from Hacker News

Wiley shuts down 19 science journals and retracts 11,000 gobbledygook papers

by Jerry2 on 5/27/24, 4:03 AM with 56 comments

  • by frereit on 5/27/24, 4:36 AM

  • by tithe on 5/27/24, 4:17 AM

    It seems most of these are the result of a poor application of a thesaurus with no regard to context, but here are some tortured phrase gems from these "gobbledygook sandwiches" [0]:

    "artificial intelligence" => "counterfeit consciousness" / "man-made brainpower" / "fake knowledge"

    "mean square error" => "mean square blunder"

    "sensitive data" => "touchy information"

    "signal to noise" => "flag to clamor"

    "breast cancer" => "bosom peril"

    "big data" => "huge information"

    "ant colony" => "underground creepy crawly region"

    "Navier-Stokes" => "Navier-Stocks"

    "NP-hard" => "NP-difficult"

    "end-users" => "stop-customers"

    "phising attack" => "phishing assault"

    "emission of CO2" => "excretion of CO2"

    "deep learning" => "profound education"

    "decision tree" => "choice bush"

    "system failure" => "framework disappointment"

    "real time" => "genuine time"

    "fuzzy logic" => "feathery rationale"

    "child nodes" => "tyke hubs"

    "state-of-the-art" => "United States of America-of-the-cleverness"

    "directional (graph) axes" => "directional tomahawks"

    "magic mushrooms" => "wizardry mushrooms"

    "max pooling" => "Georgia home boy pooling" (!?)

    "malicious parties" => "compromising get-togethers"

    [0] https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:5

  • by tommykins on 5/27/24, 4:51 AM

    Strong recommendation is to read any other source of this news, not the Jo Nova nonsense spin of it.

  • by abalone on 5/27/24, 5:53 AM

    The muckraking blog For Better Science has been sounding the alarm on this for years. Here's a great investigation into a "paper mill industry"[1] which apparently this researcher also traced some of the fraudulent papers to. It gets into some of the economic forces that drive it.

    P.S. scanned 130 million papers! WTF!

    [1] https://forbetterscience.com/2021/05/26/the-chinese-paper-mi...

  • by dbcooper on 5/27/24, 5:37 AM

    >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. A Wiley spokesperson acknowledged that some of the journals had been impacted by fraudulent studies, but attributed the closures to other factors, such as low submission rates.

    Hindawi is well known as a publisher of complete junk. No one takes any of their journals seriously. Baffling that Wiley would accept the risk.

  • by nurettin on 5/27/24, 5:29 AM

    I wonder how many equally interesting commits go through merge requests. A lot of people are deathly scared of merging code into their open source repositories. They will make sure even the idea of adding a single function goes through scrutiny in a published paper (a pip, a boost proposal) and go through the crucible of internet forums.

    Why can't we show the same rigor with scientific papers?

  • by subroutine on 5/27/24, 5:09 AM

    Wall Street Journal article:

    http://archive.today/eiPl5

  • by ChrisArchitect on 5/27/24, 5:00 AM

    Some more discussion a few weeks back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40369412

  • by ggm on 5/27/24, 4:45 AM

    Interesting story, but the author is a bit "edgelord":

    > 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.

    Please. That's hyperbole. It's extremely unfair to the ABC science team.

  • by Animats on 5/27/24, 5:39 AM

    Do these fake papers have real authors trying to take credit for them? Or are they just noise to break science?

  • by jeisc on 5/27/24, 6:22 AM

    AI written papers about AI >> "all your base are belongs to us"

  • by hiddencost on 5/27/24, 4:44 AM

    This source rapidly veered into a polemic against universities.

    The original WSJ source might be a better link.

    I'm surprised to find myself saying that.

  • by tbrownaw on 5/27/24, 4:41 AM

    Is 11,000 a lot?

  • by oefrha on 5/27/24, 5:21 AM

    Original reporting quoted in TFA: https://www.wsj.com/science/academic-studies-research-paper-...

    Archive non-paywall link: https://archive.is/WZLQp

    Why submit blogspam with snarky “commentary” with no substance at all.

  • by bernardlunn on 5/27/24, 5:29 AM

    New headline “AI robot takes psychedelics and messes up a scientific publisher”

  • by userbinator on 5/27/24, 4:45 AM

    Good. Now find every paper that cited them and audit those too.

  • by dools on 5/27/24, 5:09 AM

    This appears to be horrendous libertarian propaganda. Whatever the case is with peer review/Wiley or whatever, get the story from somewhere else.

  • by orionblastar on 5/27/24, 4:25 AM

    This is why AI won't replace human scientists: https://www.popsci.com/technology/ai-generated-text-scientif... AI has been generating random peer-reviewed papers.