Chemist Rafael Luque suspended without pay for thirteen years | Hacker News Reader

Chemist Rafael Luque suspended without pay for thirteen years

english.elpais.com

100 pointsbelter117 comments

"The prolific chemist, who has published a study every 37 hours this year..."

I found this part quite impressive until I read the following part:

"Luque is constantly publishing papers. Last year he authored some 110 articles. So far this year he has published 58. The chemist admitted that since December, he has been using the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to “polish” his texts. “These months have been quite productive, because there are articles that used to require two or three days and now I do them in one day,” he said."

Even if this is unrelated to the actual story, I find it a tiny bit disturbing. Is this the new standard practice? Let some robot spew out paragraphs of text to convey the scientist research?

That sounds like gaming the system. I have a very hard time imagining somebody can produce quality work every 37 hours non-stop.

Well, work of SOME type of quality, perhaps.

The most prolific mathematician in history, Paul Erdős, published about 1500 papers over about 60 years. That comes out to a little more than 2 a month.

That's close to an upper bound on what should be possible without some form of cheating.

Erdős took amphetamines, so he was cheating too.

He also co-authored most of his papers and offloaded a lot of the writing to others.

But he really did play a significant role in getting the results in every one of his papers.

If the domain expert is there to audit the results, where is the issue?

You're assuming they are going to do as thorough of a job auditing as they'd do on their own writing. I doubt that's what will happen when the point of the AI is to spew content out faster.

I can't tell whether this is a question from someone who didn't read the article, or whether this is the most meta comment I've ever read.

It could be both at the same time :-)

It depends on how he is using it. If he is using it to insert new content into his papers it is concerning. If he is using it to reword his papers but the content remains the same it's less concerning.

It seems to be more than that:

> Magazinov mentioned that a non-existent “vegetative electron microscopy” appears in two studies by Luque published with Iranian colleagues.

Is it unreasonable to surmise that vegetative electrons are very small, thus the microscopy?

The decision to turn off life support for vegetative electrons was made at the first Solvay Conference in 1911, at which point they ceased to exist in our universe in a total wave function collapse. ChatGPT has apparently overfitted on late 19th century theoretical physics journals.

But there’s speculation that vegetative electrons may still exist in the brains of the people who have been peer reviewing these papers.

Well there are Electron Microscope studies of the vegetative Cellular Life, so that is not the knife he will fall on...

| If he is using it to reword his papers but the content remains the same it's less concerning.

How is that less concerning? Rewording conclusions or the abstract, even subtly, can change the meaning of those words and of those sections.

I don't see how this would be much different from a non-native English speaker getting a colleague to help with the English phrasing of a paper (this is very, very common).

As long as the original researcher reads what's been written, and agrees with it, and the output gives an accurate description of the procedure and results, there's no harm done that I can see.

Edit: I mean in general, not necessarily in this specific case. This guy seems a little...questionable...for other reasons.

> I don't see how this would be much different from a non-native English speaker getting a colleague to help with the English phrasing of a paper (this is very, very common).

It's as different as ChatGPT is from an English-speaking scientist colleague.

For example, a colleague will probably ask if they're not sure which is the intended meaning of a phrase. ChatGPT will generate one of the possible meanings.

so what? the author can still proofread it and decide if that was the right meaning.

Right. That's the author's responsibility, whether he or she is using ChatGPT, a human colleague, an old-school tool like Grammarly or classic Google Translate, or even older-school tools like paper dictionaries.

In all those cases, mistakes can be made and unintended meanings can creep in. The author has to check the output, definitely, but that doesn't mean those tools shouldn't be used at all.

the author can "proofread" it as written in another language with which they're arguably unqualified to work

Okay, how is that different from them using a (whatever)->English dictionary?

Using such a dictionary instead of the control, a human translator or interpreter, is likely to suffer from the same pitfalls: not knowing a language means you are more susceptible to making errors when the language should be nuanced, and scientific & academic papers seem to be to be nuance-critical productions when it comes to wording

If you read the whole article, that's not because Rafael Luque was using ChatGPT to churn out papers, but because he was lending his name to research papers done in Saudi Arabia and Chinese universities.

I am aware of that and did not state otherwise, I just had to point it out. I even said "even if this is unrelated to the story"...

> that's not because Rafael Luque was using ChatGPT to churn out papers, but because he was lending his name to research papers done in Saudi Arabia and Chinese universities

...who were using even worse models to churn out papers about "vegetative electron microscopy."

> Without me, the University of Córdoba will drop 300 places in the Shanghai ranking. They have shot themselves in the foot

While that was the issue that the university took with him, the extra logos on his lab coat, why does the university care about him? Why is he valuable?

Numbers. He boosts numbers with bullshit. Numbers that are misinterpreted to indicate value.

And he’s gotten good at bullshit. He’s even incorporated ChatGPT into his workflow.

So good at it that entities paid him to try and sneak some extra logos on his lab coat. He’s smart. He likely found ways to never accept money and yet fully utilize it for his benefit.

This all matters.

The system is fractally broken.

An equivalent would be to claim that you work for Apple when you have a full time contract with Microsoft.

On the other hand this game has been played before. Everybody knows in Spanish speaking science that just adding one researcher from the Anglosphere with a nice English name to the list of authors is a seal of approval for many journals, and will open a lot of doors even if the researcher just agreed to sign on the paper.

Mostly is publishing by being co-author: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4190-1916

I'm doing this too on a paragraph level. It is amazing how much better my writing is getting with a tutor.

It is entirely unsurprising that a non-native writer would do this. It would be more surprising in five years that anyone is not doing this.

Prolificness aside, what has he actually done? Is he advancing chemistry or just co-signing dubious papers?

Co-signing dubious papers

From the article, this corruption scheme goes way beyond cosigning papers. The main selling point of this corruption scheme was gaming institutional metrics.

From the article, the Spanish researcher gamed publication metrics by co-signing huge volumes of research papers, and proceeded to sell his affiliation to the highest bidder as it allowed low-tier institutions to game rankings and bump up their standing.

There's also another angle to his scheme, as his threat to the university of Cordoba consisted of "you har my interests and your university will drop in rankings".

Seems like he was gaming the various academic ratings systems by getting lots of things published with his name on them.

It speaks to the broken state of measuring scientific and academic output. It's 99% a charade, people churning out machine generated papers nobody reads but get quoted in an attempt to justify the inflated claims of other machine generated garbage papers, in a circular attempt to fudge the stats that decide the funding and promotion.

The idea that someone can even read, edit and make co-author level contributions in papers aimed for a top-level journals, all in the span of 37 hours, is utterly ridiculous.

It's basically the equivalent of SEO spamming the Page rank algorithm with crummy pages with many back-links and repeated search terms. The search optimized term here is the author's name.

Why maximize paperclips when terms like "vegetative electron microscopy" could be trending in the literature.

For those who didn't read the article, or for those who did, but didn't follow its link to the PubPeer thread containing the "vegetative electron microscopy" observation:

https://pubpeer.com/publications/7C9F0CCD493B1129135A3A918B0...

Search the page for the term and you'll see the relevant comment.

The term seems to stem from an OCR cluster-mishap, where a valid scientific document was once OCR'ed incorrectly. The page has 2 columns of text and the left column has a running sentence 'ending' with "vegetative" before continuing on the next line in the same column. But at the same height in the column on the right a sentence continues, visually starting with "electron microscopy".

The term is entirely meaningless in the field.

This isn't just "using a little ChatGPT to brush up my English" at all.

Other comments point out that the contents of abstract and article don't even match, the abstract being about bacteria but the article contents about gene delivery...

I don't need convincing that ML will have tremendous positive impact in math and science disciplines, it's obvious, but the way ML was used in this case is not a defensible usage.

Yeah, from the article I get the sense that he is often agreeing to add his name to papers for network affect, perhaps even as the main author.. So his own criteria for what he writes may be factual, but seems a bit off topic for what a reader should expect on seeing his name.

To be free of this pain.

From my experience most researchers don't actually read most papers, we just don't have time. The figures are what tells the real story, not necessarily the interpretation of the authors.

I don't disagree with you, but this is a horribly sad comment. I worry that the text of papers often gives short shrift to nuance and subtlety that is necessary for reasonable interpretation.

I once read a lot of medical papers -- probably a few hundreds. There was often no real connection between the reported data and the conclusion. Sometimes the conclusion was along the lines of "a weak relation between X and Y was found" but the data showed a strong relation. Sometimes it was the opposite. Sometimes the conclusion was that X was good but the data showed X was bad. Sometimes it was the opposite.

It was almost as if many of the authors couldn't do the kind of math expected of high schoolers that apply to university to study science.

My takeaway was 1) to deeply distrust doctors as scientists (and as people who could think) and 2) mostly ignore the text surrounding the tables and graphs and just go straight to the data.

Physicians are definitely not scientists, at least the majority of MDs. MD is not a research degree, it's a memorization degree

TBH I'm terrified of the double-whammy effect of researchers becoming less and less competent as AI takes the reins (a la Wall-E) and good science getting drowned out by crap.

Modern academia incentivizes quantity over quality, and reviewers for all but the most prestigious journals don't have sufficient time or expertise to properly review submitted papers. So this does not surprise me.

A couple of years ago I spoke to my near-phd biochem friend and discussed this problem with him at length. I have since come to believe that what science needs is a git of science. Aka, a scientific way to build science over from scratch and explore different approaches and research in a version control kind of way. A property of science is that existing research should be immutable, so you can see the natural progression over time, so for this I thought a blockchain seemed a good fit. Scientists do research and peer review each other in exchange for a token. Other scientists can then easily access and improve/build on existing science, with no journal incentives required to keep academics afloat. And yes I am aware safeguards will need to be put in place to prevent gaming the system, but using AI, it should be relatively easy to actually capture the entire history of science on the chain and verify the knowledge.

This person is already writing an article in 2-3 days. Is ChatGPT realy the problem, for reducing the time to 1 day?

I think you have a good point, but you're probably getting downvoted because on first read it came off more as you were defending the use of chatgpt (rather than criticizing the absurdly fast output).

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you're pointing out the absurdity of publishing every 2 to 3 days and implying that it was already essentiallly garbage he was producing, and chatgpt was just polishing the garbage (which IMHO, as you stated, the garbage production is clearly the bigger problem, not the polishing).

> you're pointing out the absurdity of publishing every 2 to 3 days and implying that it was already essentiallly garbage he was producing

Yes, exactly.

most papers are made of 90% of useless fluff, and 10% of meat.

I'll go one step further than the sibling. For every possible occupation, if chatGPT can improve your odds of success (except maybe for writing fiction, but I'd guess it's bad at this too), then there is something fundamentally wrong with that occupation.

This is nonsense. You might as well say "if literacy can improve your odds of success, then there is something fundamentally wrong with that occupation".

I found this part quite impressive until I read the following part:

If that first stat didn't pin your bullshit detectors into the red, you need new bullshit detectors.

GPT is pretty reliable at taking an existing body of text that fits entirely in a prompt and doing something with it--reword, translate, answer questions about it, so forth. Even expanding an outline into written sentences usually works great as long as the outline has all the detail.

It's really only when you let it introduce "facts" based on its body of training that it'll start going off the rails. If he's just running text through without checking the final results, that's really not wise, but the LLM is unlikely to start introducing novel facts or changing figures in response to a conservative request based entirely on the prompt text.

Using it as a writing aid the way he claims he is (not that I necessarily believe all his claims) is probably one of the more responsibles way to use GPT, honestly, because you have full opportunity and ability to vet the output. Hack together something that has all the right content, then make it readable with the AI engine the way you might with a human editor collaborating, while jointly making sure the editor doesn't change the actual facts of the content.

Whether or not he could be hacking anything of value together every 37 hours is another story.

> Even if this is unrelated to the actual story, I find it a tiny bit disturbing. Is this the new standard practice? Let some robot spew out paragraphs of text to convey the scientist research?

I wouldn't be surprised if that statement wasn't a bold face lie, and Raphael Luque was just stapling his name to papers and proceeded with a clickfarm-like business model, where he sells the impact that his publication metrics has on institutions who request his services.

The defiant tone in his reply is evocative of other corruption cases where the criminal is so confident in his clever scheme that he even taunts defiantly everyone to challenge it. Even the old "I don't have a cent in my bank account" bullshit excuse is as old as time. Next he might just say that he only has good, generous friends who give him some presents from time to time.

I get that he was fired for other reasons but his method is a plague and should be worrying for everyone. When I wrote my latest paper more than half of the published papers I found through research hubs were so subpar that I would've failed my students if they submitted it in one of the regular assignments. Anything can be published. Add some ChatGPT so it sounds convincing and the practice of citing your colleagues to up the stats and it will be near impossible to sort decent science from junk without spending all your time on reading papers instead of doing actual research.

I'm also worried about this, but "impossible to sort decent science from junk without spending all your time on reading papers instead of doing actual research"--isn't spending all your time reading papers what "actual research" is? re-search?

Research is for discovering new things, not just reading old things.

Is both. Reading old things, sometimes published in several different languages is required to master a theme. And finding it first takes an awful lot of time

My comment implied as much.

>not just reading old things

> The university has sanctioned Luque for working as a researcher at other centers, such as the King Saud University in Riyadh and the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, despite holding a full-time publicly funded contract with the Spanish institution.

ChatGPT is getting cited in comments, but this is the real lede.

While concerning, this seems to be the least bad thing this guy does.

So which is the most bad

Spammy papers

> They have a grudge against me because I am a very prolific scientist and a lot of people adore me, because they know my worth. They are envious and mediocre people

This guy is extremely egotistical. And he's publishing papers with people he doesn't know. The article implies most of these papers are of low quality... I doubt he contributed in any way to many other than by adding his name. That's fairly common in academia even in normal times. But in these cases it's unlikely that he collaborated in any way with the authors and can't verify the content of the papers.

Yeah, he even admits that he broke rules but obviously it's all due to this genius that they are mad at him. If he would be less of a 'genius' the university would have accepted it? What a megalomaniac.

> Luque acknowledges that he skipped the established procedures to collaborate with other institutions, but attributes the sanction to envy and a lack of understanding.

“Without me, the University of Córdoba is going to drop 300 places [in the Shanghai ranking]. They have shot themselves in the foot,” said Luque, who attributed his suspension to “pure envy.”

Seems like they really lost a real gem with this one /s

That quote stuck out to me to as from somebody who only cared about gaming metrics rather than contributing to human knowledge

Anyone who's been in the academia will recognize that someone who publishes 100 papers a year or whatever it is is just gaming metrics.

He admitted to publishing a paper with authors he didn’t know.. and which external evidence suggests had authorship for sale. These people are a disaster for science..

>“They have a grudge against me because I am a very prolific scientist and a lot of people adore me, because they know my worth. They are envious and mediocre people,” he said. “I have never felt supported by the University of Córdoba, even though I put it on the Shanghai ranking. Being on the ranking is entirely due to me.”

He appears to have a very high opinion of himself.

"...The chemist admitted that since December, he has been using the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to “polish” his texts. “These months have been quite productive, because there are articles that used to require two or three days and now I do them in one day,” he said..." WTF!

Yeah WTF. This is just going to become standard practice within years if not months.

Perfect application for this AI tool imo.

Perfect application for this AI tool imo.

Yup - credential whoring and research fraud. It's the new frontier.

That was something Luque was being accused of before using AI though.

Using a machine to work more efficiently is not bad.

Why the "WTF!"?

He wasn't sanctioned for using an LLM to speed up his work, so seeing this as the first reply could confuse some people.

I've been doing this for months now too. I can get docs done in a day that used to take a couple weeks because of constant interruptions.

That is not the point...It's the fact his supposed valuable research, ( he is getting published after all!) is of so flimsy quality, that a LLM model can be a productivity improvement! That is the reason of the WTF.

Do you think Tesla or Einstein with a LLM model, would spit out 5 new discoveries per week instead of one every decade?

>is of so flimsy quality, that a LLM model can be a productivity improvement!

Who said the research was of flimsy quality?

Who said that the discoveries (as opposed to the BS padding journals require) was what LLM was used for?

They might or might not be. But not because he used an LLM to "polish them".

Has been publishing sometimes every 5 days, it seems mostly, by being listed as co-author. I like my genius with some effort and sweat. Even Terence Tao talks about his challenges...

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4190-1916

What is the nature of the space he's working in?

Something like physics, you can have a gap of months or years between a new theoretical breakthrough or the completion of a new machine giving you new raw data to churn through.

... but chemistry is something (no offense to chemists) you can do to the dirt outside your house, and every novel molecular arrangement can be paper-worthy.

Let's not go that way... - https://xkcd.com/435/

Welcome to capitalistic science, where moar is always better. You know, 40y ago when you bought a tool made of stainless steel that would last for life, and now you get the same out of flimsy plastic? Same thing with science.

For a non native English speaker, LLMs are really useful to rewrite your texts in a more natural way.

Dude was publishing every 37 hours. He wasn’t just using it to ‘polish’ his language skills, he was churning out absurdly low grade schlock with the aid of an AI and getting it rubber stamped by the broken journal cartel.

I mean the guy was writing a paper every 2-3d without AI and got it down to 1d with AI. It seems completely reasonable to me that better tooling could get their time down 50% (try shoveling a driveway vs using a truck ...).

If his was just (ab)using chatgpt to create the papers from thin air then it'd be pretty easy for somebody to show where the pre-chatgpt papers are and the post-chatgpt papers are by the drop in quality. However, nobody has been citing the content of his papers when they make the claims about quality so I doubt chatgpt has an impact on the quality of his papers.

He was “publishing” every 37h, it seems to be mostly by co-signing papers

not a bit disturbed by whatever language tools he needs to use but a paper every day (or every week) is insane. No matter what you do, it can't be sustainable for years as he claims.

And that is absolutely worthy of discussion but the use of tools is a distraction from the topic. I find it surprising that the author felt it was even worth bringing up in the article. It makes no argument for or against the subject of the article but definitely plants some weird seeds of distrust for certain types of people.

This isn't indicative of the quality of his work; it's indicative that the standardized form of the research paper has so much low-information boilerplate that it's semi-automatable. If anything, I applaud attempts to automate it (only slightly less than I applaud attempts to do away with it via a new structure for these papers).

Complaining about this is like complaining about the fact that people use IDEs to manage the imports in their Java class files. Ideally, you'd stop using a crap language that makes you wrap three lines of actual implementation in 50 lines of imports, declarations, and redundant-to-the-code comments to make doxygen (and a linter) happy, but if the institutional model prevents that... By all means use a good IDE to do half the work for you.

Have you tried using a LLM? I don’t think they are as dumb as you are making out. I’ve used GitHub Copilot to help with some lab reports this last semester, and it really sped things up. It can auto fill complicated LaTeX syntax and such so that I don’t have to look it up. The meat of the paper is mine, and I have to correct it a lot, but it was definitely useful.

Just to clarify to the casual observer, parent's quote is from a one-paragraph section about how Luque's been able to be particularly productive recently, rather than anything to do with his suspension:

Yeah, what? Millions will do the same, and thousands are already doing it...

Nice that you didn't quote the part directly after that: > Luque said he basically uses it to improve his written expression in English

What's the problem here? That a non-native speaker now doesn't need as much time to write text in a foreign language?

What your comment and others are missing is: The problem here is that the fluency in English, seems to be the main obstacle, to the speed at what he can publish novel research.

Maybe if he would be a English, Oxford educated scholar, would not need ChatGPT. Could then maybe do a paper every 4 to 8 hours?

As a non-chemist academic, it is fully beyond me how anyone churns out papers at a rate of one every three days. That is the rate he says he has even without relying on ChatGPT.

Is there a lot of overlap in the contribution that each of his individual papers make? Or are a lot of these replication studies, carried out by different teams in parallel, with him being a co-author on each of them? I'd be curious to read an academic chemist about how this is possible.

He seems to have kickstarted his citation count by reviews. This is sadly extremely common; a surprising amount of researchers nowadays don't have an actual discovery/novel experiment in their first 10 highest cited papers... He now still does those in reputable journals to relatively random, but en-vogue topics. Then he goes out and trades his name to less visible research (which is ok to do) to actual crap in 2nd to predatory tier journals in exchange for more citations (probably citing other works including him ;)).

Generally possible everywhere, also done in the none-Google/Meta/... world of ML. Just look here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/9764877/proceeding - just a random collection of crap.

He has just taken the whole "metric becomes the goal" thing to its logical conclusion. If you are only valued by your citation count..

Perhaps he could write in his native language and have a machine do the translation.

I'm reminded of a story doing the rounds about 25 years ago regarding an engineering document which had been translated by a machine. The team saw a reference to a 'water sheep' which they worked out meant 'hydraulic ram'.

If your paper goes to a british reviewer, or to a lesser extent an USA one, you are guaranteed to have your english called out. We even hired external translators to polish the paper. Some (british) reviewers had returned the paper with "needs total rewrite, I can't understand the english", while the other says just "minor corrections" non language related.

I'm going to use GPT from now on, zero doubt.

Doesn't really matter how prolific he is if he violated his employment contract. He should have negotiated a new contract before working for Saudi Arabia and Russia. Seems like a non-story.

Thanks, this is a trivial thing IMHO. Worker violates working agreement, news at 11. All the other fluff is just yellow journalism. He uses GPt? Yawn... he publishes mainly as co-author? That's completely normal in academia, particularly for high ranking professors. Wait until people discover that in several places in Germany, Proffesors delegate most of the PhD supervising tasks to lowly post-docs.

It's just layman peeking at the Academia world and getting mad at a cloud.

It's normal for academics to publish a study every 37 hours?

"Suspended without pay for thirteen years" sounds an awful lot like "fired"

Except without the actual firing. European employment laws (and university rules) may have something to do with it.

Another for the list of recent scandals of scientists publishing faster than light

Susana González, lost an EU grant of 1.8 million euro in 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14006

The wistleblower that disclosed that there were problems with the data and found images manipulated was fired and unable to find other work in research. Maybe is unemployed still, dunno. Somebody saved a lot of money also.

Is the problem that it was Saudia Arabia / Russia, or would this have happened regardless of country due to his contract with the Spanish university?

If it's the former, it really doesn't seem like a justified reaction.

Most probably, but we could miss things that we don't know. He could had been caught cheating and let him go without disclosing it in a damaging control move if we assume that everybody in his department could appear in one of his papers at least, and this could destroy the entire careers of many people or damage the ability to receive funds for everybody

I am not a scientist in this field and can not evaluate the quality of his studies. But if you let ChatGPT do the "non-scientific" work, this seems to be okay to me. Also, I think that with the time there will be better mechanisms for evaluating studies/scientists as generating spam will be easier. But nonetheless, I think these rankings don't fulfill a scientific need. A scientific discovery can be important, but that doesn't mean anyone recognizes that.

"Vegetative electron microscopy" is likely a poor rephrasing of "low-energy electron microscopy", which is a thing [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-energy_electron_microscopy

In fact, it's a copy-pasted OCR error.

Humans wont have to read the papers, might as wel run them though the llm to see what it makes from it. We could even require a machine readable benchmark for future compatibility.

I'm not in academia, is the industry vigilant of researchers who try to game metrics, or is metric-gaming commonplace and largely overlooked? Does it depend on country?

Who is "the industry"? My managers want me to succeed at the metrics. Research is too diverse for them to have real understanding of all of their underlings and their work so metrics become important. My peers (well, the ones I respect) know that the metrics are awful. The metrics seem to have the property that people who I consider successful do score well, but it's possible to score well entirely on the back of work with no scientific value too.

Feels like the terms academic plagiarism and brute force, got married to produce AI generated research papers...

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