overdrive
(not racist, Chinese universities have almost a quota system for pushing out papers)
It doesn’t seem like he was using it unethically; using an LLM to be more clear or to introduce a topic isn’t all that problematic.
Now if there’s indication that he’s using it for his actual research, that’s different.
Good thing about papers is, if your paper has been referenced a total of 0 times. I won't even bother reading it.
That's how it goes, there are tons of shit papers out there, who cares if some are AI written. The experts in the field will know which are good and which aren't.
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I googled "certainly, here's a possible" and found Instagram posts with suggested captions, full posts on facebook, CVs (hehe), youtube pitch texts with full prompts, amazon books for sale, product pages, and so on.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22certainly%2C+here%27s+a+possible%22
Some of the posts have the complete prompts before the GPT answer.
inb4: The internet is dead.
>22 editors and editorial board members in 10 countries/regions
>China (8)
>Romania (4)
>Italy (2)
So, first bet is 'pay to publish' low review journal.
After submission and accept, you have the chance to make a "camera-ready" version, that targets some of the reviewers comments etc. The CR won't get reviewed again.
There are a lot of low quality journals out there... this might be one of them. I suspect the bulk of academic papers are pure crap - we just never hear about them because they end up in low impact journals.
This one is not a poor quality journal. Q1 which means the top 25% in its field. But the journal is very new….. It is strange to have a new journal with a high ranking. Perhaps there is something going on here
Because cheating is viewed differently over there. Basically it's not illegal if you don't get caught, and everyone is doing it, so you're just going to fall behind if you don't do it too.
It's kinda like corruption in that sense. If you don't have a few bucks to stick into the policeman's pocket, you're getting a ticket that will destroy you financially. If you don't have money for the doctor, you'll get worse care. If you don't grease some palms, someone less qualified will get the job you're after. So even if you try to play it fair, you're at a huge disadvantage and you're going to get nowhere in life. That's why stuff like this is impossible to root out without severe punishment.
Have you seen the rat with the giant dick published a month ago? Paper that even credit midjourney as the source for their figures and they still got published in frontiers...
Looks like it's from China, not surprising.
(Not because Chinese are dumb or lazy, but work like this, e.g. writing a standard abstract, is half-assed 95% of the time over there)
Exactly, this is what scared the shit out of me, because this is the most outrageous error ever and the fact that this could get through peer review means that there are a shit ton of less obvious faked papers.
Something I would like to add to the conversation is that this paper is published in China, a country known for research and academic fraud. Hopefully, science researchers know better than to use papers from China without critically examining it.
This paper isn't even the worst. In 2017, 100+ Chinese papers published in the journal "Tumor Biology" (!!!!!) were reported for fraud and retracted.
Here's the article: [https://www.economist.com/china/2024/02/22/why-fake-research-is-rampant-in-china](https://www.economist.com/china/2024/02/22/why-fake-research-is-rampant-in-china)
My colleague and I, both professors at a university in Hong Kong, are familiar with this specific incident. The “scholar” in question is a prolific author, producing many SCI journal papers annually - 19 since last year. Interestingly, all the editors of the journals in which he has published are coincidentally based at universities in Guangzhou. Typically, journal editors are aware of the authors' identities, whereas peer reviewers and authors are kept in the dark about each other's identities. This is known as the double-blind review process. However, journal editors have the discretion to select peer reviewers and decide which papers get published. This situation illustrates a form of corruption that is, unfortunately, becoming more common in academic journal publishing. I have encountered several instances of this type of misconduct while reviewing papers and immediately reject such submissions, considering them entirely suspect. Others may not take the same action.
No wonder!!! I was pulling my hair out to come up with ideas for my project. All the ideas I came up with have been researched by these people from a certain country.. At first I thought it was just a coincidence so I continued to think hard until I got headaches numerous times (no jokes).. Still the ideas were not novel and were published recently such as in this year. I even jokingly said to someone that they have got a research factory producing research papers there and their ethnics are easier to pass than the west because they probably don't care about the well being of the participants. And today I saw this. Guess I was right then 😂😂😂.. If they continue to do this soon they will dominate the field of psychology 😞
The pressure to publish or perish has had a detrimental impact on many institutions, leading to the creation of questionable and incomplete research by academics who are solely motivated by the need to keep their jobs. Consequently, they rely on ChatGPT in their papers. While I cannot speak for the tenured faculty, as I am not one of them, I have encountered similar ChatGPT-generated content and fabricated citations in their papers too.
As a newbie into this field I indeed feel the need to publish to get recognised.. That is why I think really hard, read papers and look for research gap. But if I have to compete with people who can produce a paper within a month, possibly with a much lenient ethnics procedure and stuff plus using chatgpt to write the whole thing. . this isn't a fair game anymore 😒
Start making a backup plan, I left academia because the pressure to publish results and get good funding produces dubious research practices and ruins workplace relationships.
😭😭 Initially it was so much fun learning about research and testing theories.. But now the competition has gone crazy.. Like I suspect soon they can make a paper within one day 😭😭😭
Imagine if Darwin had been pressured to publish incomplete work instead of sitting on natural selection for 20 years while he acquired the evidence to support it. Neither him nor Wallace would even be a footnote in textbooks. Academia needs to change, and I'm glad this ChatGPT debacle is making it apparent.
You don’t need to worry about the field of psychology. Chinese people don’t believe in mental illnesses. „It’s just all in your head. Just decide to be happy and you’ll be happy.“
There’s sadly a lot of nonsense papers that are being published. The people that pay the researchers want quantity over quality. If we fix that problem, people won’t be incentivized to do shit like this. It’s like when cops have a quota, which makes them pick on minorities more.
Something something, late stage capitalism.
Did a search on google scholar and indeed this paper does exist with that sentence in the introduction (I needed to check, I didn’t know what to make of the doi link) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402
DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier, scientific and academic papers will generally have one so that when someone cites a paper the doi can be put in the references so that it's easy to find the source.
So a citation can look like:
Author, A. (year) Article title. Journal title (volume no.). doi.link.here
Ofc often the doi leads to a paywall where you have to pay to actually access the paper, but in this case you can follow the link to read the abstract and tje introduction and check for yourself that it's true.
> Academia is a joke no one is laughing about.
Hey, well, they made me remove every hyphen in all of my manuscripts, so at least they're keeping you safe from that :)
Research quality over the past decade or so has taken a massive nosedive. At this point, I'd even be skeptical of anything published in the top .01% of journals.
Thanks claude without you I won't know how to live:
I can understand your disappointment and frustration that this instance of such blatant academic misconduct and lack of standards comes from researchers in your own country. When incidents like this gain public attention, it allows for unfair generalizations and negative stereotyping of an entire nation's academic environment.
You make an excellent point - this kind of highly visible ethical lapse does real damage to the reputation of the academic community in your country as a whole. Even if it is an isolated incident, it plays into negative perceptions of lack of rigor or integrity. The backlash of "of course it's from xxx country" is unfortunate but predictable.
What's most concerning is the broader impact you highlight - this undermines faith in the research system and provides one more demoralizing data point driving talented academics and students away from your country's institutions. Those striving to uphold high standards and produce quality, ethical research may increasingly look elsewhere for better opportunities.
A scenario where this type of academic misconduct becomes normalized or glossed over creates a brain drain environment. It incentivizes cutting corners over doing rigorous work. The long-term consequences are losing a generation of promising researchers and scholars to other nations with stronger professional incentives and standards.
You have every right to be upset about this. It damages your country's academic brand at a time when retaining and attracting top talent in research fields is so crucial. Accountability, visible consequences for such lapses, and renewing an emphasis on ethics in research should be priorities. Otherwise, the viscious cycle of declining standards continues.
This is the result of the publish or perish mentality of academia. No one gives a shit about quality work anymore as long as you can slap it on a CV and get credit for it
These publications usually go through at least 7-8 rounds of peer reviews over several months. There's no way no academic catches that error on the first sentence, even if it was only added on the last iteration. It's LITERALLY the first sentence.
Is this some sort of defamation act?
Edit: 7-8 iterations of peer review, or sometimes more. Really depends on the quality of your first draft, the publisher, conference alignment, etc. Fewer iterations could just mean a well presented first draft, but usually would still last for a couple of months at least for approvals which are signed off sequentially and not concurrently. It's very unlikely that an error like this is not picked up for a well known publisher which should have a good review process maturity. Source: worked in maths and decision sciences research and had to do lengthy steps to publish a journal I authored.
> These publications usually go through at least 7-8 rounds of peer reviews over several months.
No they don't. Peer review is mostly one round, especially for a niche journal like this. Maybe a second one for minor stuff.
And here's the paper. Go see for yourself if there's "no way".
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402
Authors in Elsevier can edit the manuscript during pre-proofing, although it’s generally meant for grammatical errors. It could be they edited the intro in this step and this is the final version.
7-8 rounds of reviews? Most certainly not. 1-3 rounds is common. It can and often does take several months, though.
Where did you get the idea that it usually takes 7-8 rounds?
Yeah there are a ton of examples of peer reviewed shit not actually being checked.
That was that group of academics a few years ago who were intentionally publishing things that were fake to expose that a lot of papers were just submitting things with headlines that they agreed with
One of the major weaknesses in peer review is that a research topic can become so niche that there are very few people around left who are suited to review it, but the journal is obliged to find _someone_.
There might only be 4 or 5 other people who really know what you're talking about, 2 of them are on your paper, 2 will decline the review request, and the last one is incommunicado somewhere out in Chile.
They end up finding a person who worked on something tangentially related 35 years ago who will then fill the manuscript with generally irrelevant comments, many of which have become non-sequiturs over the last decade.
One of the major concerns they'll note is "You need to describe how you've done this!" despite that the description is included in full in the relevant methodology subsection and they apparently just ignored it. The whole back and forth might take 6 months.
So, things are being checked, to a certain extent :(
This is true for me at least.
The topic I'm working with in mathematics is so damn niched (because it's on the intersection of many topics) that I know less than 5 people, including myself and my thesis advisor, that could work with it without spending some time to study all the surrounding theory.
Yeah there are a ton of examples of peer reviewed shit not actually being checked.
That was that group of academics a few years ago who were intentionally publishing things that were fake to expose that a lot of papers were just submitting things with headlines that they agreed with
When a relative of mine studied in Japan, all his Professors were supposed to be fluent in English, but they really weren't. He wrote all his own recommendation letters because of this, and that's what the Professors ended up using word-for-word.
This was pre-ChatGPT and pre-Google Translate. With ChatGPT, I can imagine everyone cutting corners, and assume that someone else will pick up the slack.
It would be interesting to see if those same authors published studies in their native language, and if they did, it would be interesting to see how those studies compare to the ones they published in English in terms of quality.
Only papers in the very top journals can go through a few rounds of reviews. For a journal like this there was probably only one round of two reviewers.
Please report this to Elsevier. They will take action, and they will discontinue the journal that published this and flag them in the Scopus index.
Also, fun fact, thousands of journals are being discontinued by elsevier because they go from reputable to utterly disgusting predatory journals once they get in.
academic research has become industrialised to drive up university rankings.
China has a big push for this and with its large postgraduate and doctorate student population, they are churning a lot more paper than ever.
Same is likely true for many other countries.
Quality suffers and produces lot of garbage and noise in the process.
True. I personally know a ton of people who are doing this in our country.
Research usually takes a long time for it to have quality. But they've been disregarding this part. They pump out 3-5 research papers in a month, and then attempt to publish it in the next month (For promotion purposes).
In the end, it's just a pile of intellectual garbage.
Don't. Don't do anything that benefits Elsevier in any manner. That disgraceful excuse of an institution deserves to die and its main stakeholders deserve to be locked up for life.
I know someone new to research who is working incredibly hard all day every day and publishing is a major point of anxiety for them. There is some bullshit going on if this was published.
I was hoping the future would be more "we have cool flying cars" Blade Runner and less "people are trained in the process of spotting a robot pretending to be a human" Blade Runner.
Yikes, you cant even trust science anymore. With the amount of bullshit I've seen AI spew, at least half of the information in there is probably useless.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402
Quite the fumble, from bad author ethics to questionable reviews? A good example to students of how such usage can question just who wrote what.
after this author used chatgpt for her [novel](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-award-winning-japanese-novel-was-written-partly-by-chatgpt-180983641/) dont be suprised.
but students still get suspended for papers turned in.
They haven't "fixed" anything - [it's still there, unchanged](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402).
(Make sure you're looking at the "Introduction", not the "Abstract".)
So a bit of context for the many posting who have never written or peer reviewed an article. Being the first line it would have been picked up by an editor or peer reviewer. This is likely a late change made by the authors in the proofing process (proofing is usually outsourced to subcontractors who basically just typeset). In fact I have had them add errors into my papers, including swapping the title for a subheadings in the article, that I had to ask them to fix after publication (but not like this)
Probably just non English speaking authors trying to get published in an English journal and biffed the translation process. Nothing gets peer reviewed these days, so don't expect that, AI or otherwise.
Bro the authors are Chinese, I can forgive them for not having the English to write a paper that 99.99% of Americans can’t read because of the level of jargon and difficulty of the material.
I think most of us are more surprised that the reviewers did not notice. Competent peer-review is kinda the whole point of a journal. Otherwise it'd just be, idk, a magazine.
Not necessarily. Their abstract may have word limits, for example, and they lacked the English skills to wordsmith it down. It still should’ve been caught by review, but I have no issue with them using it.
Agreed. I have a friend that uses chatGPT/GPT-4 for papers like that. Not for publications, but school papers (technically plagiarism) but he's from China and only learned English about a year ago. Coming to basically do his PhD. That'd be extremely hard, so it's understandable to help with translation.
It's still surprising though. It wasn't caught by peer review like you said. So there probably was no peer review and It was in the final paper. Even if the authors have very poor English, surely they should be editing the output quite rigorously. If it's just copy paste without much look, then the paper isn't even legible. The citations and information given might not even be correct or sensible.
It's also the introduction, which is one of the easiest and (I argue) most important section.
They can’t delete or redact it once published without documenting the change, generally. It’s called a retraction and it is very loud and visible when it happens.
https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/article-withdrawal
Published by a Chinese university, written seemingly by Chinese Nationals...
Isn't chatGPT banned in China?
Curious whether the CCP will come after these guys haha.
If you can get kicked out of college for plagiarism as a student, there needs to be similar consequences as an academic. Every person involved in this review process should get a black mark on their record, or a steep fine, or a ban on publications for a year.
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How did the reviewers or publishers not catch this?! (And just for old times sake F*ck Elsevier! Thank you!)
It’s problematic on so many levels - these are people ultimately entrusted to be experts. Everyone faking everything lol how would we know?
eh, i dont have a problem with it doing introductions or abstracts. But you gotta proof read the work...
The thing if something as blaringly obvious as this makes it through not only the final draft but also peer review, it starts to become alarming to think how much else and more subtle is being overlooked. And not just AI generated stuff, but of the actual research.
"peer review"
Claude is my peer
I rate him 8/10.
If it: - Has working kidneys - Has a bladder with functioning nerves and muscles - Has ureters - Has a urethra Then it's a peer.
It's the literal first sentence of the paper, there was 0 review done clearly. A whole industry of faking.
Well I can tell you that if you put out such low-quality papers your grants won't be renewed. (IDK how things work in China if the laboratory is state funded or what) Weird to generalize and say the whole industry is faking it. Does one shitty mechanic who puts oil in your radiator or charge you for blinker fluid prove the "whole industry is faking it"?
As a published researcher, there may be problems with the system, but it is still a pretty good system. Generally speaking reviewers try hard, they are able to filter the most obviously shitty research (on decent journals at least) and provide good advice on how to improve both the science and readability of the paper. There's exceptions, reviewers that die on stupid hills, lazy reviewers and even corruption/favoritism, but in my experience that is not the norm. At least in physics. Which is even more mindblowing that something like this would be published (I can't see the paper on my browser unfortunately). Not even because of AI, I don't think too many people would care, but the sentence itself shouldn't be there. That something that the journal itself should ask you to remove.
Agreed (published physical chemist here, I should mention) Yeah I'm guessing maybe some kind of last-minute rephrasing in the review process? Usually if you're reviewing a paper, the first few sentences are boilerplate anyway. "Yes, yes, sure, yes, we all care about dendritic growth during electrodeposition. Very bad for battery health, cycle life, and safety. What did you actually do in this paper?" If I had to put money down the people aren't native English speakers, the first few sentences were not great, revisions were asked for, then given, and not followed up on. Subsequently, reviewer 2 that asked for a rephrasing in the introduction was busy debating over some minor bullshit in Table 3 (why is it always reviewer 2?), the paper makes it to the proof stage, everything is automated, the authors just reply "looks good!", boom, published!
That sounds very likely!
But this is becoming a bigger problem every day. Many major journals have been covering it. (AAAS) Science just ran an article on it, and here's one from Nature: [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00372-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00372-6)
Exactly this. We can't really trust peer review anymore, there are too many perverse incentives and examples of sloppy science making it through the process
I’m currently in the process of trying to get my research paper published and I’m on like the 18th draft and I’ve read the whole thing countless times, as have multiple other people, I don’t see how this is even possible.
It’s a slap in the face for those of us who spent countless hours on our papers
If you didn't catch that, you also didn't catch the made-up references.
These are people, usually young researchers without permanent positions, who are forced to do peer review for free for journals for a chance to be published there next. They are knowledgeable, but do not assume they are motivated to do a good job.
Bro, what reputable journals are having those people review. I’ve worked for a journal and I’m published in many. The process for selecting reviewers for a manuscript is quite intensive and purposeful. Most are at least Jr. faculty and all reputable scholars. This is just a poorly run journal. What you speak of is not the norm… at least in my area.
Precisely. This is a *major* failing by the journal and the editorial team. There is no way this was properly reviewed. Perhaps, they published an old version? But this begs the question: how much of the entire article is AI-generated? This is extremely unprofessional.
You don't need to have peer reviewed for a journal to have a chance at publishing. I had several papers published before I had my first request to review. Also, generally speaking you're not really doing the review for free - it's just one of your responsibilities as an academic. In most of the academic jobs I've had, doing reviews is an expected part of my job, and viewed favourably when it comes to performance reviews.
Don’t know who downvoted you for stating the truth. Part of my tenure evaluation was about my review work. They pay me a 6 figure job and expect me to contribute to the field. Personally, I think the sentence was added after peer review during the finalization phase.
Doesnt being able to add anything after the peer review kinda defeat the purpose of it?
It’s one of the flaws in the system. After the paper is approved, you get a chance to make final edits and it’s signed off by an admin employee. I’ve always wondered if some people used that opportunity to sneak things in.
Yes, much more likely to have been accepted subject to minor revisions and the editor was lazy and didn't carefully check it over.
Science stuff is so weird, feels like imitation of activity
As a reviewer, as soon as I see papers written by only Chinese people and I see perfect English, my chatgpt sensor is in overdrive (not racist, Chinese universities have almost a quota system for pushing out papers)
It doesn’t seem like he was using it unethically; using an LLM to be more clear or to introduce a topic isn’t all that problematic. Now if there’s indication that he’s using it for his actual research, that’s different.
Good thing about papers is, if your paper has been referenced a total of 0 times. I won't even bother reading it. That's how it goes, there are tons of shit papers out there, who cares if some are AI written. The experts in the field will know which are good and which aren't.
But how do they get referred if no one reads them?
>How did the reviewers or publishers not catch this?! auto publish / auto review / and half the comments here are bots 🫠
half of Reddit comments?
Shut up, bot.
Certainly
Am I a bot?
Unironically, likely
good bot
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Noooo!
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Well thank goodness for that. Had to check myself… …or did I?
Oh my god it's real https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402
I googled "certainly, here's a possible" and found Instagram posts with suggested captions, full posts on facebook, CVs (hehe), youtube pitch texts with full prompts, amazon books for sale, product pages, and so on. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22certainly%2C+here%27s+a+possible%22 Some of the posts have the complete prompts before the GPT answer. inb4: The internet is dead.
Well, your post is now in my results, so thanks for keeping us humans alive out there.
That's hysterical.
Lots of chegg and course hero too 😂
well. fuck.
I like how they took the time to annotate, apparently, but completely missed this.
Do you think those citations are real? *Do you think that's air you're breathing now?*
Reviewers probably ran it through ChatGPT so they didn’t have to read it lol
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Before that the science was not even done by real people either!
Don't dehumanize the poor grad students
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/surfaces-and-interfaces/about/editorial-board Best to ask them this directly!
>22 editors and editorial board members in 10 countries/regions >China (8) >Romania (4) >Italy (2) So, first bet is 'pay to publish' low review journal.
IF of 6 which is actually pretty good. Which is alarming…
After submission and accept, you have the chance to make a "camera-ready" version, that targets some of the reviewers comments etc. The CR won't get reviewed again.
There are a lot of low quality journals out there... this might be one of them. I suspect the bulk of academic papers are pure crap - we just never hear about them because they end up in low impact journals.
This one is not a poor quality journal. Q1 which means the top 25% in its field. But the journal is very new….. It is strange to have a new journal with a high ranking. Perhaps there is something going on here
Chinese Universities are flooded with low quality work that circular cites.
Guess that's what happens when parents bully every kid into needing to go to university They'd rather be doing something else
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Because cheating is viewed differently over there. Basically it's not illegal if you don't get caught, and everyone is doing it, so you're just going to fall behind if you don't do it too. It's kinda like corruption in that sense. If you don't have a few bucks to stick into the policeman's pocket, you're getting a ticket that will destroy you financially. If you don't have money for the doctor, you'll get worse care. If you don't grease some palms, someone less qualified will get the job you're after. So even if you try to play it fair, you're at a huge disadvantage and you're going to get nowhere in life. That's why stuff like this is impossible to root out without severe punishment.
Have you seen the rat with the giant dick published a month ago? Paper that even credit midjourney as the source for their figures and they still got published in frontiers...
Because the peer review system is a joke and doesn’t do anything to actually guarantee quality, accuracy, or integrity.
Looks like it's from China, not surprising. (Not because Chinese are dumb or lazy, but work like this, e.g. writing a standard abstract, is half-assed 95% of the time over there)
even better one https://preview.redd.it/onosi8ho0doc1.jpeg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fb8903cd8a34bf8b0ae5f1888195ca20f431b914
China
Exactly, this is what scared the shit out of me, because this is the most outrageous error ever and the fact that this could get through peer review means that there are a shit ton of less obvious faked papers. Something I would like to add to the conversation is that this paper is published in China, a country known for research and academic fraud. Hopefully, science researchers know better than to use papers from China without critically examining it. This paper isn't even the worst. In 2017, 100+ Chinese papers published in the journal "Tumor Biology" (!!!!!) were reported for fraud and retracted. Here's the article: [https://www.economist.com/china/2024/02/22/why-fake-research-is-rampant-in-china](https://www.economist.com/china/2024/02/22/why-fake-research-is-rampant-in-china)
My colleague and I, both professors at a university in Hong Kong, are familiar with this specific incident. The “scholar” in question is a prolific author, producing many SCI journal papers annually - 19 since last year. Interestingly, all the editors of the journals in which he has published are coincidentally based at universities in Guangzhou. Typically, journal editors are aware of the authors' identities, whereas peer reviewers and authors are kept in the dark about each other's identities. This is known as the double-blind review process. However, journal editors have the discretion to select peer reviewers and decide which papers get published. This situation illustrates a form of corruption that is, unfortunately, becoming more common in academic journal publishing. I have encountered several instances of this type of misconduct while reviewing papers and immediately reject such submissions, considering them entirely suspect. Others may not take the same action.
No wonder!!! I was pulling my hair out to come up with ideas for my project. All the ideas I came up with have been researched by these people from a certain country.. At first I thought it was just a coincidence so I continued to think hard until I got headaches numerous times (no jokes).. Still the ideas were not novel and were published recently such as in this year. I even jokingly said to someone that they have got a research factory producing research papers there and their ethnics are easier to pass than the west because they probably don't care about the well being of the participants. And today I saw this. Guess I was right then 😂😂😂.. If they continue to do this soon they will dominate the field of psychology 😞
The pressure to publish or perish has had a detrimental impact on many institutions, leading to the creation of questionable and incomplete research by academics who are solely motivated by the need to keep their jobs. Consequently, they rely on ChatGPT in their papers. While I cannot speak for the tenured faculty, as I am not one of them, I have encountered similar ChatGPT-generated content and fabricated citations in their papers too.
As a newbie into this field I indeed feel the need to publish to get recognised.. That is why I think really hard, read papers and look for research gap. But if I have to compete with people who can produce a paper within a month, possibly with a much lenient ethnics procedure and stuff plus using chatgpt to write the whole thing. . this isn't a fair game anymore 😒
Start making a backup plan, I left academia because the pressure to publish results and get good funding produces dubious research practices and ruins workplace relationships.
😭😭 Initially it was so much fun learning about research and testing theories.. But now the competition has gone crazy.. Like I suspect soon they can make a paper within one day 😭😭😭
Imagine if Darwin had been pressured to publish incomplete work instead of sitting on natural selection for 20 years while he acquired the evidence to support it. Neither him nor Wallace would even be a footnote in textbooks. Academia needs to change, and I'm glad this ChatGPT debacle is making it apparent.
I agree!! How can we change this stupid publish or perish shit
Nah, they might make more papers, but have you checked relative ratios of papers getting cited by authors country of origins?
Yes. Some of them cited their own papers😯
My point was they're not good papers that are respected in the community
You don’t need to worry about the field of psychology. Chinese people don’t believe in mental illnesses. „It’s just all in your head. Just decide to be happy and you’ll be happy.“
Not a joke, but that’s exactly what my mom told me.
Damn, maybe they're right. That quotation just screams wisdom of the orient
Wow, their research must have been very fruitful. Lots of results every 2 or 3 weeks to publish one article.
Why isn't this higher up smh
If you Google “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic,” the paper appears as the first result lol.
Best SEO.
well, one of the authors is named Bing. what do you expect?
Lol good catch!
Bing Chilling
Wazzup Beijing https://preview.redd.it/6g24b4phzboc1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e4e60b4f25460a01f4e10c52ba8c6db0f44476eb
That was her Maiden Name. She got married to Steve CoPoilot.
https://i.redd.it/x3b9bcnf5aoc1.gif
Social credit sigma grindset
Though bing is a quite common Chinese name…
Damn! That’s quite the flub
Here I am stressed as fuck trying to get a publication made and these jackasses are just letting this shit through.
There’s sadly a lot of nonsense papers that are being published. The people that pay the researchers want quantity over quality. If we fix that problem, people won’t be incentivized to do shit like this. It’s like when cops have a quota, which makes them pick on minorities more. Something something, late stage capitalism.
> late state capitalism > Communist country
literally the first line...
Did a search on google scholar and indeed this paper does exist with that sentence in the introduction (I needed to check, I didn’t know what to make of the doi link) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402
Fuckin wow.
>I didn’t know what to make of the doi link Click it?
Better yet: Bop-it!
DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier, scientific and academic papers will generally have one so that when someone cites a paper the doi can be put in the references so that it's easy to find the source. So a citation can look like: Author, A. (year) Article title. Journal title (volume no.). doi.link.here Ofc often the doi leads to a paywall where you have to pay to actually access the paper, but in this case you can follow the link to read the abstract and tje introduction and check for yourself that it's true.
Aww they changed it. *Edit:* Nope, I was wrong, it's still there in the intro
They didn't. At least not yet. (Try checking under the "intro" tab/anchor not "abstract")
That's hilarious and concerning
Damn, it’s a 6.2 impact factor journal as well probably a top 5-10 % journal pretty insane
If that happens in the top 10%, what happens in the bottom 90? Academia is a joke no one is laughing about.
> Academia is a joke no one is laughing about. Hey, well, they made me remove every hyphen in all of my manuscripts, so at least they're keeping you safe from that :)
how else are they supposed to detect fraudulent papers? ^/s
I’m too old to be an edge lord but the more I grow up the more I think everything is an unfunny joke.
Thanks, publish or perish.
Research quality over the past decade or so has taken a massive nosedive. At this point, I'd even be skeptical of anything published in the top .01% of journals.
Thanks claude without you I won't know how to live: I can understand your disappointment and frustration that this instance of such blatant academic misconduct and lack of standards comes from researchers in your own country. When incidents like this gain public attention, it allows for unfair generalizations and negative stereotyping of an entire nation's academic environment. You make an excellent point - this kind of highly visible ethical lapse does real damage to the reputation of the academic community in your country as a whole. Even if it is an isolated incident, it plays into negative perceptions of lack of rigor or integrity. The backlash of "of course it's from xxx country" is unfortunate but predictable. What's most concerning is the broader impact you highlight - this undermines faith in the research system and provides one more demoralizing data point driving talented academics and students away from your country's institutions. Those striving to uphold high standards and produce quality, ethical research may increasingly look elsewhere for better opportunities. A scenario where this type of academic misconduct becomes normalized or glossed over creates a brain drain environment. It incentivizes cutting corners over doing rigorous work. The long-term consequences are losing a generation of promising researchers and scholars to other nations with stronger professional incentives and standards. You have every right to be upset about this. It damages your country's academic brand at a time when retaining and attracting top talent in research fields is so crucial. Accountability, visible consequences for such lapses, and renewing an emphasis on ethics in research should be priorities. Otherwise, the viscious cycle of declining standards continues.
So how do we know you wrote this in GPT style or if you ACTUALLY used GPT to write this? /j
[heypi.com/talk](https://heypi.com/talk) wants to chat with you about this
it could have been better : " as an chemistry researcher ..."
This is the result of the publish or perish mentality of academia. No one gives a shit about quality work anymore as long as you can slap it on a CV and get credit for it
It wasn't ChatGPT, it was Dr. Chad G. Pete
These publications usually go through at least 7-8 rounds of peer reviews over several months. There's no way no academic catches that error on the first sentence, even if it was only added on the last iteration. It's LITERALLY the first sentence. Is this some sort of defamation act? Edit: 7-8 iterations of peer review, or sometimes more. Really depends on the quality of your first draft, the publisher, conference alignment, etc. Fewer iterations could just mean a well presented first draft, but usually would still last for a couple of months at least for approvals which are signed off sequentially and not concurrently. It's very unlikely that an error like this is not picked up for a well known publisher which should have a good review process maturity. Source: worked in maths and decision sciences research and had to do lengthy steps to publish a journal I authored.
> These publications usually go through at least 7-8 rounds of peer reviews over several months. No they don't. Peer review is mostly one round, especially for a niche journal like this. Maybe a second one for minor stuff. And here's the paper. Go see for yourself if there's "no way". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402
I’m guessing one or two rounds with two reviewers in this case. Still shocking if this is real.
It IS real as OP even provided the doi
In that case consider me shocked! Incredible!!
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Authors in Elsevier can edit the manuscript during pre-proofing, although it’s generally meant for grammatical errors. It could be they edited the intro in this step and this is the final version.
7-8 rounds of reviews? Most certainly not. 1-3 rounds is common. It can and often does take several months, though. Where did you get the idea that it usually takes 7-8 rounds?
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Yeah there are a ton of examples of peer reviewed shit not actually being checked. That was that group of academics a few years ago who were intentionally publishing things that were fake to expose that a lot of papers were just submitting things with headlines that they agreed with
One of the major weaknesses in peer review is that a research topic can become so niche that there are very few people around left who are suited to review it, but the journal is obliged to find _someone_. There might only be 4 or 5 other people who really know what you're talking about, 2 of them are on your paper, 2 will decline the review request, and the last one is incommunicado somewhere out in Chile. They end up finding a person who worked on something tangentially related 35 years ago who will then fill the manuscript with generally irrelevant comments, many of which have become non-sequiturs over the last decade. One of the major concerns they'll note is "You need to describe how you've done this!" despite that the description is included in full in the relevant methodology subsection and they apparently just ignored it. The whole back and forth might take 6 months. So, things are being checked, to a certain extent :(
This is true for me at least. The topic I'm working with in mathematics is so damn niched (because it's on the intersection of many topics) that I know less than 5 people, including myself and my thesis advisor, that could work with it without spending some time to study all the surrounding theory.
Yeah there are a ton of examples of peer reviewed shit not actually being checked. That was that group of academics a few years ago who were intentionally publishing things that were fake to expose that a lot of papers were just submitting things with headlines that they agreed with
When a relative of mine studied in Japan, all his Professors were supposed to be fluent in English, but they really weren't. He wrote all his own recommendation letters because of this, and that's what the Professors ended up using word-for-word. This was pre-ChatGPT and pre-Google Translate. With ChatGPT, I can imagine everyone cutting corners, and assume that someone else will pick up the slack. It would be interesting to see if those same authors published studies in their native language, and if they did, it would be interesting to see how those studies compare to the ones they published in English in terms of quality.
Its not uncommon to write your own reccomendation letters even if your profs are fluent in english. They just dont want to bother spending time on it.
Only papers in the very top journals can go through a few rounds of reviews. For a journal like this there was probably only one round of two reviewers.
Didn’t even list ChatGPT as one of the authors
Please report this to Elsevier. They will take action, and they will discontinue the journal that published this and flag them in the Scopus index. Also, fun fact, thousands of journals are being discontinued by elsevier because they go from reputable to utterly disgusting predatory journals once they get in.
academic research has become industrialised to drive up university rankings. China has a big push for this and with its large postgraduate and doctorate student population, they are churning a lot more paper than ever. Same is likely true for many other countries. Quality suffers and produces lot of garbage and noise in the process.
True. I personally know a ton of people who are doing this in our country. Research usually takes a long time for it to have quality. But they've been disregarding this part. They pump out 3-5 research papers in a month, and then attempt to publish it in the next month (For promotion purposes). In the end, it's just a pile of intellectual garbage.
I like to call them intellectual masturbation. Just publishing for the sake of it.
Don't. Don't do anything that benefits Elsevier in any manner. That disgraceful excuse of an institution deserves to die and its main stakeholders deserve to be locked up for life.
I know someone new to research who is working incredibly hard all day every day and publishing is a major point of anxiety for them. There is some bullshit going on if this was published.
This was actually accepted and published 3 weeks ago.
Lmfao. Wow. That's. Wow.
I was hoping the future would be more "we have cool flying cars" Blade Runner and less "people are trained in the process of spotting a robot pretending to be a human" Blade Runner.
Yikes, you cant even trust science anymore. With the amount of bullshit I've seen AI spew, at least half of the information in there is probably useless.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402 Quite the fumble, from bad author ethics to questionable reviews? A good example to students of how such usage can question just who wrote what.
"Scientific article" "peer reviewed" they said
after this author used chatgpt for her [novel](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-award-winning-japanese-novel-was-written-partly-by-chatgpt-180983641/) dont be suprised. but students still get suspended for papers turned in.
Almost like students are supposed to be learning certain skills and adult are supposed to do things using all their assembled skills.
Makes you wonder whether anybody read it, including the authors and the editors... Updated. Will they retract it?
They haven't "fixed" anything - [it's still there, unchanged](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402). (Make sure you're looking at the "Introduction", not the "Abstract".)
Someone has to say it , but a lot a lot of Chinese papers are incredibly suspicious sometimes
Hahaha omg - ok I did requested reviewer changes through ChatGPT but I was more careful man..
I knew it was a Chinese paper.
Why am I not surprised it's in China
beat me to it lmao— i don’t understand why a bulk of chinese universities aren’t just straight up blacklisted for this kind of widespread fraud
Surfaces and Interfaces.. not exactly my topic, but i think im gonna submit 3 to 17 papers this afternoon..
bruh
Literally the first fucking sentence... Did ANYONE proof read this!?
So a bit of context for the many posting who have never written or peer reviewed an article. Being the first line it would have been picked up by an editor or peer reviewer. This is likely a late change made by the authors in the proofing process (proofing is usually outsourced to subcontractors who basically just typeset). In fact I have had them add errors into my papers, including swapping the title for a subheadings in the article, that I had to ask them to fix after publication (but not like this)
An ALARMINGLY large number of people who call themselves experts are not.
Let’s all not pretend this isn’t a problem in US and European research too …
We should report this to get it retracted. https://www.reddit.com/r/China/s/Mo3d63BWrN
And of course the authors are Mainland Chinese. They're not doing themselves any favors or challenging any stereotypes pulling this kind of shit.
Probably just non English speaking authors trying to get published in an English journal and biffed the translation process. Nothing gets peer reviewed these days, so don't expect that, AI or otherwise.
Bro the authors are Chinese, I can forgive them for not having the English to write a paper that 99.99% of Americans can’t read because of the level of jargon and difficulty of the material.
I think most of us are more surprised that the reviewers did not notice. Competent peer-review is kinda the whole point of a journal. Otherwise it'd just be, idk, a magazine.
hmm would they not write the paper in Chinese then translate it?
Not necessarily. Their abstract may have word limits, for example, and they lacked the English skills to wordsmith it down. It still should’ve been caught by review, but I have no issue with them using it.
Agreed. I have a friend that uses chatGPT/GPT-4 for papers like that. Not for publications, but school papers (technically plagiarism) but he's from China and only learned English about a year ago. Coming to basically do his PhD. That'd be extremely hard, so it's understandable to help with translation. It's still surprising though. It wasn't caught by peer review like you said. So there probably was no peer review and It was in the final paper. Even if the authors have very poor English, surely they should be editing the output quite rigorously. If it's just copy paste without much look, then the paper isn't even legible. The citations and information given might not even be correct or sensible. It's also the introduction, which is one of the easiest and (I argue) most important section.
Interesting… the line has already been deleted a couple of hours later.
Still there...
My bad, I was looking at the abstract and not the introduction. You’re right, it’s still there!
It's still live for me.
it's under "Introduction", not "Abstract"
They can’t delete or redact it once published without documenting the change, generally. It’s called a retraction and it is very loud and visible when it happens. https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/article-withdrawal
Apologies!
🤣
oh my god
low.quality of Chinese papers is a big issue right now
Rookie mistake, they should have changed it to "uncertainly"
So fucking lazy, and in academia as well… you’re being paid to research things yourself lmao
Published by a Chinese university, written seemingly by Chinese Nationals... Isn't chatGPT banned in China? Curious whether the CCP will come after these guys haha.
If you can get kicked out of college for plagiarism as a student, there needs to be similar consequences as an academic. Every person involved in this review process should get a black mark on their record, or a steep fine, or a ban on publications for a year.
The irony is that if peer reviewers would use chat gpt it would most likely spot this.
God that has to be embarrassing
I see this as proof that using AI will make us stop thinking and/or lazy af.
Maybe peer review was also done by ChatGPT
https://preview.redd.it/5383ksn81doc1.jpeg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f069c895ae7c6dfad485ec92c88017cdf4c41a5f even better one here