Carl T. BergstromMay 12, 2023

This week, Science published a stunningly irresponsible news story entitled "Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common" and claiming that upward of 30% of the scientific literature is fake.

https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-papers-are-alarmingly-common

Below, the first two paragraphs of the story.

Headline and intro notwithstanding, the story itself later notes that the detector doesn't actually work and flags nearly half of real papers as fake. Does the reporter just not understand that?

h/t @Hoch

Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common

But new tools show promise in tackling growing symptom of academia’s “publish or perish” culture

Show threadCarlo Gubitosa 

@ct_bergstrom @Hoch "Sabel’s tool correctly flagged nearly 90% of fraudulent or retracted papers in a test sample. However, it marked up to 44% of genuine papers as fake, so results still need to be confirmed by skilled reviewers".

In other words, these figures are produced by a detection algorithm, which is unknown and should be evaluated independently by third parties before taking these figures for granted.

May 12, 2023 at 7:22pmWeb
Show threadCarl T. BergstromMay 12, 2023

@gubi @Hoch

They describe the detection algorithm in the paper, and is laughable.