"It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry..."
By Tyler Durden: It's yet another reminder of why blindly 'trusting the science' may not always be the best go-to move in the future.
217
year old Wiley science publisher has reportedly "peer reviewed" more
than 11,000 papers that were determined to be fake without ever
noticing. The papers were referred to as "naked gobbledygook
sandwiches", Australian blogger Jo Nova wrote on her blog last week.
"It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry," she said. "Who knew, academic journals were a $30 billion dollar industry?"
According to Nova's
post, professional cheating services are employing AI to craft
seemingly "original" academic papers by shuffling around words. For
instance, terms like "breast cancer" morphed into "bosom peril," and a
"naïve Bayes" classifier turns into "gullible Bayes."
Similarly, in one paper, an ant colony was bizarrely rebranded as an "underground creepy crawly state."
The
misuse of terminology extends to machine learning, where a 'random
forest' is whimsically translated to 'irregular backwoods' or 'arbitrary
timberland'.
Nova writes that shockingly, these papers undergo
peer review without any rigorous human oversight, allowing egregious
errors, like converting 'local average energy' to 'territorial normal
vitality', to slip through.