Mastodawn

What does the #AcademicChatter hivemind think about strategically reordering manuscript author order to promote junior author who may benefit more from a first-authorship? Given (1) a discipline where author order is important, (2) all on authors fulfilled authorship criteria, (3) junior author would be listed lower if going by contributions, and (4) all authors agree to reordering. #ScientificPublishing

Sure, no problem to reorder

47.1%

No, it would be unethical to fudge the order

41.2%

It's complicated (please comment)

11.8%

Poll ended at May 24 at 11:51am.

Albert Cardona May 21

"Intermediate levels of scientific knowledge are associated with overconfidence and negative attitudes towards science", Lackner et al. 2023 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01677-8

The Institute for Replication (#I4R) is collaborating with the publisher (Nature Human Behaviour) and has now produced a report on the above paper (https://osf.io/mg95t/files/mjs86 ) which is largely positive:

"LFMMG (2023) presents a computationally reproducible and largely robust finding. We re-implemented the full analytical pipeline and conducted thirty-one robustness checks with those results summarized in Table 8. There is much kudos to be given to the original authours* for making the process of replicating their work clear and worthwhile."

* typo in the original text of the report.

#ScientificPublishing #PRC #PublishReviewCurate

Intermediate levels of scientific knowledge are associated with overconfidence and negative attitudes towards science - Nature Human Behaviour

Lackner et al. show that individuals with an intermediate level of science knowledge tend to have overconfidence in their own knowledge and negative attitudes to science.

Nature

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Albert Cardona May 21

@MCDuncanLab @Drugmonkey

Relatedly, in the middle of the XX century the scientists that were responsible signed the paper as authors, and everyone else was listed in the Acknowledgements section.

That today we list everybody as "middle authors" is, on the one hand, a consequence of the "publish or perish" culture, and on the other, a way to bring visibility to people who did the actual work (I am thinking here of famous neuroscience papers were the actual work was done by non-PhD women technicians who were merely "acknowledged" instead of signing as first authors, which would have been the case today).

Further, in my own papers, I don't add anyone as author who hasn't read the whole paper and commented on it. As a bare minimum. Each contributor should know first hand what they are agreeing to endorse with their name, even if they couldn't do that work themselves without a lot of training.

#ScientificPublishing #academia

Giuseppe Bilotta May 21

I'm reading news of someone in academia complaining about the new no-AI policy by ArXiv that requires something as outlandish as co-authors to take responsibility for what gets published in a scientific paper and … I'm sorry, how is this unexpected?

Academic publishing has a lot of issues, but requiring people to actually read what they sign off to is not one of them.

#scientificPublishing #academia #publishOrPerish

Albert Cardona May 19

Scientific publishing has always been hard, and as always, it's about attention. Here is Dr. Alois Alzheimer trying to communicate his findings about dementia to his contemporaries 120 years ago:

"On 3 November 1906, Alzheimer discussed his findings on the brain pathology and symptoms of presenile dementia publicly, at the Tübingen meeting of the Southwest German Psychiatrists. The attendees at this lecture seemed uninterested in what he had to say. The lecturer that followed Alzheimer was to speak on the topic of "compulsive masturbation", which the audience of 88 individuals was so eagerly awaiting that they sent Alzheimer away without any questions or comments on his discovery of the pathology of a peculiar case of early-onset dementia."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Alzheimer

Thankfully, "Following his presentation, Alzheimer published a short paper summarizing his presentation; in 1907 he wrote a longer paper detailing the disease and his findings."

"... he used the newly developed Bielschowsky stain to identify amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. These brain anomalies became identifiers of what is now known as Alzheimer's disease."

#neuroscience #Alzheimer #ScientificPublishing

Alois Alzheimer - Wikipedia

Steven Saus May 18

Send the arXiv AI-generated slop, get a yearlong vacation from submissions One of the site’s moderators described the new policy on social media. https://s.faithcollapsing.com/5ebvv#ai #ai-slop #arxiv #preprints #science #scientific-publishing

Beilstein-Institut May 18

Our Managing Editor Dr. Barbara Hissa will give an online talk during the International Conference on Advanced Nanoparticle Generation and Excitation by Lasers in Liquids (ANGEL) on May 24, 2026 at 2 pm CEST. Barbara will talk about “(Diamond) Open Access landscape in Europe and beyond”.

➡️ https://angel-conference.org/program/

#EditorsTalk #EdiTours #ScientificPublishing #DiamondOpenAccess #OpenScience #BJNANO 💎🔓

Albert Cardona May 14

You may not agree with this paper, but you should read it:

"Aging and the narrowing of scientific innovation", Cui et al. 2026 (James Evans lab)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady8732

"Analyzing more than 12.5 million scientists who published between 1960 and 2020, we find that novelty—the linking of previously unconnected ideas—increases with academic age, whereas disruption—the replacement of established ideas with new ones—declines."

#ScientificPublishing #science #bibliometrics

sayzard May 12

LLM Hallucinations in the Wild

대규모 분석을 통해 LLM이 생성한 허위 인용문헌(환각)이 2025년에 약 146,932건에 달하며, 특히 AI 활용이 빠른 분야와 AI 보조 작성 문서에서 두드러지게 나타남을 확인했다. 이러한 환각 인용은 과학적 신뢰성과 공정성을 위협하며, 기존 출판 심사 과정으로는 충분히 걸러지지 않고 있다. 또한 환각 인용은 주로 저명하고 남성 학자에게 잘못된 공로를 부여해 과학적 인정의 불평등을 심화시킬 가능성이 있다. 이 연구는 LLM 환각 문제가 학술 지식 생산에 광범위하게 침투하고 있음을 경고한다.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

#llm #hallucination #citation #scientificpublishing #aiethics

LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations

Large language models (LLMs) are known to generate plausible but false information across a wide range of contexts, yet the real-world magnitude and consequences of this hallucination problem remain poorly understood. Here we leverage a uniquely verifiable object - scientific citations - to audit 111 million references across 2.5 million papers in arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, and PubMed Central. We find a sharp rise in non-existent references following widespread LLM adoption, with a conservative estimate of 146,932 hallucinated citations in 2025 alone. These errors are diffusely embedded across many papers but especially pronounced in fields with rapid AI uptake, in manuscripts with linguistic signatures of AI-assisted writing, and among small and early-career author teams. At the same time, hallucinated references disproportionately assign credit to already prominent and male scholars, suggesting that LLM-generated errors may reinforce existing inequities in scientific recognition. Preprint moderation and journal publication processes capture only a fraction of these errors, suggesting that the spread of hallucinated content has outpaced existing safeguards. Together, these findings demonstrate that LLM hallucinations are infiltrating knowledge production at scale, threatening both the reliability and equity of future scientific discovery as human and AI systems draw on the existing literature.

arXiv.org

Albert Cardona May 8

"The hard truth about how hard it is to publish in Development", Briscoe et al. 2026
https://journals.biologists.com/dev/article/153/1/dev205432/370214/The-hard-truth-about-how-hard-it-is-to-publish-in

"for the past 10 years, 35-45% of papers submitted to Development ultimately get published."