I have never heard of gnews.org (slogan: “Truth: Freedom”) until today, but this article, as over-excited, breathy and tabloidesque as it is . . . appears to be essentially true.
These papers were once regarded as cutting-edge science and were cited numerous times by other academic researchers. Now these scientific papers – which often relied on taxpayer dollars for research funding . . .
Additionally, the 217-year-old publisher announced the closure of 19 journals due to large-scale research fraud. The fake papers often contained nonsensical phrases generated by AI to avoid plagiarism detection. Examples include “breast cancer” referred to “bosom peril” and “fluid dynamics” written as “gooey stream.” In one paper, “artificial intelligence” was called “counterfeit consciousness.” . . .
Since this is in the realm of academics, let us use this as an opportunity for an educational lecture on the logical fallacy that is appealing to authority.
While I am sure that’s true in many cases,
federal dollars are not always involved.
Doing some, basically random research at one of the above links I came across Dr. Jayati Sinha who holds the Macy’s Retailing Professorship at Florida International University and formerly taught at Eller College of Management, University of Arizona,
She has had THREE papers “taken away,” (one-sixth of her total published research.)
– 1.) Linking room temperature to prices paid at in-person auctions
– 2.) Showing a positive correlation between a.) the willingness to donate money to charity and b.) certain words used during the sales pitch.
– 3.) Showing a positive correlation between people’s memories of doing good deeds and the ambient light. (People are less helpful when it’s dark out.)
I found no immediate evidence of federal funding, but I did note that her co-authors were
Rajesh Bagchi, of Virginia Tech University (apparently he is dept. head)
Promothesh Chatterjee of the University of Kansas, and
Pronobesh Banerjee of Winston-Salem State University.
She does not appear to choose her co-conspirators randomly.
It does not attempt to be nor claim to be complete or “all inclusive.”
(More like they wrote 70 articles about retractions on that topic)
The site is useful but/and seems to have a lot in the fields of medicine and public health (both of the big wigs got their starts in those fields.)
Examples include “breast cancer” referred to “bosom peril” and “fluid dynamics” written as “gooey stream.” In one paper, “artificial intelligence” was called “counterfeit consciousness.”
I think the point is they were not even read by the peer reviewers.
ChatGPT deliberately inserts such phrases to alert proof-readers.
You might recall:
For example, a recent paper published in Surfaces and Interfaces in the journal Elsevier, contained the line: “certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic.” Researchers are using AI chat bots and large language models (LLMs) without even looking at what is being transcribed for publication.
Ever had a college lecturer who seems to know the material but whose English skills are horrible?
Notably, researchers Manshu Zhang , Liming Wu , Tao Yang , Bing Zhu , Yangai Liu are not (to my knowledge) alleged to have falsified their data or research, simple that the had ChatGPT write parts or all of their paper.
