Researchers then write up any important findings in papers and submit them for possible publication.
You might therefore reasonably believe that published papers are quite reliable and meet high-quality standards.
You might expect small mistakes that got overlooked during peer review, but no major blunders.
Its science, after all!
Youd be wrong in expecting this, though.
Real and good science does exist, but theres a worrying amount of bogus research out there, too.
Fake science
A number of practices currently threaten to undermine the legitimacy of scientific research.
This process is similar to a recall at the grocery store.
Similarly, a journal can recall a published paper that, in hindsight, turned out to be bogus.
Of course, sometimes papers get retracted because the authors made an honest mistake in their research.
In more than half the cases, however, its because of academic misconduct or fraud.
The more sophisticated technology has become, however, the more things have gotten a lot more complicated.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
One simple solution would be to just ignore bogus papers.
The problem, though, is that theyre often hard to identify.
Also, once a paper is retracted from a publication, that tarnishes the entire journal a bit.
Let this happen often enough, and the publics confidence in science as a whole goes down.
Therefore, the scientific community as a whole needs to take this problem seriously.
Camille Nous
Some of the problem is analog.
Camille Nous doesnt have much to do with AI, but it deserves a mention nevertheless.
To make this concern visible, many researchers chose to add Nous as a co-author.
Especially inpapers about AI, cases of fake co-authorship have been mounting.
This deception includes the practice of adding a high-profile scientist as a co-author without their knowledge or consent.
Many scientists will Google all authors names before reading a paper or citing it in their work.
Its unclear how many fake authors have been added to date.
Moreover, no standard method currently exists to verify a scientists identity prior to publishing a paper.
This gives fake authors a free pass.
All these issues show the necessity of some pop in of ID-verification process.
Nothing formal is currently in place, and thats a shame.
Itgot accepted, although no one, including the author himself, understood what he was saying.
Not only is this ridiculous, but it also goes to show how lazy peer reviewers can get.
In this case, they literally accepted what was essentially an article of gibberish.
One of their gibberish papers was accepted for a conference at the time.
In 2015, the site still got 600,000 page visits per year.
Unfortunately, though, fake papers arent only generated as pranks.
Such companies, also dubbedpaper mills, are getting more and more sophisticated in their methods.
This could lead to an arms race between paper mills and journals that dont want to publish bogus work.
How are we going to give credit to these algorithms or their creators?
And how do we deal with them?
Despite this, setting up a fake email address and going through the process with it is quite easy.
So, were in need of stronger systems.
One good approach to verifying the identity of a scientist isORCID.
Thats a shame, in my opinion, and something that could be fixed pretty easily.
Finally, AI might be itself useful in this struggle.
Some journals aredeployingAI modelsto detect fake contributions.
As of now, however, journals have been unable to agree on a common standard.
Of course, high-tier journals might profit from the lack of competition in the short term.
Individual publications are, in fact,doing a lotto track down fake papers.
But if some journals have the means and others dont, publications arent operating on a level playing field.
Plus, scammers will always be able to target some underfunded journals with their fake papers.
For example,fake journalistswere the apparent authors of op-eds in various conservative outlets.
Their headshots were generated with AI-algorithms.
Their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts are entirely fake, and its still unclear whos really behind these articles.
There are also severalfake newsarticlegeneratorsthat make creating fake headlines easy.
I didnt have that attitude a few years back.
Neither did the people around me.
Trust in news has eroded dramatically, and I have no idea how well be able to restore it.
Now, whats already been happening with news is happening with science.
Its bad enough that its difficult to find out the truth about whats happening in the world.
But if the very foundations of human knowledge erode, that would be an even bigger disaster.
Although the debate around fake news has died down since the 2020 election, its far from over.
This article was written byAri Jouryand was originally published onTowards Data ScienceYou can read ithere.
