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Comment by aix1 | Hacker News Reader

Here is one hypothesis: https://theconversation.com/problematic-paper-screener-trawl...

<quote> Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States? Or bosom peril? Kidney disappointment? Fake neural organizations? Lactose bigotry? These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of “tortured phrases” that sleuths have found littered throughout reputable scientific journals.

They typically result from using paraphrasing tools to evade plagiarism-detection software when stealing someone else’s text. The phrases above are real examples of bungled synonyms for the United States, breast cancer, kidney failure, artificial neural networks, and lactose intolerance, respectively. </quote>

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During the whole BLM thing a few years ago my emplyer wanted "to do something" I guess so they added one of those "inclusive language" SaaS buttons.

This seems more plausible to me. "Bosom peril" is not in any way a synonym for cancer. But if you think 'cancer' as a word will trigger people then softening it with 'peril' makes sense.

It's not a woke sensitivity thing. They're using spinners, tools designed for spammers years ago (long predating LLMs) that just randomly substitute words from a thesaurus.

It works because so many academic journals are write-only media. The only things that actually "read" the papers are machines that check for plagiarism, compute citation counts and do other things used to decide on academic promotions. So it doesn't matter if the text is nonsensical.

And the tools work for spam, the original use case, because people who want to buy Viagra from spam mails don't care if they have to read weird English, they just want to find the web shops. Works great for bypassing keyword and Bayesian filters though.

Some papers show signs of being generated by context-free grammars or random phrase combination as well.

These papers are often being produced by "paper mills" that bulk generate fake studies and sell them to academics, who use them to get promoted without having to do any real research.

I wrote an article about the problem years ago if you want to learn more:

https://dailysceptic.org/2021/10/03/436-randomly-generated-p...

Nice article.

Your description of the completely apathetic chain of actors, starting with the journal editors, was depressing to read.

You did not explicitly comment on it, but the situation also implies that even researchers don't really care about research? Like no advisers, or employers or colleagues are reading through these papers?

It feels like more people should have noticed that these journals will print garbage and having an article in a journal like this would not be a positive signal anymore. Maybe it just takes a while?

Yeah, nobody is reading these journals. They all have dozens of "editors" but it's just CV manipulation.

People are noticing, that's why academic credibility is in free fall but it's all tied up with ideology. Academia purged everyone not on the far left a long time ago, so the left find it useful to promote universities as still having the highest rigour.

You sure it isn't a euphemism for "heart attack"?

"Bosom peril" sounds like what someone in the 1800s would write in a spicy novel describing a character's experience being unable to breathe while being hugged by a well-endowed lady.

I thought it was booby trap

It's all gone tits up.

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