I try to be optimistic about academia, but then there are evenings like today...

I am reviewing a textbook on GenAI and second language teaching for a renowned commercial publisher. Although I now priorise reviewing for scholar-led, non-commercial publishers, the topic is of personal interest to me and I accepted this invitation because I wanted to ensure that critical AI literacies were well represented in this new textbook (and decent financial compensation was offered, which I admit was also a motivation). This evening, I started reading the preface (which was short but promising) and the introduction. After a couple of pages of pleasant reading, I came across a statement that I thought was odd so I decided to follow up on the reference that was used to support this statement. It turned out that the DOI in the reference section returned a 404. And that the entire reference does not exist! This made me suspicious so I went through all references in Ch. 1 and found three additional hallucinated references and several more incorrect DOIs! I'm not reading any further – will now stop working and attempt to write a polite review tomorrow.

#AppliedLinguistics #SLA #GenAI #academia