There follows a guest post by Daily Sceptic contributing editor Mike Hearn about the ongoing problem of apparently respectable scientific journals publishing computer-generated ‘research’ papers that are complete gibberish.
The publisher Springer Nature has released an “expression of concern” for more than four hundred papers they published in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences. All these papers supposedly passed through both peer review and editorial control, yet no expertise in geoscience is required to notice the problem:
The paper can’t decide if it’s about organic pollutants or the beauty of Latin dancing, and switches instantly from one to the other half way through the abstract.
The publisher claims this went through about two months of review, during which time the editors proved their value by assigning it helpful keywords:
If you’re intrigued by this fusion of environmental science and fun hobbies, you’ll be overjoyed to learn that the full article will only cost you about £30 and there are many more available if that one doesn’t take your fancy, e.g.
- Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and physical fitness detection of basketball
- Detection of rare earth elements in groundwater based on SAR imaging algorithm and fatigue intervention of dance training
- Detection of PM2.5 in mountain air based on fuzzy multi-attribute and construction of folk sports activities
- Characteristics of heavy metal pollutants in groundwater based on fuzzy decision making and the effect of aerobic exercise on teenagers
Background
Peer-reviewed science is the type of evidence policymakers respect most. Nonetheless, a frequent topic on this site is scientific reports containing errors so basic that any layman can spot them immediately, leading to the question of whether anyone actually read the papers before publication. An example is the recent article by Imperial College London, published in Nature Scientific Reports, in which the first sentence was a factually false claim about public statistics.
Evidence is now accruing that it’s indeed possible for “peer reviewed” scientific papers to be published which have not only never been reviewed by anybody at all, but might not have even been written by anybody, and that these papers can be published by well known firms like Springer Nature and Elsevier. In August we wrote about the phenomenon of nonsensical “tortured phrases” that indicate the usage of thesaurus-driven paper rewriting programs, probably the work of professional science forging operations called “paper mills”. Thousands of papers have been spotted using this technique; the true extent of the problem is unknown. In July, I reported on the prevalence of Photoshopped images and Chinese paper-forging efforts in the medical literature. Papers are often found that are entirely unintelligible, for example this paper, or this one whose abstract ends by saying, “Clean the information for the preparation set for finding valuable highlights to speak to the information by relying upon the objective of the undertaking.” – a random stream of words that means nothing.
Where does this kind of text come from?
The most plausible explanation is that these papers are being auto-generated using something called a context-free grammar. The goal is probably to create the appearance of interest in the authors they cite. In academia promotions are linked to publications and citations, creating a financial incentive to engage in this sort of metric gaming. The signs are all there: inexplicable topic switches half way through sentences or paragraphs, rampant grammatical errors, the repetitive title structure, citations of real papers and so on. Another sign is the explanation the journal supplied for how it occurred: the editor claims that his email address was hacked.
In this case, something probably went wrong during the production process that caused different databases of pre-canned phrases to be mixed together incorrectly. The people generating these papers are doing it on an industrial scale, so they didn’t notice because they don’t bother reading their own output. The buyers didn’t notice – perhaps they can’t actually read English, or don’t exist. Then the journal didn’t notice because, apparently, it’s enough for just one person to get “hacked” for the journal to publish entire editions filled with nonsense. And finally none of the journal’s readers noticed either, leading to the suspicion that maybe there aren’t any.
The volunteers spotting these papers are uncovering an entire science-laundering ecosystem, hiding in plain sight.
We know randomly generated papers can get published because it’s happened hundreds of times before. Perhaps the most famous example is SCIgen, “a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations” using context-free grammars. It was created in 2005 by MIT grad students as a joke, with the aim to “maximize amusement, rather than coherence“. SCIgen papers are buzzword salads that might be convincing to someone unfamiliar with computer science, albeit only if they aren’t paying attention.
Despite this origin, in 2014 over 120 SCIgen papers were withdrawn by leading publishers like the IEEE after outsiders noticed them. In 2020 two professors of computer science observed that the problem was still occurring and wrote an automatic SCIgen detector. Although it’s only about 80% reliable, it nonetheless spotted hundreds more. Their detector is now being run across a subset of new publications and finds new papers on a regular basis.
Root cause analysis
On its face, this phenomenon is extraordinary. Why can’t journals stop themselves publishing machine-generated gibberish? It’s impossible to imagine any normal newspaper or magazine publishing thousands of pages of literally random text and then blaming IT problems for it, yet this is happening repeatedly in the world of academic publishing.
The surface level problem is that many scientific journals appear to be almost or entirely automated, including journals that have been around for decades. Once papers are submitted, the reviewing, editorial and publishing process becomes handled by computers. If the system stops working properly editors can seem oblivious – they routinely discover they published nonsense only because people who don’t even subscribe to their journal complained about it.
Strong evidence for this comes from the “fixes” journals present when put under pressure. As an explanation for why the 436 “expressions of concern” wouldn’t be repeated the publisher said:
The dedicated Research Integrity team at Springer Nature is constantly searching for any irregularities in the publication process, supported by a range of tools, including an in-house-developed detection tool.
The same firm also proudly trumpeted in a press release that:
Springer announces the release of SciDetect, a new software program that automatically checks for fake scientific papers. The open source software discovers text that has been generated with the SCIgen computer program and other fake-paper generators like Mathgen and Physgen. Springer uses the software in its production workflow to provide additional, fail-safe checking.
A different journal proposed an even more ridiculous solution: ban people from submitting papers from webmail accounts. The more obvious solution of paying people to read the articles before they get published is apparently unthinkable – the problem of fake auto-generated papers is so prevalent, and the scientific peer review process so useless, that they are resorting to these feeble attempts to automate the editing process.
Diving below the surface, the problem may be that journals face functional irrelevance in the era of search engines. Clearly nobody can be reading the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, including its own editors, yet according to an interesting essay by Prof Igor Pak “publisher’s contracts with [university] libraries require them to deliver a certain number of pages each year“. What’s in those pages? The editors don’t care because the libraries pay regardless. The librarians don’t care because the universities pay. The universities don’t care because the students and granting bodies pay. The students and granting bodies don’t care because the government pays. The government doesn’t care because the citizens pay, and the citizens DO care – when they find out about this stuff – but generally can’t do anything about it because they’re forced to pay through taxes, student loan laws and a (socially engineered) culture in which people are told they must have a degree or else they won’t be able to get a professional job.
This seems to be zombie-fying scientific publishing. Non-top tier journals live on as third party proof that some work was done, which in a centrally planned economy has value for justifying funding requests to committees. But in any sort of actual market-based economy many of them would have disappeared a long time ago.
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It should. But logic and sense has long been decoupled from policy making around Covid. A hundred other things should have stopped this by now and they haven’t.
And now that kids have all finished school what is the point of them continuing to test. so we might just see an exponential drop in cases.
And everything will be nicely in place for a corresponding exponential rise in cases when schools testing restarts in September.
That’s the plan!
The MSM is claiming that the drop in the number of “cases” is due to kids not being tested to death now that schools have broken up. This makes a certain amount of sense, as schools in Scotland broke up several weeks ago, and “cases” peaked before they did in England. The number of “cases” is pretty meaningless as it is largely a factor of the number of tests carried out. It would be far more meaningful to look at the percentage of tests coming back positive to get an idea of whether the wave has peaked or not. Sadly this information isn’t easy to find, maybe because it wouldn’t look as scary as the number of “cases” which often increases due to more and more testing.
The Daily Telegraph interactive map shows whether cases are rising or falling in the area selected and seems to be more accurate than most. They seem to calculate their seven day rolling averages in a different way and are more up to date than some website information such as Gov UK. This, and the BBC one include information which is over a week old which is an age in this business. Tim Spector spotted the peak but was bullied into changing his prediction and his methodology and appeared on YouTube recanting at the very moment the DT was reporting the week on week fall last Thursday.
It is true there were 300k less tests in the past 7 days compared to prior, but still testing over 1m, 550k which are not PCR (mostly LFT). It will have an effect.
Not on illnesses but positive test results.
And on cue, the zero nutters are pushing out the “New Covid” bullshit already.
As we have learned over the last 18 months, inconvenient facts are ignored by the Lockdown Extremists.
And that’s because this isn’t about control of a low consequence infectious disease. It’s about creating a global health surveillance/social contract system.
Yeah, but give it till mid November to see the REAL consequences you irresponsible bastards! (Sarcasm)
This is purely because of the schools closing.
All of a sudden millions of schoolkids aren’t doing twice weekly testing.
These were estimated at producing over 5,000 cases a day, and up to 10,000 cases a day near the end of term.
This would have been obvious if they’d give us the cases by age data, but, just like the by vaccination status data, the ugly truth would be more likely to become apparent to the public.
Nevertheless, you’d have thought that the authorities would have warned us that it was coming, and tried to estimate its impact.
The question from here is, now that this one-off effect has been removed from the system will we see a drop in cases, as you’d expect from previous covid waves, or will we see a slower decline perhaps as a sign of asymptomatic vaccinated becoming a reservoir for covid.
As an aside, I think there is now a risk that the government blame the recent covid wave as due to children, and thus try to get all kids vaccinated. This would be a disaster.
Why would an effect caused by schools closing happen seven days after schools were closed? Did they do an additional 7 days of testing without teaching?
My kids’ school closed on Wednesday.
Today’s data is from Thursday, which will include some delayed results coming through the system.
The shape of the decline indicates the range of school closure — some closed late last week, some will be closing today.
Schools in Scotland close at the beginning of July, which is why their cases curve peaked before the UK (they’re 8% of the UK’s population, so their fall in cases was masked by rest-of-UK data).
The changes in cases from now will be more indicative of the real shape of this covid wave.
I’ll add to this.
The twice weekly testing has picked up over 5,000 cases a day since early July.
What do you think will happen at the point where this mandated testing stops?
Do you think they’ll continue in their testing?
I’d also note that the majority of cases of covid in children are asymptomatic; they won’t choose to self-test because they won’t know it is necessary.
The same here in Cheshire, except for private schools.
Where do you live? The schools round here (Hampshire) closed today.
I’m no longer at school. This was a school holiday date from some web site. My bad.
But overall testing numbers haven’t dropped significantly, so I’m not sure that schools can be the cause.
That’s very interesting.
You’ve made me check this. I’m not sure what’s going on.
The UK test figures show about 1 million tests a day, of all types.
But there are about 4 million secondary age children in the UK, and the majority take two tests a week. So that should even out as about 1.5 million tests a day just from this group. Ie 0.5 million more than the total number of tests taken.
Thus I cannot see how school testing is included in their daily tests update. However, there is no indication anywhere that the schoolchild tests are excluded from the totals.
I’d note that the child test results have to be reported even if negative (I do this, twice a week), so they’re all being recorded somewhere.
Yet another area where the situation is not at all clear.
They said on the news tonight that the drop in cases was due to the end of the euros so people weren’t mixing as much and cases are due to rise again. A burst of laughter came from my wife’s direction my jaw just dropped. Rather this no matter how ridiculous than blaming it on schools.
It’s so good that you keep trying Will and are hopeful for normalcy. I don’t feel hopeful at all. I feel this will continue and worsen into the Autumn and through the winter and perhaps only next year will things ease off.
It’s normality -normalcy is a Gates word.
Actually, the word ‘normalcy’ appeared in the early 1920’s. It was brilliantly condemned by Dorothy L. Sayers in her book ‘The Mind of the Maker’.
‘Always excepting words such as ‘normalcy’ and ‘sportsdrome’ which are so steeped in sin that their only place is Hell or a dictionary of Barbarisms.’
These days it’s mainly seen in US English.
Let me off lightly… had a wisdom tooth out today .. must have removed a bit of my brain too!
I wasn’t really having a go Wendy, but seriously the first time I actually heard normalcy was last year in a a Bill Gates video. Hope your mouth feels better soon.
Personally, I believe that Johnson is somewhat sceptical about lockdowns; and Sunak is definitely down that path. I’m also inclined to the idea the Handcock’s demise was engineered, in the sense that some people knew we was being a bit handy, and chose an auspicious time to swap him for Javid who is less of a zealot (BTW: not praising these people, just ranking them).
One can argue about whether Johnson should have stood up right at the beginning, or whether that was politically impossible. Nevertheless, the timing of the end of lockdown is fortuitous. OK, the end is nothing like it should be, but it was significant enough to bring the Zero Covid idiots out in force, shouting about how we were going to get 100K cases a day, 200K cases a day, whatever, only to be definitively shown to be wrong.
I have some hope (not confident, but a bit hopeful) that this might be the beginning of the end, as their credibility is finally shot to shreds.
Fingers crossed ……
‘politically impossible’ – sounds like a polite excuse for lying. I just can’t stand why people aren’t decent, honest and trustworthy. Ok let’s say a few slip through, why aren’t they tarred and feathered. Our system is terrible and that it’s accepted is worse.
Stand up, present facts, advise people, sit down, how hard can it be? Oh and collect my bins once a week.
Thanks for the optimism, we do need hope.
It’s better to look at the number of cases reported in the last 7 days as this is less affected by daily fluctuations (dividing that by 7 yields the moving average but there’s little point in doing this). Currently, that looks like this:
A feature of moving averages is that they lag, which means that when numbers fall, the numbers fall before the moving average does. Keeping assorted parts of my anatomy crossed.
I desperately hope this is a real peak and on the whole I suspect it will be. But we haven’t seen the effect of any increased freedoms on July 19th. The median incubation period of the virus is four or five days and you have to allow time for people to meet. We won’t see any influence of July 19th (if there is any) until next week at the earliest.
Holy non-sequitur, Batman!
If the median[*] incubation period is 4 – 5 days, half of the effect of “opening on the 19th” should have happened by now. If “50% of the new cases” translates to a drop. “100%” won’t be a huge increase.
[*] The median is the number exactly in the middle of an ordered sequence of numbers.
Covid is unexceptional at a societal level and does not merit extraordinary responses, especially as those responses had previously been rejected as futile – a judgement demonstrated as very wise by real world data.
Everything else is just a rabbit hole to disappear down.
… and why all this f.ing nattering about the smoke and mirrors of ‘cases’? It sounds like a convention of Covidiots having a wet knickers party.
Yes but……………the 10000 Scottish football fans who supposedly came back from London showing symptoms cannot have been away for very long. Their incubation period seemed to be a few hours.
Why do I think of herd immunity?
And why doesn’t the government admit that’s what’s happening?
I don’t know the answer to either question! (maybe you weren’t asking me).
It has always happened in past epidemics. The human race survived. The balck death lockdown never happened except as a consequence of people naturally avoiding the plague-ridden where possible.
I desperately hope that one day all this will recognised for the evil folly that it is. I won’t live to see that day, but hope my children will.
I think historians will lump it in with tulip mania and the south sea bubble.
Some have, quite ridiculously, claimed that the sudden drop in case rates is attributable to the sudden increase in vaccine uptake in young people.
Where do I start?….
First, assuming that vaccination in young people actually could reduce case rates, then the increase in vaccine-uptake would take a good three weeks at least to take effect and cause this reduction. Instead, it has happened IMMEDIATELY AFTER a sudden increase in uptake over the last few days, which already rules out this being a factor. Conversely, if the lifting of restrictions were to be the culprit of an increase in cases, then we would see that take place more or less straight away. Instead we see the opposite.
Second, again assuming that rising vaccination rates in any age group reduces case rates, why would one naturally assume that it’s the extra young people receiving jabs, rather than the extra elderly vulnerable people receiving their second jab that has achieved this?
Third, and this is the most important point, the aforementioned assumptions are in fact incorrect anyway. Surely one thing that the behaviour of the Delta variant has taught us, should be that vaccinations do not reduce cases significantly anyway. Their primary purpose is to protect the individual receiving a vaccine from getting severe symptoms. This is corroborated in the official data, that shows clearly that the correlation between hospitalizations/deaths and cases has been broken.
And then there’s the total evasion of talking about ever-increasing levels of naturally acquired herd immunity, in addition to the vaccination programme!
Also, according to the govt’s own data, there doesn’t appear to have been a rapid increase in young people being vaxxed over the last few days anyway.
Another interesting one. Pretty complicated. It’s the speed of change of the number of cases reported in the last 7 days as day-on-day factor divided by the same value for tests. If this is >1, cases are growing faster than tests, if it’s <1, cases are growing slower (including negative growth, ie, decline) than tests.
Currently below 1 for the first time since June.
GI>GO
I just checked.
There were 47,000 confirmed cases in schoolchildren last week (12th to 16th July).
They test on schooldays, so that’s a contribution of 9,500 positive tests a day.
The vast majority of these positive tests will have now gone. The disappearance will be spread over a week or so, as that’s the spread of ‘last day of term’ across the country.
The contribution of these ‘now missing’ test results needs to be considered before inventing any other reason for the decline.
The vast majority of these positive tests will have now gone.
Most schools in the UK closed today – so presumably this will not happen until next week.
The number of tests (in the last 7 days) have been declining since last Sunday. But cases (in the last 7 days) kept growing until yesterday. Today, the number of tests grew (by about 0.5%), yet cases declined (by about 4.7%). This doesn’t look as if it’s caused by “missing test results”.
The only thing I fear is the “nightclub” effect – but will it be or will most of the nightclub frequenters already have had covid. Why do I fear it? Not because of the effect on the young who get it but because of Canute Johnson being panicked by his dreadful so called experts again
Way too early to crow but, the models have always been difficult to accept because they seem to see an unlimited number of potential infected. That simply isn’t how virus spread can occur. You have to have infected with open field to many other potentially infected, to go with a highly successful virus (if indeed the virus family transmission rate is below 10%, this really gets dubious). We now have 90.1% of adults with antibodies. This means the population of easily infected is shrinking weekly. 1 in 75 infected in the past week. The population of potentially ill simply doesn’t allow for continued growth. This is why viruses burnout. Now, if we see a variant that can actually break through to prior infected (not vaccinated) and produce enough virus load to transmit, we likely have a whole new game. We don’t have that at this point. And doubtfully won’t, no matter how many insane modelers propose it to be.
What have antibodies to do with fighting a virus that invades one’s cells via the ACE2 receptor may I ask, with respect?
The reasoning from a temporary drop in the absolute (i.e. test-dependent) number of cases and without accounting for delays in infection is as flawed as the authorities using these same shitty charts to preach pandemic. But of course, if the cherry-picking fits your preconceptions, then it’s all right to abuse data. Sceptic my ass. You are on the same level as the government “experts”, just visibly more so.
Sometimes, reading before commenting pays. As I already wrote elsewhere “drop in cases” did not mirror a corresponding “drop in tests”. Until yesterday (ie, up to and including Wednesday), the number of tests was declining but the number of cases grew nevertheless. Yesterday, cases and tests declined (by about 2.5% each), today, tests grew and cases declined faster than before.
You’re also asserting that this must be a temporary drop despite you can’t predict the future any better than anyone else, IOW, you’re stating something as fact you cannot possibly know yet. If that’s supposed to be professional propaganda, it’s poorly executed.
The author of text (correctly) stated that we do not know this yet.
From NHS Test and Trace methodology web page, section Timings and Revisions:
“A snapshot of this data is taken for publication several days after the end of the reporting period to give time for tests reported at the end of the 7-day period to be captured. Figures given in previous releases are routinely revised as some tests may continue to be reported after this period.”
Meaning that the new data most likely has not even arrived yet.
Also, the author chose to completely ignore that the maligned “pingdemic” is making increasingly more people isolate… which is also going to suppress new cases. But of course, the idea that this “individual lockdown” or “idle at home” policy might be the real reason for the effect goes in exactly the opposite direction than the author’s preferred fantasy.
If some inconvenient truth is pointed out, throw more dust in the air.
Assuming your quote is at least not taken completely out of context, some number of somethings I wasn’t writing about will possibly change, probably going up, due to future revisions.
Aha.
This combined with more idle speculation and more unbacked assertions.
Are they counting one individual as an actual ‘case’? Or are they counting ‘cases’ with the idiots that are morbidly looking for symptoms testing themselves several times a week? One idiot that tests several times a weeks could be classed collectively as 12 ‘cases’ a month.
So the idiots think its 12 separate ‘cases’
You wouldn’t have been able to make this up two years ago…!
Expect to much less emphasis on case numbers. Anything bad will be the headline.
When it becomes impossible to ignore they will credit the vaccine and because people kept wearing their muzzles.
Once they realised they could just lie with impunity they had no shame.
The Delta variant is less transmissible: it has become almost completely dominant during the time when restrictions are being lifted and social contacts increasing. It’s been less able to transmit when restrictions on contact have been in place. It’s a process of natural selection of the virus, the different strains compete with eachother. As a society, we should be encouraging the selection of the less transmissible variants. Normal human behaviour and interaction achieves this, as well as ultimate herd immunity. Restricted behaviour prolongs the pain. In the meantime, public policy should be turned to address the protection of the vulnerable. Properly, this time.
Perhaps the numbers are falling in England now and Scotland earlier because all the schoolkids recording positive tests to get time off from school don’t need to anymore. With the repercussions of all their contacts being pinged too. Possibly.
It might be the Delta variant is following a similar path to the path it followed in India, infections rose very rapidly then fell equally rapidly. It’s hard to believe lockdowns had such a dramatic effect.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/india
If the Covid zealots are right there should be an increase in cases in irresponsible England due to less masking etc while Wales and Scotland see cases fall thanks to their continuing restrictions.
Hhhmmm… let’s see what happens.
And if ever there was a time, now is the time to apply the 2-stage plan: 1) allow Ivermectin to be deployed and provide the protocols to GPs, and 2) re-open GP surgeries to enable them to administer it on as near a drop-in basis as possible to those with symptoms. Oh, and completely stop testing of the asymptomatic and totally abolish Test & Trace.
Posted this https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html above.
Proving the complete ( and utter bollocks) that we’ve been fed for over a year. Why are we as a nation buying this shit.
Someone needs to help explain it to me.