Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@kottke/116647849282379563

The thing I don't get here, is how?

I understand that AI hallucinates papers, it's very annoying and one of the reasons I don't use it for research.

But you're supposed to go read the paper before you cite it. Evaluate the paper, even. And you can't even skim or uncritically read just the abstract of a paper that doesn't exist.

So a huge number of published academics don't even read what they cite?

It's concerning that there's a higher standard asked of students than professionals.

#academic #academia #AI

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Keira (She/Her)1d ago

I mean, I know people look at them uncritically. I was researching something for uni recently, and most of my source papers quoted the same paper regarding childhood malnutrition linked to adult diabetes.

So I went and read the paper. And found it doesn't say that at all. The results found what looked like a link, but the discussion clearly says they *couldn't* establish a link because there were far too many confounders. There was an older, larger study that legitimately did, but the pressure to cite more recent studies (and laziness?) meant most people were citing them anyway.

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Su_G

@keira_reckons
Strange research that cites papers that don’t exist or papers that don’t contribute. 😐 Seems like a giant waste of time. Why is it rewarded at all. [I guess this is a rhetorical question; maybe a better question is: why do ‘research’ if this is all it is? I.e. where is the drive to fake it or do this fake research coming from?] 🤔

#researchIntegrity #research #citations #fakeResearch #reconnectingConsequencesToCauses