Claims like this require peer review, not to mention this is a private company not a university lab.
I’m worried over this trend of private companies putting press releases into LaTeX templates.
I’m worried over this trend of private companies putting press releases into LaTeX templates.
Citation extortion rings are part of every journal. I had a reviewer from Nature give feedback that I should cite her co-authors work on a topic that had nothing to do with my paper. It got rejected because I wouldn't. It went into archive and has been cited nearly a hundred times now. To add insult to injury Nature News asked to interview me about my work.
Some more info on the subject, and a vast underestimation of how prevalent it is: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/cite-my-papers-els...
At this point if you can figure out how to make a pdf paper using latex I consider your work to be on par with anything in a journal.
The head of the jury for my thesis defense had no shame in opening complaining in the public defense session:
"I am THE authority in the field [never had heard of the guy before], why the hell you didn't come to me!?"
The project had already been international award-winning, but then the thesis about it (from the single author) received a bad grade.
It’s pretty easy to con investors if you have the same “look” as a real lab.
I think you are talking about an extremely small segment of the population, so I don't think we're talking about a very large social impact. I'm also unconvinced that that segment doesn't generally take ordinary tech press releases at face value anyway.
> I trust citations from private companies without strong academic pedigree
OK, but the first two authors on this have doctorates in ML and applied photonics respectively. They don't have peer review on this paper, but I don't think you can say they're lacking in academic pedigree.
> It’s pretty easy to con investors if you have the same “look” as a real lab.
I don't know. My feeling is that the "conning investors who are terrible at due diligence" game is largely unavoidable and mostly a zero-sum competition between con artists. So while it's obviously bad, I'm not convinced that the specifics matter all that much. Fools and their money, and all that.
And we are decades away from modulatable miniaturized 250nm laser sources. It is typically 1.5um with today’s devices.
Not in this case, no. But in cases where I do have more knowledge, the additional detail makes it much easier to tell if there's anything of substance there, compared to traditional press releases which just make superficial marketing claims with minimal technical detail.
And if this were something more relevant to me, but where I didn't have expertise necessary to look at it, I could reach out to someone with the expertise needed to take a look. The point here is that it's very difficult talk at great length and in great detail about BS without making it apparent to experts that you're talking BS, whereas with a more traditional PR, the best you can often say is "well, if this is anything, these are very big claims."
People need to realize once and for all that templates no longer represent quality or truthfulness, if they ever did. Maybe that lesson has to hurt a bit.
Or maybe “peer or open review,” or something like that.