Dr. Damien P. Williams, MagusMar 18, 2024

So about five days ago, or so, people on Bsky and Twttr started highlighting Elsevier science papers with GPT/LLM hallmark phrases riddled all throughout them. [Dozens and dozens (at least)] of peer-reviewed papers.

As I said, then, and as I discussed in my dissertation, knowledge-making and expertise are always a tricky process, but it needs deep, intentional confrontation and reform:
https://media.proquest.com/media/hms/PRVW/1/twSaS?_s=yIAhHtzhif4xd76I%2BihtcJJXTPw%3D

Anyway, now it looks like @404mediaco has dug down on this, and found *Even More of It* and I am genuinely and completely struggling against despair at what the future of being an educator, researcher, and writer will even mean over and at the end of the next 5 years.
https://www.404media.co/scientific-journals-are-publishing-papers-with-ai-generated-text/

Quite frankly, this should genuinely a) be the death of peer review as we know it (Again: AS WE KNOW IT), and b) lead a complete reformulation of the knowledge-making and expertise processes, but it won't and that terrifies and saddens me.

Show threadNot a Spring OnionMar 18, 2024

@Wolven @404mediaco
LLM phrases are one thing. Even if I wonder how that survived any kind of peer review...

I see the real problem in the "publish or perish" mindset, encouraging researchers to go for quantity over quality, "salami-slice dissemination" and so on.

To weed out most bad papers, someone actually reading them suffices. And maybe we should stop thinking in "half paper" (4 pages) and "paper" (8 pages) categories, allow omitting the state of the art if it isn't needed and... maybe even find ways to automatically create a proper introduction.
With less LLM magic and more science, maybe.

Show threadBjörn BrembsMar 19, 2024

@wakame @Wolven @404mediaco

Indeed, we do not need LLMs to write unreliable articles at all. If you just take "regular" psychology and cancer biology articles, they contribute ~200k unreliable articles to the literature every year - and that's just two fields:

https://bjoern.brembs.net/2024/02/how-reliable-is-the-scholarly-literature/

How reliable is the scholarly literature?

A few years ago, I came across a cartoon that seemed to capture a particular aspect of scholarly journal publishing quite well: The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat. There are […] <a class="more-link" href="https://bjoern.brembs.net/2024/02/how-reliable-is-the-scholarly-literature/">↓ Read the rest of this entry...</a>

bjoern.brembs.blog
Show threadMisuse CaseMar 19, 2024
@brembs @wakame @Wolven @404mediaco I am sure the “publish or perish” rat race contributes to this state of affairs but so does Elsevier’s monopoly position. They have a license to print money in this field, it’s not like they need to actually put in the effort of closely reviewing what they publish.
Show threadBjörn BrembsMar 19, 2024

@MisuseCase @wakame @Wolven @404mediaco

Absolutely!

In fact, why should they invest in quality? On average, over all journals and publishers, journals with higher prestige publish both less reliable science
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full
and command higher revenues
https://bjoern.brembs.net/2018/04/why-open-access-big-deals-are-worse-than-subscriptions/
so we pay them more money for less reliability.

So instead, they invest their huge surplus in surveillance technology:

https://bjoern.brembs.net/2021/09/algorithmic-employment-decisions-in-academia/

https://eiko-fried.com/welcome-to-hotel-elsevier-you-can-check-out-any-time-you-like-not/

https://www.dfg.de/resource/blob/174924/d99b797724796bc1a137fe3d6858f326/datentracking-papier-en-data.pdf

#sciencetracking

Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability

In which journal a scientist publishes is considered one of the most crucial factors determining their career. The underlying common assumption is that only the best scientists manage to publish in a highly selective tier of the most prestigious journals. However, data from several lines of evidence suggest that the methodological quality of scientific experiments does not increase with increasing rank of the journal. On the contrary, an accumulating body of evidence suggests the inverse: methodological quality and, consequently, reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank. The data supporting these conclusions circumvent confounding factors such as increased readership and scrutiny for these journals, focusing instead on quantifiable indicators of methodological soundness in the published literature, relying on, in part, semi-automated data extraction from often thousands of publications at a time. With the accumulating evidence over the last decade grew the realization that the very existence of scholarly journals, due to their inherent hierarchy, constitutes one of the major threats to publicly funded science: hiring, promoting and funding scientists who publish unreliable science eventually erodes public trust in science.

Frontiers
Show threadMisuse Case
@brembs @wakame @Wolven @404mediaco Oh the only thing they care to invest in is DRM and rent-seeking, haha, of course; we live in hell.
Mar 19, 2024 at 9:07pmWeb