Mastodawn

New (at least for me) term alert!

TORTURED PHRASE: An established scientific concept paraphrased into a nonsensical sequence of words. "Mean square error" becomes "mean square blunder". "Breast cancer" becomes "Bosom peril". Sign of fraudulent research. Can be a product of AI technologies.

https://thebulletin.org/2022/01/bosom-peril-is-not-breast-cancer-how-weird-computer-generated-phrases-help-researchers-find-scientific-publishing-fraud/

#metascience #researchfraud #academicethics #AI

"Bosom peril" is not "breast cancer": How weird computer-generated phrases help researchers find scientific publishing fraud

Many fraudulent scientific papers contain "tortured phrases," standard scientific terms paraphrased into gibberish. Breast cancer is a scary disease, but what is bosom peril? These phrases are likely popping up because scientists, to boost their article count, are running texts through paraphrasing software, which helps them avoid plagiarism accusations. And new AI technologies may be crafting some article text from whole cloth.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

ResearchBuzz: Firehose Aug 10, 2025

Retraction Watch: Fighting coordinated publication fraud is like ‘emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,’ study coauthor says. “Systematic research fraud has outpaced corrective measures and will only keep accelerating, according to a study of problematic publishing practices and the networks that fuel them.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/08/10/retraction-watch-fighting-coordinated-publication-fraud-is-like-emptying-an-overflowing-bathtub-with-a-spoon-study-coauthor-says/

Retraction Watch: Fighting coordinated publication fraud is like ‘emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,’ study coauthor says | ResearchBuzz: Firehose

ResearchBuzz: Firehose | Individual posts from ResearchBuzz

Serhii Nazarovets Aug 5, 2025

A powerful new study (Richardson et al., @PNASNews 2025) reveals the scale of systematic research fraud: fake papers are doubling every 1.5 years - ten times faster than real science. Retractions and deindexing can't keep up. Journals look away. Universities stay silent. Ministries protect their own.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420092122

The authors call for independent, conflict-free structures with real power to act.

#ResearchFraud #ScientificIntegrity #PaperMills #AcademicEthics

Katherine Stiles 🔬Feb 1, 2025

Bogus scientific papers are enriching fraudsters and slowing lifesaving medical research
@TheConversationUS ‣ https://theconversation.com/bogus-scientific-papers-are-enriching-fraudsters-and-slowing-lifesaving-medical-research-248291 #researchfraud

Bogus scientific papers are enriching fraudsters and slowing lifesaving medical research

The world’s library of scientific papers is becoming contaminated as fraudsters use ‘paper mills’ to game scholarly publishing for profit.

The Conversation

Lowlife's inane ramblings 🦜☠Sep 27, 2024

Finally, Francesco Gino is definitely and without doubt, a total fraud. #researchintegrity #researchdata #researchfraud
https://youtu.be/Q9tgyVPytBk

- YouTube

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Auscandoc May 22, 2024

“There is a large-scale industry of so-called “paper mills” that sell fictive research, sometimes written by artificial intelligence, to researchers who then publish it in peer-reviewed journals — which are sometimes edited by people who had been placed by those sham groups” #ScientificFraud #ResearchFraud https://mstdn.science/@YvanDutil/112486855163219831

Yvan Dutil (@[email protected])

Why Scientific Fraud Is Suddenly Everywhere https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-scientific-fraud-is-suddenly-everywhere.html

mstdn.science

Chris J. Karr Jun 28, 2023

No surprise (I'm currently dealing with other kinds of research scammers), but still OOF.

https://open.substack.com/pub/platformer/p/the-ai-is-eating-itself

#AI #ResearchFraud #MechanicalTurk

The AI is eating itself

Early notes on how generative AI is affecting the internet

Platformer

Alex Danvers Feb 19, 2023

New blog post! There's a version of this on Psychology Today, but I got some weird edits, so I wanted to have a "version of record" here.

This one is about how the President of Stanford allegedly falsified Alzheimer's research, has been called out on it for over 2 decades, and continues to "fail up."

Comments here are welcome.

@socialpsych
@cognition
@neuroscience

https://danvers.substack.com/p/failing-up-in-research

#ScienceReform #Alzheimers #ResearchFraud #Stanford