Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.
Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.
Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on ‘breast cancer’ becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a ‘naïve Bayes’ classifier became a ‘gullible Bayes’. An ant colony was labeled an ‘underground creepy crawly state’.
And what do we make of the flag to clamor ratio? Well, old fashioned scientists might call it ‘signal to noise’. The nonsense never ends.
A ‘random forest’ is not always the same thing as an ‘irregular backwoods’ or an ‘arbitrary timberland’ — especially if you’re writing a paper on machine learning and decision trees.
The most shocking thing is that no human brain even ran a late-night Friday-eye over the words before they passed the hallowed peer review and entered the sacred halls of scientific literature. Even a wine-soaked third year undergrad on work experience would surely have raised an eyebrow when local average energy became “territorial normal vitality”. And when a random value became an ‘irregular esteem’. Let me just generate some irregular esteem for you in Python?
If there was such a thing as scientific stand-up comedy, we could get plenty of material, not by asking ChatGPT to be funny, but by asking it to cheat. Where else could you talk about a mean square mistake?
Wiley — a mega publisher of science articles has admitted that 19 journals are so worthless, thanks to potential fraud, that they have to close them down. And the industry is now developing AI tools to catch the AI fakes (makes you feel all warm inside?)
Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures tainted by fraud
EMIL LENDOF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Nidhi Subbaraman, May 14, 2024
Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.
In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.
Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.
Scientific papers typically include citations that acknowledge work that informed the research, but the suspect papers included lists of irrelevant references. Multiple papers included technical-sounding passages inserted midway through, what Bishop called an “AI gobbledygook sandwich.” Nearly identical contact emails in one cluster of studies were all registered to a university in China where few if any of the authors were based. It appeared that all came from the same source.
One of those tools, the “Problematic Paper Screener,” run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases.”
Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “gooey stream”; “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.” The tool is publicly available.
Generative AI has just handed them a winning lottery ticket,” Eggleton of IOP Publishing said. “They can do it really cheap, at scale, and the detection methods are not where we need them to be. I can only see that challenge increasing.”
The ABC in Australia even wrote about this, but only because it worries about the loss of public faith in its pet universities:
For the ABC, peer review is like the Bible, and universities are the Church. The public must believe!
So the ABC makes excuses… Oh! Those poor poor universities, forced to become billion dollar businesses selling defacto Australian-citizenships to children of rich Chinese families. If only they got more money, their Vice Chancellors wouldn’t have to make do with million dollar salaries, and punishing professors who pointed out fraud, and they’d have time to do research and prevent the fraud instead.
Wiley’s ‘fake science’ scandal is just the latest chapter in a broader crisis of trust universities must address
By Linton Besser, ABC News
It [the Wiley debacle] also illustrates what is just another front in a much broader crisis of trust confronting universities and scientific institutions worldwide.
For decades now, teaching standards and academic integrity have been under siege at universities which, bereft of public funding, have turned to the very lucrative business of selling degrees to international students.
Grappling with pupils whose English is inadequate, tertiary institutions have become accustomed to routine cheating and plagiarism scandals. Another fraud perfected by the internet age.
This infection — the commodification of scholarship, the industrialisation of cheating — has now spread to the heart of scientific, higher research.
With careers defined by the lustre of their peer-reviewed titles, researchers the world over are under enormous pressure to publish.
Suffer the researchers who are forced to pay for fake papers just so they can “do their job”? Sack the lot.
The ABC is part of the reason science is corrupt to the core. The ABC Science Unit is paid to hold junk-science’s feet to the fire, instead it provides cover for the pagan witchcraft that passes for modern research.
The rot at Wiley started decades ago, but it got caught when it spent US $298 million on an Egyptian publishing house called Hindawi. We could say we hope no babies were hurt by fake papers but we know bad science already kills people. What we need are not “peer reviewed” papers but actual live face to face debate. Only when the best of both sides have to answer questions, with the data will we get real science:
In March, it revealed to the NYSE a $US9 million ($13.5 million) plunge in research revenue after being forced to “pause” the publication of so-called “special issue” journals by its Hindawi imprint, which it had acquired in 2021 for US$298 million ($450 million).
Its statement noted the Hindawi program, which comprised some 250 journals, had been “suspended temporarily due to the presence in certain special issues of compromised articles”.
Many of these suspect papers purported to be serious medical studies, including examinations of drug resistance in newborns with pneumonia and the value of MRI scans in the diagnosis of early liver disease. The journals involved included Disease Markers, BioMed Research International and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience.
The problem is only becoming more urgent. The recent explosion of artificial intelligence raises the stakes even further. A researcher at University College London recently found more than 1 per cent of all scientific articles published last year, some 60,000 papers, were likely written by a computer.
In some sectors, it’s worse. Almost one out of every five computer science papers published in the past four years may not have been written by humans.
Even if one in five computer science papers are written by computers, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the rot at the core of “peer reviewed research”. The real rot is not the minor fraudsters making papers that no one reads to pad out their curriculum vitae. It’s the institutional parasites taking billions from taxpayers to create modeled garbage to justify the theft of trillions. But that’s another story.
PS: Who knew, academic journals were a $30 billion dollar industry?
h/t SharperinOz
So much money flying around. A lot of it wasted unfortunately. The long suffering Taxpayer and Consumer always pay and the so called Elites and cheats benefit. Alas.
480
The other side of the fake papers determining social and political attitudes and policies about such destructive nonsense as anthropogenic global warming, AGW, is that real papers are often excluded. These papers for instance conclusively disprove AGW but never made the grade of PR:
https://vixra.org/pdf/1108.0032v1.pdf
https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.1650
473
It makes me wonder if anyone actually reads the majority of published papers?
Even the reviewers seem not to have read the gobbledygook papers that they were supposed to have reviewed.
I have dozens of unread journals at home. I barely glance at the cover these days.
Am I exceptional or do other professionals mistreat their literature in the same way?
331
Peter, I am just one of the 99% of aussies who have no knowledge in any scientific field or study.
For me “peer review” once had significance. ie the papers have been checked, the research and findings have been verified etc. In other words what is being stated is almost certainly truth than not.
For the past few years I have lost any faith in “peer review”.
The publishers and reviewers are entirely to blame for this lack of faith.
Follow that up with all the Covid Wuflu lies and misinformation from medical authorities, governments etc. and we are now seeing a complete lack of trust in those same institutions.
We are used to lies from governments. The lies from health authorities however is something that I will never forgive or forget.
531
I think the numbers who read the abstract would exceed those who read the whole paper by two orders of magnitude. I read lots of abstracts in botany journals, but only delve into the main text if I’m searching for some specific piece of information or if the paper is about the Iridaceae family (my speciality). If curiousity leads me to journals remote from my field, I’m likely to skim even more lightly.
Apart from the time needed to read a paper critically, a major reason for this is specialisation. We don’t appreciate the vocabulary and background of publications outside our own area of experience. And this applies to reviewers as well. I’ve had papers sent to reviewers who clearly had no understanding of the topic, and no interest in learning as they weren’t getting paid for writing a review.
240
Wasn’t the infamous 97.3% based solely on a survey of abstracts? No actual reading of the full papers?
200
Yes, correct.
So vituslly no one actually reads the papers, including the reviewers.
101
Yes, correct.
So virtually no one actually reads the papers, including the reviewers.
50
Yep, “SAFE & EFFECTIVE” – ” I AM the Science!!”
& >>>> we get:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHWX59ITAGs
Cheers Greg!
30
DC – indeed so, I am sure.
This came up a few days ago.
Worth a[nother?] mention, I think.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c84z2jqpvpko – HEADLINE – ‘Free wine hidden in small print claimed after three months’
A bottle of wine – free to the first claimant – but it was in the ‘privacy policy’ of a tax-focused think tank’s website.
It was claimed after 3 months …
Nobody reads the small print voluntarily.
The winner only read it because he was trying to draft similar Ts&Cs for his own business ….
Many years ago, teaching managements systems, I gave an example using the Ts&Cs of a well known local bank – the original and my copy-handout were in 3 point print. Well, of course nobody read them!
Now, the moral of this story, I suggest, is that there is so much [too much?] information out there, so we cannot all read all of it [just try the UK Tax Code, repiutedly 21,000 pages … [https://www.cutmytax.org/post/all-the-devils-are-here-the-uks-monstrous-tax-code#:~:text=The%20UK%20tax%20code%20is,contains%20over%2010%20million%20words.] ‘Business-Friendly’?]
So – who moderates what we [largely] read?
The media.
So, even if they were competent and utterly unbiased [no laughing at the back!] – it would be a massive task.
And most of the media DO have axes to grind.
That makes the citizen even more hard-pressed.
I wish I could see a solution to this.
Even a hard, expensive one that doesn’t involve giving in completely to the forces of – well, I’ll call them ‘the forces of inequity’.
At this time, I do not see such a solution.
In the UK Starmer – likely to be PM on 5 July 2024 – wants to give the vote to 16 year olds.
If you weren’t a socialist at 18 – you have no heart.
If you aren’t a conservative by 35, you have no brain.
Paraphrasing someone.
I despair for my country.
Auto
90
One of my mentors stressed very heavily that “You read the abstract and then the whole paper to be sure”.
And owned the photocopy so you could prove that you likely did both.
20
Way back in the late 1960s, I knew of a legitimate report (no problem about the study), but the author sent it off to half-a-dozen places after having changed the title and a few other aspects. It still was 97% the same stuff. On the vitae, it appeared as though there were multiple research efforts completed. Promotion committees likely only counted the titles without reading or investigation.
The more of this that was done, the more absurd/hilarious it seemed, not fraud. The university benefited because it added to the recognition. Strange, though.
320
On Quora, I have had the experience of rapid extremely verbose argument around minor points. Never use one word when three will do.
It has occurred to me that I am arguing sensibly with an automatic search and word generator. So I deal with the underlying proposition, but I suspect that it is just a bit of fun for an ignorant commenter. Why bother using Dr Google to find contrary statements when you can get ChatGPT to not only do the lazy research but formulate the entire response? And skip that nuisance comprehension thingy?
A Noble Spirit embiggens the smallest man.
Like using a chess playing program to play internet chess. Why would you bother?
310
“A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man”
Be careful when quoting Jebediah Springfield, the Left may seize upon the fact he was a former pirate and a fraudster. You could say in your defence that this is merely fiction- much like a lot of peer reviewed science. But they could counter by saying your logic is not cromulent
70
Just the latest steaming pile of crap that passes for “innovation” these days.
Medical tech is cool, but bring me back to the days before smartphones, doomscrolling, and now botshit.
40
It’s tragic that our knowledge-based institutions such as “universities” and government research organisations such as CSIRO in Australia that are meant to discover new knowledge and the organisations that propagate such knowledge such as scientific journals are now so corrupted, especially by Big Green, Big Pharma and Big Tech as to be virtually worthless.
The Left’s assault on our Civilisation continues.
President Eisenhower warned about this in his Farewell Address of Jan 17, 1961.
420
Also applies to museums and libraries which have been “revised”, censored and dumbed-down to suit the Official Narrative.
331
I hear from my sister in Perth that the “new” museum there is the dullest, dumbest institution.
70
As they are outside medical and defence, what is the motivation for the CSIRO to do anything? The I in industrial is being shut down completely by carbon dioxide taxes. Scientific has to have a point. Rain making and sheep shearing failed. And our largest plastics manufacturer from resin just shut shop, thanks at least to a war on anyone who used gas. When will the fertilizer manufacturers leave?
The refusal to do anything but back the Labor/Green war on agriculture, manufacture, transport, forestry turns the CSIRO into a sheltered workshop. Over 6,000 people costing $250K each and they are trying to look busy. Saving things perhaps, the Great Barrier Reef and the Giant Kelp beds of Tasmania. While the bosses support the war on Australia. Along with the Chief Scientist.
The CSIRO need an independent assessment. It is an institution. With inmates.
320
It needs shutting down. Take away the money and the left fold like a cheap suit. My daughter finished a degree recently at the University of Newcastle. For many of her assignments she was in a group of five students but she was the only one who could speak English and write. She succeeded and in doing so dragged four others who probable learnt next to nothing along with her. She said she was not the only patsy in this education fraud.
350
I had a son at RMIT with exactly the same experience. It is common.
40
Their CSIRO is like Their ABC and have outlived any relevance they may once (arguably) have had. The only purpose either of them now have is to push Government propaganda and the Official Narrative.
271
“The only purpose either of them now have is to push Government propaganda and the Official Narrative.”
They do – also – employ those who would be scientists – but prefer to brown-nose, for the sake of the salary, pension, and [perhaps] prestige.
Others employing similar work-habits are, perhaps more honourably, known as prostitutes.
Auto
70
Is there any formerly respected organisation, national or international that hasn’t become tainted by left or right extremism or used to push their own political agendas? One has reached the stage of never accepting a decree nor opinion from most organisations before investigating the credentials, wriggle room and public validation of those making momentous announcements. Credibility seems almost inversely related to the degree of articulated fear-mongering found in the narrative.
50
Back in the day, it was quite a rigorous process to obtain research funding and your case was strongly scrutinised by legitimate scholars, as were any subsequent publications.
Nowadays, it seems you just have to utter the magic words “climate change” and et voilà your funding, usually excessive for the “work” proposed to be done, magically appears.
In fact, often you don’t even have to ask for it and are surprised when you find out in the media you have received funding such as when former PM Chief Moron Turnbullsh-t gave $444 million to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a tiny organisation of not more than a dozen people at the time.
I’m not even sure if it’s possible to get any research funding these days if you don’t say that magic incantation, perhaps along with “covid”.
331
Also, no “research” funding should ever be given to people wishing to go to exotic locations such as Antarctica or tropical island paradises for their “work”. These should be regarded as taxpayer-funded adventure holidays and a misuse of public money, even more so than regular funding for “climate change”.
310
When you send “scientists” on exotic adventure holidays, they feel obliged to publish scary stories.
270
The best R&D job I have ever seen was the American Professor supervising bikini clad young women on the beach of Bora Bora, Tahiti, studying the effects of ‘acidification’ on crabs, fish, etc. in little fish tanks with CO2 bubblers on the beach in Paradise. Meetings under the palms. It looked very demanding work. Much preferable to being frozen in Antarctica. Climate Change study is often in the tropics. Watching the sea level rise in the atoll.
202
This looks like the Bora Bora “research” you are referring to, TdeF.
https://www.instagram.com/lillywoodbury/reel/CxD1C9Opz4p/
120
Exactly. Now you get paid. Or a degree in beach party ecology.
100
All their smiles and merriment look very ‘pseud’.
50
Clearly I studied the wrong subjects. Philosophy seldom requires research on tropical islands.
20
Perhaps others should have been left trapped in the ice a little longer before rescue. They would have recognised and appreciated a little ice melting as being beneficial to the human race. It’s all a matter of perspective.
50
For more than a year, we watched highly educated doctors, highly paid journalists, late night TV comedians, and even the CDC itself, tell us to our faces …
that Ivermectin is “horse de-wormer”.
And that we are not horses.
I happen to identify as a horse.
I also identify as a Scientist.
I am a horse Scientist.
And I am writing a ‘paper’.
Here is the abstract.
It is known the horses are equineopogenic. Horse epistemology is highly forced by by cowperson etymology due the colonialist influence on rodeo culture. We examined the social media postings of 1200 cowpersons, and analyzed 17 John Wayne westerns, constructing European dominated attitudes about the de-worming process. We observed that most cowpersons attributed horse worms to Climate Change. We also observed the Elon Musk and MAGA supporters denied horse de-worming science and demanded books about non-binary horse/human relationships be banned. We show that horse worms are reaching a negative energy forcing feedback point, and that without the immediate cessation of worm de-sequestering, there will not be enough Ivermectin to prevent equestrian boiling and equineogenic worm forcing due to insufficient supply for government de-worming mandates.
480
I got hoarse just reading that.
120
Try some hoarsepaste for that.
40
So effortless Mr Honk R…
110
The scientist came into the workshop saying these exact same words, and he asked if we could fix it for him.
We called over our Senior engineer, a guy in his 70s, who we all perceived had, well, he’d seen everything really.
He pondered the problem for a couple of minutes, and his response was this.
Well, we could rant and gran the phantastran, and then retrense the transaxlabiaphonic multiplexification Unit. That could actually work.
The scientist was agog at this incredible affirmation of a positive result….. And how much would this cost he asked.
The senior engineer replied ….. oh, I think we could get out of it for just $165 Million give or take, but I hear there’s a Government subsidy for it.
Where do I sign the scientist panted!!!!!
Tony.
230
Grandiloquent bollocks is what I’d call Honk’s extract. 😁
In promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities, and amicable philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity.
Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compacted comprehendedness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency, eschew all conglomerations and garrulity, jejune babblement, and asinine affections.
Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and voracious vivacity, without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast.
Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompouprolificacy, ventriloquil verbosity, and vain vapidity.
170
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”
60
https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
“The struggle for the transformation of ideology into critical science …”
I am a horse.
I am the egg man.
I am the walrus.
50
Honk,
You are todays bovine excrement bingo winner . Even a trans aboriginal with disabilities would applaud your effort . John gets second prize as no mention of intersectionality or climate change .
70
Neigh…by that I mean yeaaah! Spot on Honk
20
DEI becomes DIE! This is how WHO has managed to con governments to cede sovereignty and how a bunch of egotistic Lawyers dressed in black cloaks and fluffy white collars managed to ingratiate themselves into The ICC and pontificate over where WWIII will start.
190
Almost all politicians are lawyers. But they should have a job first. Being ruled by politicians who have never had a real job and with very strong opinions on how society should function is absurd. Something about the law and politics seems to remove any concept of morality more effectively than Islam. As the people of Iran can testify, the combination is deadly.
260
Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2
30
Is that the bit where Falstaff proposes that “First, let’s kill all the lawyers”?
In my long-lost youth, I heard anti-whatever demonstrators assuring us that there will be no peace until “the last lawyer is strangled with the guts of the last social worker”.
110
The Australian Parliament does not have the power to cede Australia’s Sovereignty to anyone least of all the UN. The Australian Constitution does not allow it. The People have the power backed up by the Constitution.
70
Most Australian people don’t even bother to read our Constitution … and aren’t terribly interested in who has power over them.
80
The Biden government is said to be ignoring the Constitution every day of the week when it comes to the borders and the forgiving of student loans. The interesting part is that there seems no ready-built legal department that one can refer matters to except the SCOTUS, and that can take a lifetime to get around to anything, especially as it is a judicial system whose justices are political selections.
80
The CSIRO was a great organisation, now it is a “special needs” depot. All good things must come to an end, but shouldn’t.
120
Gobbledygook 😁
50
The review process actually exposed this problem, whats wrong with that ?.
The ‘best of both sides’ debates still need to be fact checked (reviewed), something sceptics fail at.
017
Sure, they tell us that “The scientific method” means experts peer review it, and then it turns out the experts are crooks who don’t even read it, the data doesn’t exist and the papers are made by a computer.
And now we’re using AI to read papers to try to guess which ones were faked by AI.
So let’s talk about the other 3 million papers that are not 100% fraud. Let’s say a human team makes a weak low quality effort, with baseless assumptions, or even fakes the data, how would peer review by anonymous pals who don’t even read the paper, let alone check the data or test the assumptions — reject a junk paper before our PM turns it into national policy?
If it takes 30 years to “filter that out”, and costs $1.5 trillion dollars, how many civilizations can we afford to waste before our children are slaves?
Are you an AI? I have to ask…
190
Good, you acknowledge it self corrects.
So you would replace reviews with debates?,you don’t seem to cope with that either.
09
So you don’t deny you are an AI bot?
60
The response indicates our host is half-right- Grandpa is artificial. The article shows the “reviews” fail to catch fake work for thirty years, lending credibility to that work that must now be undone, with more effort wasted. My take is, Grandpa is another name for a house troll, artificial but not intelligent. Now he wants to play racehorse. Waste of keystrokes.
60
A review, which apparently focuses on other reviews generated by AI, revealed that the peer review process employed by a reputable company that has existed for over 200 years is highly flawed and inaccurate. That doesn’t trouble you? In business, reputation used to be everything. Without demonstrating an ability to provide reliable goods or services you were nothing. This principle doesn’t apply as much anymore- if you have enough money you can employ PR specialists to buy you a good reputation or delete any of your past misdemeanours. This tactic is especially evident in the practices of Big Pharma.
If you don’t believe me, type “top ten Pfizer lawsuits” into your search engine of choice, take a look at the search results, and then ask why that company was regarded as a trustworthy supplier of novel therapeutics during the pandemic. It was like their terrible track record never existed
80
Mr. Rattin: “Grandpa” was so untroubled by that fact, he wants to pretend he made a point and race on to another. Classic troll posting. If his post above is any indication, his reply to you will accept your apology (!?) and assert that you must agree with his next non-point.
40
“fact checked (reviewed), something sceptics fail at”
Gramps,
I have fact checked (reviewed) your comment, and determined it to be safe and effective.
While it does not prevent the transmission of facts, it will help protect you from possible hospitalization and death due to fact exposure.
Note to Jo-I am a real boy … I mean horse.
20
Mr. Smith: But you didn’t peer review his comment, for that you’d need to be a lower order than horse.
20
LOL, but there were over 11,000 bad papers discovered which means they did a horrible job checking them BEFORE they decide to publish Epic Fail from the start.
How did you miss that part?
10
On the subject of AI I just heard a “technology expert” on radio 3AW (Melbournistan) talking about how he uses AI to summarise and spelling correct his meeting notes into short, punchy briefs he sends out. He thought it was wonderful. But it’s not his work, plus it might not represent his intended meaning.
Also, it has been well proven that most Big Tech AI has a strong, Leftist, woke bias that alters history and conforms to the Official Narrative. It’s so woke and anti-historic that it even thinks National Socialist stormtroopers and George Washington were of black African origin. Not even BLM rioters ever claimed that.
Also getting AI to write “scientific” and other papers will just result in further reinforcement of the Official Narrative / Leftist lies.
There is some hope with Elon Musk’s AI implementation, Grok, which is designed for truth seeking, not Leftist lies.
81
Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Heinlein borrowed the Title.
Exodus 2:22
“And she bare him a son, and he (Moses) called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.”
KGV
40
this is a good short explanation
“The 19 journals were all previously owned by Hindawi, an Egyptian publishing company with a portfolio of about 250 journals that Wiley purchased in 2021”
“The fraudulent papers come from “paper mills,” businesses that charge their clients a fee to list them as an author on a fake study and submit it to academic journals. Paper mills often submit to multiple journals at once to have the best chance at getting published.”
I was wondering about the business model for fake papers – now it is clearer
29
And that’s all very well Peter, but doesn’t address the radioactive point about what this means for all “peer reviewed” papers.
The whole concept that it is somehow rigorous is exposed as shell game.
190
Mr. Fitzroy: Thank goodness you were able to attempt damage control. Do you think it worked?
40
I had a friend visit recently who is one of Australia’s foremost experts on AI. He uses AI to do just about anything for him. So, he books a boat ticket to Palm Island but AI buys him a billet to Magnetic Island instead. Such is.
80
Doesn’t the basic responsibility lie with the institutions employing these “scientists”? The publish-or-perish attitude to research has been with us for years, indirectly encouraging such fraud. Plus the scientists’ natural ambition to be “the first”. Then with Government grants as the only way to survive: no grant, no tenure, no wonder the dog-eat-dog approach to research prevails. I don’t know how a sane and sensible person survives academia these days. There needs to be change and regrowth, root and branch.
100
Peer Reviewing = Idiots that allow their work 2B PRd by another idiot while paying for the privilege. The CSIRO have descended into infamy!
100
CSIRO equals. Australia is just way too dumb to build nuclear power stations, while the French must be super smart, building 50 odd nuclear power stations in 40 years…Australia dumb and dumbest. Enjoy the back to the 70s up coming blackouts Australia.
120
Are these “peer reviewed ” scientific papers being used by Blackout Bowen and Airbus Albo for the ALP/GREENS/TEALS ruinables energy future?…..bwahaha, goodluck with that gullible climate change alarmists Australians, you will be paying for it forever….bwahaha.
50
Fairy Tales
40
90
It is beyond the time for ALL products “Created” by, or with the assistance of AI to be required by absolute law to be indelibly “Watermarked” as having an AI component of any size..Any information found by,or as a consequence of, the use of, AI to be totally inadmissable in law unless confirmed by traditional means.
100
At the moment the only laws that apply to AI seem to be that works solely created by AI are not subject to copyright nor are they copyrightable in most jurisdictions.
60
In this woke worlds, peer review has become pal review and all but worthless.
70
Woke has turned peer review into pal review.
50
How did papers from the University of East Anglia come out in the wash I wonder. It didn’t seem to need AI to find there was nothing there to see in all those emails! Were the Climate Change papers from the UEA put to the test?
70
DOC, that’s just it — papers written by actual humans with daft ideas and ridiculous assumptions won’t be noticed at all by AI analysis looking for tortured phrases. This report is just about the worst of the worst, not about average level incompetence.
This debacle just shows how pathetic “peer review” is.
50
The biggest mistake people can make is to think that just because something has been published in a peer reviewed journal, that it is now fact.
Leaving aside the futility of peer review, the whole point of publishing papers is to promote ideas and discussion.
Person X says they have determined that some thing causes something else to happen when set up in a certain way.
Person B seems what person X has done, and finds flaws in some of the experimental methods
Person B responds to Person X either via a journal, or in other communications, explaining their concerns
Person C reads all this, and thinks “I can do this a better way”, and does it, publishing their own results
the sum of human knowledge increases slightly, but slowly.
Of course, this is all nice in theory but now so many papers are basically press releases to bolster a publication quota.
It also doesn’t help that very little research can be reproduced for the purposes of validation because it takes usually real money and resources to do it, and no one will fund this.
60
The substitutions have a distinct Chinese feel to it. Or should that be oriental touch.
But look at the bright side. We can talk about fraudulent or misleading climate science ad infinitum, but ‘hockey stick’ does it nicely.
60
With CO2 there is now an Ice Hockey Stick. This is the argument by coincidence that the increase CO2 is man made. Even if it is proven categorically wrong by radio carbon dating.
In this Ice Hockey stick metamorphic ice is connected smoothly to firn is connected to laboratory measurements as if they are all the same thing. The implied argument is that we humans made it happen with our fossil fuels. While the ice story is great research, what is done with this data is very wrong science, like tree rings data bolted onto laboratory data with gratuitous guesswork at the end.
Also note the tricks
1. removing the X axis and scaling, the recent data becomes a near vertical line. By starting at 180 the departure is visually doubled from 50% to 100% of the graph height.
2. But it takes hundreds of years for firn to be compressed by sheer weight of snowfall over passing years and great pressure to create solid ice and a halving in volume, with cracking and gas escape and dissipation. This reduces time resolution.
3. the spectrum shows previous peaks, none less than a few thousands years wide. Which means change in only 100 years would not be seen at all a thousand years from now.
4. The point shown as 1911 in other graphs is shown as 1950. It hardly matters. It depends on who is preparing this graph. But they are labelling firn, compressed snow and not ice. And 1958 is just 68 years ago, still near the surface and subject to cyclic changes and gas escape and diffusion.
At the end of the day, this argument for man made CO2, the only argument anyone has, is just coincidence. It is not a direct measurement of the origin of CO2 which is done by measuring C14. The idea of man made CO2 being substantial in the atmosphere was debunked in 1958. The 1965 atmopsheric explosions doubled C14 and it is all gone now, proving all new CO2 vanishes in just 60 years.
Fossil fuel has no C14. All other CO2 has C14. The dilution by fossil fuel should be 33% and it is only 3%. And given that CO2 emissions are now 5%, it means fossil fuel CO2 is disappearing into the oceans in just 6 months, as we saw from the Australian 2019 bushfires.
And what I find with AI is that it cannot actually argue these points. It can only heap up contrary statements, hoping to achieve by volume what is missing in logic.
It reminds me of the publication, 100 scientists against Einstein. No number of publications cancels the truth. Even AI generated.
And as Jordan Petersen found, AI will even generate realistic but fake references. It will lie to win the point. That part at least is human.
50
Besides, how could Einstein’s solution to the problem of General Relativity be wrong? Most people would agree that in General most problems are relatives. Maybe then neighbours?
30
According to Henrys Law, the Carbon Dioxide content of the Air/Oceans is at a 1/50 equilibrium after an average 5.4 year delay. The ocean holds 98% of the carbon dioxide. So 98% of the man-made carbon dioxide emissions, made more than eleven years ago, now reside in the oceans.
This confirms Carbon-14 isotope studies that analyse the Earth’s Atmosphere, and show that man-made and volcanic CO2 content of the Atmosphere is about 4%. The half-life of Carbon-14 is about 5,760 years. So from this we have an analysis that reveals that man-made CO2 content of the atmosphere is about 1.5% and volcanic CO2 content is about 2.5%.
Ice core data shows that carbon dioxide levels follow the temperature by about 800 years. The Medieval Warm period peaked 800 years ago, so that proves that most of the increase was natural CO2 from the deep Ocean. Oceanic thermal inertia is the reason, and can be observed.
This evidence therefore reveals that 115ppm of the increase since 1888 was natural, and 6ppm was Man-made. The ocean contains more than 50 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. Most of this is stored in the very cold benthic layers of the ocean floor. The solubility of CO2 in water depends on temperature. The warmer the water temperature the less CO2 it can dissolve. Hence as the ocean depths are warmed after an average 800 year thermal delay, CO2 is released. This is known as oceanic out-gassing.
The Carbon Cycle presented by the IPCC is a circular assumption essential for the political scam, not evidence based.
Past Ice Core data proves that present day temperatures do not have much effect on the natural carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere because Oceanic thermal inertia means that this temperature will take an average of 800 years to reach its effect on the Ocean floor. The Medieval Warm Period peaked in 1200, which is 800 years ago.
The IPCC fraudulently assumes that 100% of the 140ppm increase in carbon dioxide since 1850, was man-made.
“Carbon cycle modelling and the residence time of natural and anthropogenic atmospheric CO2, (1997) by Tom Segalstad” shows up the scientific fraud essential for maintaining the IPCC’s climate scam.
50
Is there a list of the journals?
And do I hear sniggering from a certain Mr. Sokal?
30
On the plus side of peer review, I will point out that a reviewer caught a circular argument in one of my papers, so I was able to replace it without public embarrassment.
On the minus side, I will point out that I have been a peer reviewer myself.
31
In answer to myself, above, I’ve found a list.
https://www.hindawi.com/list-hindawi-journals-closing-may-2024/
Advances in Preventive Medicine
Autism Research and Treatment
Contrast Media & Molecular Imaging
Disease Markers
Education Research International
Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine
International Journal of Chronic Diseases
International Journal of Otolaryngology
Journal of Addiction
Journal of Nanomaterials
Journal of Oncology
Journal of Sports Medicine
Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Mobile Information Systems
Psychiatry Journal
Scanning
Scientific Programming
Sleep Disorders
Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
31
Brilliant! – That is some of your best work Joanne. Made my day.. Yes, their ABC is truly horrible.
50
That seems quite accurate.
10
Open review >>> peer review.
10
Peer Review started with Robert Maxwell…
You know, ran away with the pension fund – part of the Yacht crowd, Ghislaine’s Dad.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1087/095315102760319233
20
Wiley recently asked for my views on the value of its traditional publishing.
I did not hold back.
10
All those fraudulent papers were not written or submitted by plumbers, electricians or car mechanics. The fraud was committed by college graduates with BS, PhD and MD after their names.
Ivy League schools are now completely corrupted and spitting out graduates who know little of value, but owe $200,000+ in debt. That’s a lot of incentive to commit fraud and obtain money under false pretense.
Universities are creating criminals.
30
Hi Jo
Very interesting read.
Do you by chance know this guy over here:
http://www.forbetterscience.com
This is in your wheelhouse also.
Cheers, Oliver
30
No I didn’t. Thanks!
20
Outstanding article thank you Jo.
The Currency Lad has it featured and I will also.
20
cross posted in part at So much for “peer review” – 11 thousand papers withdrawn
20
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” -Marcia Angell, MD (“Drug Companies and Doctors: A story of Corruption.” NY Review of Books, Jan. 15, 2009.)
10
Not being Australian, I assume ABC is Australian Beer Commission?
30
Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Like BBC and CBC.
20
[…] 217 year old Wiley science publisher has reportedly “peer reviewed” more than 11,000 papers that were determined to be fake without ever noticing. The papers were referred to as “naked gobbledygook sandwiches”, Australian blogger Jo Nova wrote on her blog last week. […]
20