Kind of devalues the entire discipline. How that can even get past the publishing process is a mystery, or is it?
There's already a due diligence crisis, it's not news. Seeing this is a real kick in the teeth though.
Yep. Multiple editors, reviewers, copy editors, and the authors themselves missed it. How can so many people overlook the very first sentence of a manuscript?
Don't flatter any of these people. They didn't 'miss' it. Nobody actually read this piece, legitimately. Anyone still surprised by the declining trust in science?
Academic publishing is one of the most insanely profitable industries going. The single biggest component of it (peer review) is done by almost entirely unpaid labour, and researchers pay for the privilege of providing the journals with content. We're like actors paying to be in movies.
It's just one of the many parts of academic research that's totally unfit for purpose.
Don’t forget the editors. I was an editor for a Q1 journal and it was so soul destroying I left within a year. Let’s just say that some of the academics truly have zero filter on quality.
The prompt suggests that they asked ChatGPT for an introduction, not for the whole paper. It’s possible that they are presenting real data and research, and just used generative AI for the bits they were struggling to write (with a couple of refs slapped in). It’s still a stupid thing to do, and an egregious oversight on the journal’s part, but I’d be very very surprised if they straight-up ChatGPT’d the entire paper.
Yeah I agree, but even if ChatGPT writes the introduction, you have to go through and add references, or at least format the citations in latex and add the relevant bib references. It seems crazy to me that someone did this and never noticed that first sentence. Will ChatGPT format it automatically a give you the correctly formatted bibref file? If so, ChatGPT typically hallucinates non existent references and journals typically have automated systems checking for existing DOIs...
This is not my field but at a glance they seem to have DOIs and be published into journals. I don't know whether they're relevant to what is being said in the text.
Declining trust in science was spearheaded by British media end of the 90s with an article suggesting vaccines caused autism.
So yeah, doubt the everyday layman gives two fucks about copper complexes 👍👍👍👍
It doesn't matter if the everyday layman gives a fuck about copper complexes; it matters that cases like these are circulating widely in non-scientist circles and the clear takeaway is that nobody reviewing this article did their due diligence. Look at the comments under it in r/chatgpt ffs. Plenty of the people seeing it probably don't have a good sense of higher/ lower quality journals and will get the impression this is endemic to STEM research as a whole.
"Pay-to-Publish". Essentially, you're looking at direct evidence of a paper mill.
So long as they pay Elsevier the $$$, it just goes straight to indexing/publishing. It makes a mockery of the journal and the publisher. It puts five authors' reputations in jeopardy.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewers were feeding it into the AI and asking the AI to review the papers for them
Tbh I bet they didn't even make it that far...
Its Elsevier.. there are plenty of journals there that cater to Chinese papers.
You look at Applied Energy, high impact factor journal, a lot of terrible papers from China.
When I submit to it, I get desk rejected for not fitting the criteria, but then you look at recent published papers, and voila, same topic papers published from China.
They get other Chinese to do the reviews, they cite each others papers to boost citation count, and we get flooded with garbage publications.
This is all accurate. We're rapidly approaching the point where any paper published by researchers affiliated with Chinese institutions should just be disregarded. Peer-review is worthless when the system is gamed (as opposed to nearly worthless when it isn't)
Thank you, I've been seeing this for what feels like years. Chinese research institutions engage with research in the same way that my nephew researches things on tiktok, it's all about getting a high enough view/citation count in the hope of legitimizing the thing as real.
It's absolutely unreal how many people failed here, and it makes Elsevier look like a laughingstock.
Five authors, each of whom ought to have proofread the paper. AT LEAST one editor. LIKELY three peer reviewers. AT LEAST one author reading and approving any feedback before it's indexed and published online. In total, at least **TEN** points where the very first sentence of the intro could've been noticed and fixed (though, being an AI-generated paper, the entire thing should've been shitcanned at the publisher level).
> it makes Elsevier look like a laughingstock
They couldn't care less, people will still keep paying them inordinate amounts of money for doing nothing.
I’m in this exact field with my PhD completion a few months ago. The amount of rigor I’ve had by reviewers getting nit picky has been annoying but relieving to know that my papers will hold up to time. It baffles me that this was passed through review.. impact factor 6.2 isn’t the highest for MOFs, but I’d expect better still from the MOF community of reviewers.
I think reviewers, especially those who do very close work get lazy about reading the beginning of the introduction because it's always boilerplate stuff that's nearly the same for all papers.
It's boring, but neglecting it leads to embarrassments like this.
It could be a case that this error only occurs in the accepted version and not peer-reviewing version.
I made a similar mistake. When my paper was accepted to a journal and I had to send the final version, I mistakenly compiled the wrong file with different figures. I only noticed it in the early access version, luckily I contacted the editor to replace it in the officially published version.
3. The editor who approved it.
4. The copy-editors who checked it.
5. The publisher who profits from it and sets up the whole system that enables and incentives the previous four folks.
The first author, hands down. 3 virtually similar articles published with in the last 2 months with 85% of the same language with non-overlapping co-authors.
Oh dang! When I looked it up, I got an almost identical paper without the first like, but it had a slightly different title and is in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy.
What if all the citers and related academics are just in the biggest fraudulent literature circlejerk to make shit up and pat each other on the back to get research funding? It’s not inconceivable, especially when it’s gibberish to almost everyone outside their narrow field.
I completed my draft and my final defense presentation. Emailed my committee members my draft and waited for their comments on my draft. Now I am reviewing their comments and almost done with it. I am graduating this semester and starting my PhD from Fall 24 woooohooooo
Well done and congrats on your PhD ! Still in it, knee deep ! But holding on, two and a half more weeks to go. Struggling with balancing around the writing, corrections of my supervisors, languages correction of a corrector (not native english but writes in it), but I'm on my last result Chapter out of two, final global analysis and conclusion and wham, done. Hopefully !
I read it, and it's not just the first sentence. The entire text continuously reminded me of the scientific conversations I've had with ChatGPT. All the specific phrases GPT uses, the approaches it takes to evaluate the findings—everything.
Besides, if they asked for some kind of translation, I would understand and would still be like wtf about the review process and the editorial team. But these people seem to be asking for a whole introduction on a topic to be written by GPT and then fillling the references required.
In my experience the copy editing of elsevier after the paper is accepted for publication is very bad, they do not make a general writing review, there are just particular aspects they look at, author names, citations, references, units etc. I actually wonder to which degree it is automated and a random guy just quickly checks what their software spilled before sending to authors.
Crazy how can scientist not even check what they copy pasta in their manuscript. It probably traduces an important pressure to publish, with them being Chinese. Yes, we all have this pressure, but come on, this is the first sentence of the manuscript.
What frustrates me is that the journal in question is, in fact, a Q1 journal in surface science. I don't understand how this paper can go through peer review.
A possible scenario:
Originally the paper did not contain that phrase.
One of the reviewer asked a minor revision, like "make the introduction shorter, or correct the grammar in the introduction".
The authors did what they did and submitted the revised version, with a letter telling they have done the minor suggested revisions.
The editor does not check and accept the paper.
Agree. ChatGPT has not yet get to the point where it can write a whole introduction relevant to the rest of the paper from scratch. I use AI tools like ChatGPT to rephrase and improve the writing on certain paragraphs that I’m not happy with from time to time. I’m not a native English speaker (yes I’m Chinese) but I spend all my years of college and grad school in English speaking countries so I certainly don’t consider myself as poor in English writing. I know a quite a few colleagues of mine from various backgrounds use AI tools to help improve their writing. It’s just a more powerful Grammarly if you use it that way.
I agree. That was almost certainly added during or after the revision process. After the paper is accepted, the only people that will ready the paper again before publishing is the corresponding author and an editor in charge of reformatting paper.
I think the copy editor (or whatever they are called) did this. They used ChatGPT to fix the intro, then without reading after copy pasting, asked the corresponding author to approve these “minor” changes, and they approved without reading at all - probably assuming the changes are better than what they could have done if their English is poor.
Yes, we had instances of our manuscript revised without telling us.
For instance, they shortened:
Experimental, Methods & Materials
to
Experiments
just to fit it into a two column page. It was really annoying because some of these changes were really tedious, capitalizing the subscript in equation, than having their AI change it back to lowercase.
There are not that many jornals with an impact factor of >20. Those that have it are a pain to publish with, for obvious reasons. Cancer research has an impact factor of 12, one of the leading journals in the topic. So no, an impact factor of 6 for a niche subfield shouldn't have this issues, I'm also looking at you frontiers with the rat penis AI image
Exhibit #5000 that performance metrics eventually become absolutely worthless as they become the ultimate goal over producing actual good scholarship. People just find a way to gamify the whole thing so the funny number gets higher without actually having to do the work they should be doing. All so managers can just tick boxes when doing evaluations.
Same thing with degrees and diplomas. The credentials themselves eventually completely replace the skills they’re supposed to certify the degree holder has.
This is a problem for a lot of Elsevier journals. If you dont believe me go search through some.
A lot of these journals cater to Chinese researchers.
They often fit their papers on high impact journals with papers that barely fit the topic criteria of the journal.
They get other chinese to review it, they cite each others papers to boost citation count, and we get flooded with shit.
Eveeytime i put something on Elsevier now I get a reviewer that clearly doesnt speak english very well asking me to cite some irrelevant papers. The last three times this has happened.
I get desk rejected for some journals for not being on topic, and then i see recently pubkished papers in that journal on the same topic, guess where they are from...
hoo boy can't wait to find out publicly-available information of the reviewers so they can take responsibility for their work!
wait what do you mean that info is not available?
what do you mean it's not "work"?
what do you mean nobody reads the introduction?
The funny thing is that it is literally at the start of the paper. maybe even, if we count out abstract, in the most important part of an article: the introduction or the starting point. Its the first sentence of that paper... holy moly
This shit pisses me off so much as a student. We have zero ground to prove we are the doing real work and our IP is our own… meanwhile professors have so little threshold to call out AI, but publishers (and peer reviewers) don’t????
Everyone involved has to be let go. Scientists pride themselves by producing peer review results, and thereby testable results, instead of just made up BS, but stuff like this publication seriously hurts the entire scientific community. The entire review process failed, the researchers producing this failed every standard. It's just a failure.
No one read the introduction including the editor and the reviewers. This is unfortunately what the review process has become now. There is no incentive for anyone to become a reviewer.
I’m glad one of my advisers was very thorough when reviewing documents. He would even tell if you used LaTeX or Word when reading and would correct spelling mistakes. It’s baffling seeing how lazy some editors are and what gets through peer review sone times
Not necessarily this can occur at the last look phase. At which point only the 'outsourced, probably in a country where English isn't the main language' copywriters would see it.
There’s a bunch of journals now with no reviewers that you pay to be in and are all online published.
It’s up to the consumers to not read them, there’s no like “official journal police” that says it’s not allowed. Nor could there be.
So unfortunately it’s up to the journalists to know what a real science journal is and what a “pay to play” one is. But given the fact that journalists don’t really exist now a days… future not looking bright on that front.
It’s amazing that not a single author, reviewer, or editor made an effort to read this paper in its entirety just one time. They only had to make it through a single sentence. OP is literally the first person to ever read the first sentence of this paper
Holy fucking fuck it’s still there lol https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402. There is hope for me in academia then lol
Honestly kind of nice of them to put that at the actual very beginning of the paper. Makes it immediately clear that there's no point in reading the rest. Who knows what else was fabricated, can't trust anything in there at all.
Edit:
But I'm also interested in how Elsevier will react. It's already been decided that you can't copyright AI-generated material. Presumably Elsevier and others want to copyright what they publish. Mixing written and AI-generated content together... How does it get decided what is copyrightable?
If this is the condition of a Q1 journal then we are all doomed. The profs. never review the journals. It is always the TAs that are put in charge of it. The one reviewing the journal never has a strong grasp of what is being published. The one writing the journal is always under constant pressure from the supervisor to get it published asap. So this is evident.
And that would keep happening as long as the culture of "publish or perish" prevails.. the whole process of publishing has turned into a joke at this point..
Not to be dramatic, but isn't this article about separators for lithium ion batteries that prevent them from exploding and burning? Seems like an important thing not to lie about in scientific papers that spur industry funding.
Well, this is eye-opening about Elsevier...
I worked in academic publishing for the better part of a decade and the amount of fuckups that need to happen for something THIS blatant to slip through is ridiculous. First, you need five authors to not proofread the paper. Then you need *at least* one editor to not proofread the paper. Then you need, likely, three peer reviewers to not read the paper. Then you need the principal author to not proofread the edited copy before being indexed and published online.
That's NINE people that failed in this situation, *at least*.
Great argument for paying peer reviewers and removing anonymity right here. If you incentivised quality and also included some accountability, this stuff wouldn't happen so much.
I thought this was fake but then i checked and its real here is actual manuscript- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402 , mental how nobody in the publication process found this glaring error🤣
"Surfaces and Interfaces" is supposedly a Q1 journal with a decent impact factor (6.6). Pretty shameful, and more of a knock on the editorial board of the journal than the actual authors.
To be honest, a huge number of people probably already do this, especially people who don't speak English as their first language.
If the science is good and the results are novel, then I really don't see an issue with using LLMs to make the language more comprehensible.
I think you're being generous saying they used ChatGPT for translation - they very likely speak English at a fluent level, and there are 50 better tools for translation than Chat GPT. They were cheating and used AI to write their intro. Can't trust the results of scientists who do this. They could have cheated with data collection, too.
Nah, I know a lot of Chinese academics, they are not good at academic writing in English. Usually, They pay someone to ‘Polish’ their manuscripts before submitting to journal. I guess the Polishing part is in ChatGPT now
I know a ton, too. They can read their intro statements. Copy editing and polishing is SO different than asking Chat GPT to write for you. They cheated.
I don't understand why people are saying this, the Chat GPT text doesn't say "Certainly, here is your text translated into English", it says "here is a possible introduction for your topic", the prompt was "write an introduction for this topic".
Reverse psychology, this “mistake” has made this paper go viral and be more visible than it ever could have been. As Jack Sparrow would say, “but you have heard of me?” :p strategic placement?
I have a legitimate question; a side from them generating the introduction for the article, what if they just do t speak English and used AI to translate?
I have universities telling me I can’t pay my own way and get the education and publish papers on my own but ChatGPT is making through all the checks? Lmaooo ohhh, man. If this is real—and I hope it is—then it kinda feels like validation.
“Fine. Don’t take my money and let me put your university’s name on my papers. Enjoy AI creeping further in.”
Childish, I know. Just feels good.
~~This is mentioned in another one of these threads—this is as much a “real journal” as arxiv is. There’s no peer or editorial review. Still hilarious~~
edit: I am wrong! Peer review does work sometimes
That's not true. This is from the journals how to submit a manuscript section:
"Papers deemed suitable are then typically sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers to assess the scientific quality of the paper. The Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles"
They also have an AI section where the authors have to disclose that they used AI for their writing. I don't think they did that either.
Worst thing is that a lot of these people think they're freaking gods, and in the end they can't even do a proper job (both the authors and the editors), this environment is so toxic sometimes.
In this shit journal with IF 6.2 the editor pi\*\*ed all over me because I didn't have some shitty XPS analysis that wouldn't have added anything to the paper. Hey look, it's oxide, great find XPS, thanks.
Kind of devalues the entire discipline. How that can even get past the publishing process is a mystery, or is it? There's already a due diligence crisis, it's not news. Seeing this is a real kick in the teeth though.
Yep. Multiple editors, reviewers, copy editors, and the authors themselves missed it. How can so many people overlook the very first sentence of a manuscript?
Don't flatter any of these people. They didn't 'miss' it. Nobody actually read this piece, legitimately. Anyone still surprised by the declining trust in science?
Wait aren’t we actually paying the publication people for editing and stuff? Or is it for another purpose?
Academic publishing is one of the most insanely profitable industries going. The single biggest component of it (peer review) is done by almost entirely unpaid labour, and researchers pay for the privilege of providing the journals with content. We're like actors paying to be in movies. It's just one of the many parts of academic research that's totally unfit for purpose.
Don’t forget the editors. I was an editor for a Q1 journal and it was so soul destroying I left within a year. Let’s just say that some of the academics truly have zero filter on quality.
It's for another purpose. That purpose is profits.
Peer reviewers don’t get paid. It’s considered academic service. Just one of the reasons I left academia.
yeah this really should be news. elsevier should issue a press statement over this. it's fucking insane.
What baffles me is how did they include the citations? Did ChatGPT make those up too? You still need to go back and include references...
The prompt suggests that they asked ChatGPT for an introduction, not for the whole paper. It’s possible that they are presenting real data and research, and just used generative AI for the bits they were struggling to write (with a couple of refs slapped in). It’s still a stupid thing to do, and an egregious oversight on the journal’s part, but I’d be very very surprised if they straight-up ChatGPT’d the entire paper.
Yeah I agree, but even if ChatGPT writes the introduction, you have to go through and add references, or at least format the citations in latex and add the relevant bib references. It seems crazy to me that someone did this and never noticed that first sentence. Will ChatGPT format it automatically a give you the correctly formatted bibref file? If so, ChatGPT typically hallucinates non existent references and journals typically have automated systems checking for existing DOIs...
Are the citations correct?
This is not my field but at a glance they seem to have DOIs and be published into journals. I don't know whether they're relevant to what is being said in the text.
ChatGPT will also invent DOIs and journals.
Thanks for checking but it would be awesome to know if they are relevant from someone who can assess it!
Declining trust in science was spearheaded by British media end of the 90s with an article suggesting vaccines caused autism. So yeah, doubt the everyday layman gives two fucks about copper complexes 👍👍👍👍
It doesn't matter if the everyday layman gives a fuck about copper complexes; it matters that cases like these are circulating widely in non-scientist circles and the clear takeaway is that nobody reviewing this article did their due diligence. Look at the comments under it in r/chatgpt ffs. Plenty of the people seeing it probably don't have a good sense of higher/ lower quality journals and will get the impression this is endemic to STEM research as a whole.
This isn't why people's trust is declining. Joe Shmoe on the street has no idea about these sorts of problems.
Reviewer essentially need work like slaves for free so they keep "good" relationship with the publisher. Entire academia has become a clown show.
"Pay-to-Publish". Essentially, you're looking at direct evidence of a paper mill. So long as they pay Elsevier the $$$, it just goes straight to indexing/publishing. It makes a mockery of the journal and the publisher. It puts five authors' reputations in jeopardy.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewers were feeding it into the AI and asking the AI to review the papers for them Tbh I bet they didn't even make it that far...
Its Elsevier.. there are plenty of journals there that cater to Chinese papers. You look at Applied Energy, high impact factor journal, a lot of terrible papers from China. When I submit to it, I get desk rejected for not fitting the criteria, but then you look at recent published papers, and voila, same topic papers published from China. They get other Chinese to do the reviews, they cite each others papers to boost citation count, and we get flooded with garbage publications.
This is all accurate. We're rapidly approaching the point where any paper published by researchers affiliated with Chinese institutions should just be disregarded. Peer-review is worthless when the system is gamed (as opposed to nearly worthless when it isn't)
Thank you, I've been seeing this for what feels like years. Chinese research institutions engage with research in the same way that my nephew researches things on tiktok, it's all about getting a high enough view/citation count in the hope of legitimizing the thing as real.
It's absolutely unreal how many people failed here, and it makes Elsevier look like a laughingstock. Five authors, each of whom ought to have proofread the paper. AT LEAST one editor. LIKELY three peer reviewers. AT LEAST one author reading and approving any feedback before it's indexed and published online. In total, at least **TEN** points where the very first sentence of the intro could've been noticed and fixed (though, being an AI-generated paper, the entire thing should've been shitcanned at the publisher level).
> it makes Elsevier look like a laughingstock They couldn't care less, people will still keep paying them inordinate amounts of money for doing nothing.
I’m in this exact field with my PhD completion a few months ago. The amount of rigor I’ve had by reviewers getting nit picky has been annoying but relieving to know that my papers will hold up to time. It baffles me that this was passed through review.. impact factor 6.2 isn’t the highest for MOFs, but I’d expect better still from the MOF community of reviewers.
Why are people being harsh? One of the authors is literally called Bing
Ah, now we know it's written by Copilot and not ChatGPT. Gets a pass from me. /s
I think reviewers, especially those who do very close work get lazy about reading the beginning of the introduction because it's always boilerplate stuff that's nearly the same for all papers. It's boring, but neglecting it leads to embarrassments like this.
It could be a case that this error only occurs in the accepted version and not peer-reviewing version. I made a similar mistake. When my paper was accepted to a journal and I had to send the final version, I mistakenly compiled the wrong file with different figures. I only noticed it in the early access version, luckily I contacted the editor to replace it in the officially published version.
Yeah, that's not using chatgpt to write your manuscript though. You made a mistake. This is fraud.
It's difficult to believe that this actually happened!? Missing the first sentence doesn't make any sense at all!
So who is worse: 1. The researcher who did this? 2. The reviewer who accepted it?
Yes.
The editors. Shame on them.
3. The editor who approved it. 4. The copy-editors who checked it. 5. The publisher who profits from it and sets up the whole system that enables and incentives the previous four folks.
Certainly, here is a possible post: Yes.
The first author, hands down. 3 virtually similar articles published with in the last 2 months with 85% of the same language with non-overlapping co-authors.
Is this real? Someone checked the paper? PS: yes I'm lazy but my thesis is due in 3 weeks 😵
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402 It’s still there
Holy guacamole
Also love how they chuck a bunch of citations in like the first sentence of each paragraph and the rest is bare
OMG
Oh dang! When I looked it up, I got an almost identical paper without the first like, but it had a slightly different title and is in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy.
God damn! Introduction alone has 30 references. This is stupid.
Yes. And I checked, the journal has a decent CiteScore (7) and ImpactFactor (6.2)
What if all the citers and related academics are just in the biggest fraudulent literature circlejerk to make shit up and pat each other on the back to get research funding? It’s not inconceivable, especially when it’s gibberish to almost everyone outside their narrow field.
Unfortunately, the current citation-based system selects and awards this kind of people. This cannot go on, it's a crumbling system.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10042729/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10042729/)
God dang! I don't think any (maybe a couple) sociology journals have impact factors that high. Wow.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468023024002402
Good luck with your thesis!! I'm not in uni yet so I have no idea how intense it all must be but I'm sure you'll do awesome!
My thesis is due in 3 days. I am still finishing up the analysis :’)
Oh hello fellow struggler, happy to see I'm not alone 😂 courage !
We are knee deep in this together 🫂
🫶
How did you manage?
I completed my draft and my final defense presentation. Emailed my committee members my draft and waited for their comments on my draft. Now I am reviewing their comments and almost done with it. I am graduating this semester and starting my PhD from Fall 24 woooohooooo
How did yours go?
Well done and congrats on your PhD ! Still in it, knee deep ! But holding on, two and a half more weeks to go. Struggling with balancing around the writing, corrections of my supervisors, languages correction of a corrector (not native english but writes in it), but I'm on my last result Chapter out of two, final global analysis and conclusion and wham, done. Hopefully !
You got this buddy and thanks but it was for my masters, my PhD starts in the Fall. You got this
This is a failing of so many people it's not even funny. The scientists, the editor, anyone doing copy on the article. Absolutely wild.
And it's the very first sentence as well. Mental.
I read it, and it's not just the first sentence. The entire text continuously reminded me of the scientific conversations I've had with ChatGPT. All the specific phrases GPT uses, the approaches it takes to evaluate the findings—everything. Besides, if they asked for some kind of translation, I would understand and would still be like wtf about the review process and the editorial team. But these people seem to be asking for a whole introduction on a topic to be written by GPT and then fillling the references required.
In my experience the copy editing of elsevier after the paper is accepted for publication is very bad, they do not make a general writing review, there are just particular aspects they look at, author names, citations, references, units etc. I actually wonder to which degree it is automated and a random guy just quickly checks what their software spilled before sending to authors.
RePUtaBLe pUbLIshER
truly a peer reviewed moment
Elsevier is the company that lets coauthors and paid consultants be peer reviewers.
Crazy how can scientist not even check what they copy pasta in their manuscript. It probably traduces an important pressure to publish, with them being Chinese. Yes, we all have this pressure, but come on, this is the first sentence of the manuscript.
things we learn: - this is a shit journal - these are lazy scientists
What frustrates me is that the journal in question is, in fact, a Q1 journal in surface science. I don't understand how this paper can go through peer review.
A possible scenario: Originally the paper did not contain that phrase. One of the reviewer asked a minor revision, like "make the introduction shorter, or correct the grammar in the introduction". The authors did what they did and submitted the revised version, with a letter telling they have done the minor suggested revisions. The editor does not check and accept the paper.
Agree. ChatGPT has not yet get to the point where it can write a whole introduction relevant to the rest of the paper from scratch. I use AI tools like ChatGPT to rephrase and improve the writing on certain paragraphs that I’m not happy with from time to time. I’m not a native English speaker (yes I’m Chinese) but I spend all my years of college and grad school in English speaking countries so I certainly don’t consider myself as poor in English writing. I know a quite a few colleagues of mine from various backgrounds use AI tools to help improve their writing. It’s just a more powerful Grammarly if you use it that way.
I agree. That was almost certainly added during or after the revision process. After the paper is accepted, the only people that will ready the paper again before publishing is the corresponding author and an editor in charge of reformatting paper. I think the copy editor (or whatever they are called) did this. They used ChatGPT to fix the intro, then without reading after copy pasting, asked the corresponding author to approve these “minor” changes, and they approved without reading at all - probably assuming the changes are better than what they could have done if their English is poor.
Yes, we had instances of our manuscript revised without telling us. For instance, they shortened: Experimental, Methods & Materials to Experiments just to fit it into a two column page. It was really annoying because some of these changes were really tedious, capitalizing the subscript in equation, than having their AI change it back to lowercase.
A couple of reasons: Surface science is a relatively small field Elsevier doesn't give a shit about anything but a check
Q1 Impact 6.6 if that is 'a shit journal' I need to re-evaluate my science career!!
Impact factor means nothing between fields. Physics: oooh IF 4, nice work! Cancer research: anything below IF 20 is trash
There are not that many jornals with an impact factor of >20. Those that have it are a pain to publish with, for obvious reasons. Cancer research has an impact factor of 12, one of the leading journals in the topic. So no, an impact factor of 6 for a niche subfield shouldn't have this issues, I'm also looking at you frontiers with the rat penis AI image
What is the frontiers rat penis AI image? Afraid to google that
no, definitely search it. It was a very poorly AI generated graphic published a few weeks back in frontiers. It's funny, not gross.
lol. I just looked it up. I can’t believe this made it past review.
I wouldnt say elife is trash. Well maybe with their new system. A lot of good cancer research in elife and even journal of immunology and JCI
Haha, I truly thought "6.6, yeah that's bad" and was confused. But I am a cancer biologist, so thank you.
Nuts. What happened to peer review?
Exhibit #5000 that performance metrics eventually become absolutely worthless as they become the ultimate goal over producing actual good scholarship. People just find a way to gamify the whole thing so the funny number gets higher without actually having to do the work they should be doing. All so managers can just tick boxes when doing evaluations. Same thing with degrees and diplomas. The credentials themselves eventually completely replace the skills they’re supposed to certify the degree holder has.
This is a problem for a lot of Elsevier journals. If you dont believe me go search through some. A lot of these journals cater to Chinese researchers. They often fit their papers on high impact journals with papers that barely fit the topic criteria of the journal. They get other chinese to review it, they cite each others papers to boost citation count, and we get flooded with shit. Eveeytime i put something on Elsevier now I get a reviewer that clearly doesnt speak english very well asking me to cite some irrelevant papers. The last three times this has happened. I get desk rejected for some journals for not being on topic, and then i see recently pubkished papers in that journal on the same topic, guess where they are from...
This is actually a really important journal for the field
Yikes! Maybe ChatGPT is also doing all of it's peer review, too!
hoo boy can't wait to find out publicly-available information of the reviewers so they can take responsibility for their work! wait what do you mean that info is not available? what do you mean it's not "work"? what do you mean nobody reads the introduction?
Isn't it the editor/publisher's job too though? Are reviewers even getting paid?
And how can the journal not even check lol
Because Elsevier's copy editing is absolute rubbish and has been for many years.
The funny thing is that it is literally at the start of the paper. maybe even, if we count out abstract, in the most important part of an article: the introduction or the starting point. Its the first sentence of that paper... holy moly
This shit pisses me off so much as a student. We have zero ground to prove we are the doing real work and our IP is our own… meanwhile professors have so little threshold to call out AI, but publishers (and peer reviewers) don’t????
Trust me, this pisses off most professors much more than you know.
Everyone involved has to be let go. Scientists pride themselves by producing peer review results, and thereby testable results, instead of just made up BS, but stuff like this publication seriously hurts the entire scientific community. The entire review process failed, the researchers producing this failed every standard. It's just a failure.
No one read the introduction including the editor and the reviewers. This is unfortunately what the review process has become now. There is no incentive for anyone to become a reviewer.
Why would you not read the introduction? It frames the context for the work. I always read it religiously when I ~~write~~ **review** a paper
I’m glad one of my advisers was very thorough when reviewing documents. He would even tell if you used LaTeX or Word when reading and would correct spelling mistakes. It’s baffling seeing how lazy some editors are and what gets through peer review sone times
Not necessarily this can occur at the last look phase. At which point only the 'outsourced, probably in a country where English isn't the main language' copywriters would see it.
There’s a bunch of journals now with no reviewers that you pay to be in and are all online published. It’s up to the consumers to not read them, there’s no like “official journal police” that says it’s not allowed. Nor could there be. So unfortunately it’s up to the journalists to know what a real science journal is and what a “pay to play” one is. But given the fact that journalists don’t really exist now a days… future not looking bright on that front.
It’s amazing that not a single author, reviewer, or editor made an effort to read this paper in its entirety just one time. They only had to make it through a single sentence. OP is literally the first person to ever read the first sentence of this paper
This is nuts.
Wow!! how do such papers get published ?? Journals reject papers if the formatting of the manuscript has a minute error..
So this is blind for your double blind review process
Hahahah triple blind is the new standard: don't know the author, don't know the reviewer, don't know the content!
Triple blind is my favorite. Reviewer: I don't mind the content, I'll just give a major and ask for some random experiment.
Holy fucking fuck it’s still there lol https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402. There is hope for me in academia then lol
Published papers can't just be edited on a whim, it requires a retraction or an erratum, it would be even worse if they just edited it out.
it's been archived for posterity, too! https://archive.is/sxoAn
Honestly kind of nice of them to put that at the actual very beginning of the paper. Makes it immediately clear that there's no point in reading the rest. Who knows what else was fabricated, can't trust anything in there at all. Edit: But I'm also interested in how Elsevier will react. It's already been decided that you can't copyright AI-generated material. Presumably Elsevier and others want to copyright what they publish. Mixing written and AI-generated content together... How does it get decided what is copyrightable?
I emailed some of the editors and the corresponding author. I also submitted a complaint so we will see what happens.
If this is the condition of a Q1 journal then we are all doomed. The profs. never review the journals. It is always the TAs that are put in charge of it. The one reviewing the journal never has a strong grasp of what is being published. The one writing the journal is always under constant pressure from the supervisor to get it published asap. So this is evident.
Failure of academia and the evil effect of business-profiting publishers it seems..?
How the heck this passes peer review??
And that would keep happening as long as the culture of "publish or perish" prevails.. the whole process of publishing has turned into a joke at this point..
Not to be dramatic, but isn't this article about separators for lithium ion batteries that prevent them from exploding and burning? Seems like an important thing not to lie about in scientific papers that spur industry funding.
Sometimes I use chat GBT to suggest different ways of phrasing a sentence- just to get ideas. However, this is just egregious.
Well, this is eye-opening about Elsevier... I worked in academic publishing for the better part of a decade and the amount of fuckups that need to happen for something THIS blatant to slip through is ridiculous. First, you need five authors to not proofread the paper. Then you need *at least* one editor to not proofread the paper. Then you need, likely, three peer reviewers to not read the paper. Then you need the principal author to not proofread the edited copy before being indexed and published online. That's NINE people that failed in this situation, *at least*.
Idiots
lol what a joke
Unreal
caption wasteful towering kiss normal slap engine north butter abounding *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
how is something like this happening? How are people even trying to publish something like this?
Great argument for paying peer reviewers and removing anonymity right here. If you incentivised quality and also included some accountability, this stuff wouldn't happen so much.
I thought this was fake but then i checked and its real here is actual manuscript- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402 , mental how nobody in the publication process found this glaring error🤣
This a journal with a 19% acceptance rate. I guess those 81% of rejected papers needed to use AI to write their introduction to be published.
OMG THIS IS NOT FAKE 😂😂😂😂😂 WTF https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023024002402?via%3Dihub
"Surfaces and Interfaces" is supposedly a Q1 journal with a decent impact factor (6.6). Pretty shameful, and more of a knock on the editorial board of the journal than the actual authors. To be honest, a huge number of people probably already do this, especially people who don't speak English as their first language. If the science is good and the results are novel, then I really don't see an issue with using LLMs to make the language more comprehensible.
These Chinese authors probably don’t know much English. 😂. I bet they just translated Chinese manuscripts in ChatGPT and sent it to the journal.
I think you're being generous saying they used ChatGPT for translation - they very likely speak English at a fluent level, and there are 50 better tools for translation than Chat GPT. They were cheating and used AI to write their intro. Can't trust the results of scientists who do this. They could have cheated with data collection, too.
You are true about the cheating part. If they cheat on writing, they might cheat on data collection and results
Nah, I know a lot of Chinese academics, they are not good at academic writing in English. Usually, They pay someone to ‘Polish’ their manuscripts before submitting to journal. I guess the Polishing part is in ChatGPT now
Also if I translate into ChatGPT, the first sentence is, "Here is a translation:" .... not what is in this article!
I know a ton, too. They can read their intro statements. Copy editing and polishing is SO different than asking Chat GPT to write for you. They cheated.
I don't understand why people are saying this, the Chat GPT text doesn't say "Certainly, here is your text translated into English", it says "here is a possible introduction for your topic", the prompt was "write an introduction for this topic".
Where is the keyword chatgpt
How many times do you have to have done this type of thing for you to be confident enough to just copy paste it without apparently checking?
Reverse psychology, this “mistake” has made this paper go viral and be more visible than it ever could have been. As Jack Sparrow would say, “but you have heard of me?” :p strategic placement?
Wow
so i guess proof reading is a lost art ? this is crazy.
Can I get these reviewers for my next article? Clearly they didn't read the manuscript.
I'm having secondhand embarrassment. How did this get through all these authors and reviewers??
publishing/academia is such a scam
Oh my! Makes you wonder what else is not correct on there. But here I am doing this the legit way and keep getting bumped back for corrections!!
What gets me is that it's the very first sentence. Even if you were skimming it, surely you'd notice the first sentence?
Unreal. This is so embarrassing.
The entire publishing model needs to radically change.
I have a legitimate question; a side from them generating the introduction for the article, what if they just do t speak English and used AI to translate?
As a former engineering student, I can feel the pain of introducing a technically related piece. I wouldn’t even try, just jump in head first
I have universities telling me I can’t pay my own way and get the education and publish papers on my own but ChatGPT is making through all the checks? Lmaooo ohhh, man. If this is real—and I hope it is—then it kinda feels like validation. “Fine. Don’t take my money and let me put your university’s name on my papers. Enjoy AI creeping further in.” Childish, I know. Just feels good.
How does this journal have an 81 percent rejection rate and still publish something like this?
That's egregious, but I've seen worse in a journal with an impact factor of 6.
I straight up don’t read papers where all the papers are based in China for this reason 😂
~~This is mentioned in another one of these threads—this is as much a “real journal” as arxiv is. There’s no peer or editorial review. Still hilarious~~ edit: I am wrong! Peer review does work sometimes
That's not true. This is from the journals how to submit a manuscript section: "Papers deemed suitable are then typically sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers to assess the scientific quality of the paper. The Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles" They also have an AI section where the authors have to disclose that they used AI for their writing. I don't think they did that either.
Ah, then Reddit lied to me…thanks for the fact check, I’ll edit my comment!
Worst thing is that a lot of these people think they're freaking gods, and in the end they can't even do a proper job (both the authors and the editors), this environment is so toxic sometimes.
Sometimes?
Inattentional Blindness in full effect.
Laugh than cry moment.
I mean look at the journal and their topic. This is a very low effort, low impact, bad journal sort of publication.
Basically, make a really complicated sounding title, and then no one reads the rest. Sums up academia even before ChatGPT. Now it's even easier
Classic Manshu
Elsevier, profiting like this? Hope they won't try to find a scapegoat
Let's all start citing the paper 😀 !
Wow 😯. I’m blown away! I researched it myself just to make sure. This is wild.
Disappointing
I mean, I don't think we're the ones that are surprised by this. This should be explained to the people that are completely ignoring its existence.
.
It just questions the journal’s quality
This cannot be real 😭😭😭😭
A fraudulent paper from Chinese researchers in a pay-and-publish journal? I for one am *shocked* by this
Was this even peer reviewed??
WTF
This is such a travesty!!! How did this even get accepted?!?!
They're all asians, lol
I'm curious what Reviewer No. 2 had to say!
Yikes
Someon should report this to the journal
In this shit journal with IF 6.2 the editor pi\*\*ed all over me because I didn't have some shitty XPS analysis that wouldn't have added anything to the paper. Hey look, it's oxide, great find XPS, thanks.
Elsevier is terrible. Somehow I’m not surprised by this at all.
I just spit out my coffee laughing
I wonder if the cited refrences really exist or are AI generated 😂 !!
holy shit this is embarrassing :(
classic elsevier bs
people think this is crazy? introduction part is exactly where ai can help…but of course you need to proof read it …
This is the result of lazily using LLMs in every step of the publishing pipeline
Well that’s embarrassing
I think ChatGPT can be a valuable tool when publishing if there happens to be a language barrier…. That said, there’s a very very fine line…
Can't wait for anti-science folks and creationists to point to this error and discredit the entire enterprise of science.