Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 00:46:49 UTC No. 16196865

>>16196862
kek

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 01:03:09 UTC No. 16196879

>>16196862
Cockroaches?
In MY urethra??

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 01:19:09 UTC No. 16196897

>>16196862
Some of it's students trying to evade plagiarism, but some of it is researchers trying to avoid accusations of plagiarism when they happen to reuse common phrases from paper to paper.

When you find a good way of phrasing something, it's irritating as fuck to have to constantly find new ways of expressing it.

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 01:34:18 UTC No. 16196915

>>16196862
Bro, I've seen some absolutely cursed English in editing some Indian and Chinese submissions to journals. I think if I saw an engineer use "flag to clammor ratio" instead of "signal to noise ratio" I'd recommend they keep it that way just because it's funny as fuck.

🗑️ Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 01:46:30 UTC No. 16196933

>>16196862
From what I can gather on that site it's just correction of loose language into formal terms, press on the number in the tips column

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 03:11:26 UTC No. 16197017

>>16196915
kek, Indian and Chinese journals are cheating.
I was asked to proofread the posters of some undergrad students for our seminar class a couple years ago, and one of the Chinese students' posters was an absolute clusterfuck. No title, none of the figures were labeled, and the whole poster was gibberish. The one phrase I still remember is:
>Before your eye the swimming rice am become the messy place.
The whole damn poster was like that. He didn't respond to my feedback email, and he skipped the actual poster presentation event, so to this day I still have no fucking idea what his poster was about.

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 03:15:00 UTC No. 16197023

>>16197017
Oh no they were IEEE English language journals, just from Indian and Chinese universities/researchers. Dreadful stuff really.

In terms of what his poster was about, my guess is that it has something to do with studying psychological unrest when you enter the water. That or abstract algebra, both could fit that quote well.

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 03:16:46 UTC No. 16197026

>>16196862
>Teachers may have noticed some of these phrases in students’ attempts to get good grades by using paraphrasing tools to evade plagiarism.
NO SHIT. YOU DON'T FUCKNIG SAY

If you don't notice these you shouldn't be teaching at any level

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 05:05:53 UTC No. 16197113

Lmao based AI

🗑️ Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 05:11:27 UTC No. 16197119

No one told me super long cockship got cancelled :(

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 05:41:50 UTC No. 16197141

>>16196862
>peer-reviewed articles
Academia is dead, jews killed it, and indians shat over the corpse.

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 05:51:57 UTC No. 16197149

>>16196862
>counterfeit consciousness
I would probably think that that was intentional if I saw that, it sounds like something out of a sci fi novel.

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 05:56:23 UTC No. 16197153

>>16197149
How legitimate is a consciousness of someone who goes around with a head full ideas that were planted there by Hollywood sci-fi movies and government brainwashing schools?

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 06:07:51 UTC No. 16197169

>>16197153
I didn't mean that I particularly give a shit about Hollywood and what they have to say, I meant that it sounded like a name for something that could become an interesting concept, if competently written. To speak more on the subject of this thread, if this term were to appear in, say, a short story as part of an English assignment, I wouldn't think twice about it as it sounds like a termwhich could arise naturally in a sci fi setting. Honestly, someone who immediately thinks of terribly written bullshit Hollywood stories for midwits at the mere mention of a genre with a lot of potential for interesting stories is probably less conscious than someone who can understand nuance and filter for quality without just ignoring an entire genre.

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 21:42:44 UTC No. 16198256

>>16197169
You're not a real person, you don't think, your brain is just a data storage device for various propaganda distributors.

Anonymous at Tue, 28 May 2024 21:51:14 UTC No. 16198268

>>16196862
Or maybe it's just ESLs making mistakes when they translate their research into english to submit it.

Anonymous at Wed, 29 May 2024 05:29:19 UTC No. 16198709

tortured phrases has a lot of comic potential. the fact that "AI" software spits out this gibberish just shows how mechanical and unintelligent it really is

Anonymous at Wed, 29 May 2024 16:51:15 UTC No. 16199284

>>16196862
The idea is that original research should convey original ideas or discoveries, it doesnt matter if the text also includes cliche phrasing now and then. This is just Jewish terrorism to accuse and destroy out of line faculty if they use a 3 word sequence that someone else also used in the history of the world

Anonymous at Wed, 29 May 2024 18:00:43 UTC No. 16199374

>>16196862
>India (71.2 percent)
Lmao
Figures

Anonymous at Wed, 29 May 2024 20:26:29 UTC No. 16199582

>>16196862
>tortured phrases
This is all because of the AI mass produced fraudulent Chinese, Indian, and muslim "research papers". ESL international students in our universities are fucking ruining EVERYTHING. They are notorious for being scammy and willing to take shortcuts for anything as long as they think it sounds impressive enough.

Anonymous at Wed, 29 May 2024 20:29:24 UTC No. 16199588

>>16197153
>>16198256
>Projections
Silence, wumao.

Anonymous at Wed, 29 May 2024 20:34:25 UTC No. 16199595

>>16199582
So if the person is a half-Indian half-Chinese Muslim they are super cooked eh?

I think a lot of it is definitely a cultural thing. Chinese universities and military research centers (as an example) don't seem to give a shit at all about western norms around things like plagiarism and falsification of results. If it is "true" in a "it would be useful to me/my team/my party if it were true" way it's good enough for them and they ship it.

Leads to a lot of junk papers and an unfortunate reputation to overcome if you're the exception to that rule.

Anonymous at Wed, 29 May 2024 20:41:55 UTC No. 16199615

>>16199595
I think they started mass-producing these obvious garbage papers just to destroy our scientific standards. These trashy articles are so prolific that some Science journals are shutting down because majority of the articles they receive are virtually worthless.

Anonymous at Wed, 29 May 2024 20:53:49 UTC No. 16199643

>>16199615
I don't really think it has much of anything to do with that. I've had quite a few conversations about this topic with (generally frustrated) Chinese and Indian graduate students at my western university in the US.

My understanding is that it generally goes something like this:
> Large cultural pressure for your children to become doctors, scientists or researchers. Anyone even slightly competent at math or science is pushed into STEM by their family even if they aren't a good fit for it.
> Absurd overproduction of low quality graduates from low quality state run 4-year institutions, all of which are going to try to go to grad school to achieve more prestige and career prospects.
> Western research is generally considered superior outside of the few very nationalist institutions, so these graduates are all trying to publish in Western journals.
> Huge pressure to publish in these journals when finishing degrees, but almost no consequence paid for things like plagiarism, falsification of results etc. that would cost you your career in the west.
> Cultural nepotism allowing for Asians/Indians etc. in the west to overlook some of these tendencies to further the academic careers of people they culturally connect with.

There definitely is (especially from China) some official party chest-beating, but I don't think it really takes any intentional undermining. I think they just don't understand or don't care about the impact they are having.

Anonymous at Wed, 29 May 2024 21:00:37 UTC No. 16199656

>>16199643
You might be right, but I wouldn't count anything out given how hard their active subversive agents are pushing for DEI policies in our universities while infiltrating federal government institutions. Chinese communist party is actively waging hybrid warfare, and we know Indians tend to be bottom of the barrel golem peons of third world 'globalist' agenda anywhere.
>prestige
This is their deciding social factor in anything they do, more so then any other cultures. They constantly think in terms of class warfare and climbing the social ladder, and any quality or virtue is simply the means to that end for the majority of the population. We've had these issues with ESL students God knows many times, but Chinese and Indians are ridiculously class sensitive.

Anonymous at Wed, 29 May 2024 21:25:44 UTC No. 16199704

>>16199656
> Chinese communist party is actively waging hybrid warfare, and we know Indians tend to be bottom of the barrel golem peons of third world 'globalist' agenda anywhere.

I don't have any doubts about the first part being true. I do have doubts that this is the primary factor in the problem of Chinese research being shit.

Most Western research is shit too, we just have a lot more mechanisms to prevent shit research from getting so far along the process that it gets submitted to journals with such obvious problems. Most Western PI's and professors are far too concerned with the consequences they would face to allow the brazen academic misconduct that occurs from these Chinese military schools.
If Western professors were to face literally no consequences for almost everything that comes from their research group being fabricated/plagiarized it would be far more common here too.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 01:37:01 UTC No. 16200069

>>16199582
Testorrncells

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 02:06:10 UTC No. 16200107

>>16199704
>we just have a lot more mechanisms to prevent shit research from getting so far along the process that it gets submitted to journals with such obvious problems
no we don't, the "replication" crisis (AKA outright fraud on a massive scale) has been going on for decades and it just keeps on getting worse and worse.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 05:20:40 UTC No. 16200259

>>16200107
When they use public funds to pay for their academic vanity publication and then it turns out that their vanity publication was fraudulent, do they have to pay back the public funds that they intentionally misused?

🗑️ Kate at Thu, 30 May 2024 05:24:56 UTC No. 16200264

Hello, I'm sorry for the sudden message!
I am part of a Japanese startup looking to create manga that appeals to international audiences. Finding this Discord, I wanted to reach out to learn more about your favorite types and what you usually read.
Would you be available for a 30-minute chat on Zoom? I would be really thrilled to hear back from you!

🗑️ Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 06:15:56 UTC No. 16200345

>>16197149
>Thou shalt not make a machine to
counterfeit a human mind.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 06:16:58 UTC No. 16200352

>>16197149
>Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 06:21:29 UTC No. 16200357

>>16200264
Fuck me harder mommy ohhhh baby

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 08:39:31 UTC No. 16200473

>>16196862
Sad that you apparently think that this is a new Phenomenon.

Most studies have very poor methodology and often not even supplementary material to even be able to reproduce the study or experiment.

Often papers are a buzzword bingo, with a buckload of unrelated or maybe tangentially related references and excuses to use obscure statistical methods, which are heavily biased.

And buckload of retarded to useless references and heavy usage of made up abbreviations is nothing but a obfuscation method to conceal that they actually didn't even have any relevant data.
Must studies are extremly long abstracts, introductions and discussions to justify the conclusion.
Methods are mostly not even a page long and not even explained why this particular method, exclusion criteria or additives are used. They just do.
And then make shit up, on why it fits the hypothesis.
And even if all results go against the hypothesis, they still make up shit, why it could be interpreted as "somewhat fullfilling the hypothesis".

It is beyond retarded

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 11:54:35 UTC No. 16200643

>>16199615
>it's a worldwide conspiracy against me!
Meds
>>16199643
This is closer to the truth. They're imposing quotas on how many papers should be out every year

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 12:02:16 UTC No. 16200650

>>16200107
The replication crisis is not "outright fraud on a massive scale." That's not what that means.

The replication crisis is the problem that the results of a growing number of studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Some subset of that will be fraud, but a lot of that will not be fraud and will instead be a combination of 1) exponentially increasing expenses for studies involving medications or large human sample sizes, 2) massive computational and time resources required for studies which aggregate the results of millions of sub-trials (either simulated or physically performed), 3) methodology errors which often turn out to be a genuine lack of understanding on the part of the researchers rather than fraud.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 12:29:59 UTC No. 16200680

>>16198268
ESLs are scammers by default, and the honest+smart ones get good at English really fast

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 13:17:46 UTC No. 16200744

>>16199582
>dck

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 13:25:40 UTC No. 16200756

>>16200650
Some studies re also impossible to reproduce, because they do not supply a detailed methodology or evene refuse to share supplementary materials such as raw data.

Also the reproduction crisis involves such studies, that are not "experiments" but purely observational, retrospective studies and working with exclusive datasets.
Gaining access to the data is sometimes impossible, or actively obfuscated.
As an example, we requested some supplementary material raw dats, from a study and instead of a .csv or excel they sent us a 1200 page PDF of images, literally images, of tables. You couldn't search or do anything automated.
They refused to give us the data in a machine readable format.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 15:26:50 UTC No. 16200892

>>16200264
Buy an ad and kill yourself

Anonymous at Thu, 30 May 2024 16:34:18 UTC No. 16201009

>>16200756
Yeah the whole data access issue is a massive pain in the ass. In general my experience is not that people are intentionally malicious, more that they are lazy and don't want to do the work of making data easily accessible if there's no benefit on their end.

I'm sure there are people who are malicious and don't want people snooping around the validity of their results (especially if they've cooked their results in not so ethical ways). My wife has run into that a lot in ecological population modeling where labs can be very protective of granting access to their "open source" data.

🗑️ Anonymous at Fri, 31 May 2024 00:15:59 UTC No. 16201689

if "AI" software is so smart and powerful then why can't it even paraphrase correctly?

Anonymous at Fri, 31 May 2024 00:36:33 UTC No. 16201727

>>16201689
AI isn't smart. It's literally more retarded than a 5 year old. It's like if you had a person that had both never developed actual linguistic understanding or basic decision making ability but had also read/memorized every book in every library on Earth. It can "paraphrase" via interpolation just about anything you'd need it to, but it has no clue what it's actually saying.

Anonymous at Fri, 31 May 2024 06:19:20 UTC No. 16202128

>>16201727
This.
Unfortunately, we have retarded instructors and 'professors' who are wholly unqualified for their jobs and write worse than AIs do.

Anonymous at Fri, 31 May 2024 07:44:01 UTC No. 16202175

>>16200650
Why are the "massive computized aggregate of sub-trials" taken seriously in the first place anyway? It's like you give students homework, "Find data on X subject", they all go and fake up the data and give it to you, then you who are a lazy piece of shit input all the data in a machine and it shits out some bullshit that is believable but it's still bullshit. How can you trust something like that?

>methodology errors
Exactly, why are meta-analysis so highly regarded if they take the collective word of people who don't know shit?

Anonymous at Fri, 31 May 2024 07:46:42 UTC No. 16202176

>>16196862
>The two most frequent countries listed in the authors’ affiliations are India (71.2 percent) and China (6.3 percent)
sirs...

Anonymous at Fri, 31 May 2024 07:55:40 UTC No. 16202178

>>16201009
Ofcourse it is not ethical to assume motives. That is a nobrainer.
But one has to acknowledge that intransparency with data is a entry to allow fraud going on.

And this hits especcially hard in medicine and bioinformatics.
Because if a purely retrospective data driven study introduces highly vaguely defined exclusion criteria, it is unavoidably required to have the raw data and verify consistancy of excluded data.

And this happens pretty frequently.
Another obfuscation of data is the extrem narrowing of clinical endpoints and concealing all other endpoints that are effected by the intervention that is being observed.

No access to data will make it impossible to draw a conclusive result.
As an example, this is the exact technique that "vitamin & supplement" studies are deploying.
Vitamin X shows a benefit in heart health.
And then the study only includes highly specific heart events like a congestion.
But when congestion gets down arterial sclerosis goes up.
But they excluded arterial sclerosis.
And also in the clinical endpoints didn't account for overall mortality or morbidity, which also had no benefitial outcomes indicating, that supplementation does not improve health overall but shifts one disease expression to another.
Yet such conclusions are never drawn or at least mentioned.
And yeah sure, "but we wanted to only look at clinical outcome x" so we didn't lie, and ignored all the events we didn't care about. This study is not about health.
Which is mostly what you get, when questioning the benefits of the conclusion. Which is in my opinion not ethical not even making sense. But sure there will be a lot of people who will say: "I just looked at what I was payed for."
And people who will justify this, because god knows why.

Anonymous at Fri, 31 May 2024 22:44:13 UTC No. 16203151

>>16200650
That is what that means.

Anonymous at Sat, 1 Jun 2024 07:23:21 UTC No. 16203760

>>16196862
>tortured phrases

Anonymous at Sat, 1 Jun 2024 14:08:58 UTC No. 16204207

>>16196862
>India (71.2 percent) and China (6.3 percent)
Thats quite a power gap

Anonymous at Sat, 1 Jun 2024 14:16:53 UTC No. 16204228

>>16202175
> Exactly, why are meta-analysis so highly regarded if they take the collective word of people who don't know shit?

Methodology errors happen all the time even in cases where people are doing good research. I don't know if you know this, but most research it's not known ahead of time the "right way" to solve the problem (otherwise it wouldn't be research). In the process of figuring out the best solution, people will make mistakes, rely on assumptions from other's work that they didn't know were there, and come to conclusions that will later be determined incorrect by others. That's literally the scientific process.

> Why are the "massive computized aggregate of sub-trials" taken seriously in the first place anyway?

I don't know if you know this, but outside of mathematics, physics and some engineering disciplines there really are no "analytical" benchmarks or theoretical results connecting phenomena. When researchers are trying to determine a relationship between two phenomena in practice, unless they are lucky enough to have some physical or mathematical modeling they can rely on, they basically have to do it via aggregation of data and statistical analysis of macro-scale relationships. This often times requires an absurd amount of data from a very wide pool of samples if you want to avoid confounding (meaning accidentally capturing unrelated factors that you didn't properly average out).

Anonymous at Sat, 1 Jun 2024 14:53:33 UTC No. 16204297

>>16204228
>unless they are lucky enough to have some physical or mathematical modeling they can rely on, they basically have to do it via aggregation of data and statistical analysis of macro-scale relationships. This often times requires an absurd amount of data from a very wide pool of samples if you want to avoid confounding (meaning accidentally capturing unrelated factors that you didn't properly average out).
You've pretty much described the playbook of modern AI (except read "hidden layers" for "macro-scale relationships"). Are you saying that the knowledge I'd get from reading their papers is indistinguishable from reading the output of an LLM?

Anonymous at Sat, 1 Jun 2024 16:22:17 UTC No. 16204549

>>16204297
> Are you saying that the knowledge I'd get from reading their papers is indistinguishable from reading the output of an LLM?

No, that's not what I'm saying. Obviously the quality of different research papers will vary, but a good observational paper have quite a good bit of analysis/discussion on the interpretation/meaning of their results.

I'll give you an example in which there's real concern over confounding but we can't really have a meaningful "analytical model" without basically imposing one a priori.

Let's say we're looking at the population dynamics of a predator/prey combination in a particular region and trying to figure out the impact of a nearby industrial area. While in principle one could try to make some ODE predator prey curve, there's no justifiable analytical relationship one can point to examining the impact of that industrial development.

However, you want to make sure you aren't accidentally capturing things like weather cycles or multi-year birth population cycles when you are trying to determine the relationship between the industrial development and their populations. This requires access to large datasets of both the populations for the species, as well as the ecological context (weather patterns, metrics of industrialization, human population models in the local area, etc.).

Ultimately, the study has to look at the trends for these factors both alone and in combination to determine which seem to have an important relationship. That's not unreliable gibberish like an LLM, it's a deep contextual analysis of the population model and an effort to eliminate confounding.

Anonymous at Sun, 2 Jun 2024 00:59:53 UTC No. 16205517

>>16196862
LMAO that all of that blatant trash passed peer review and made it into academic journals

Anonymous at Sun, 2 Jun 2024 21:24:50 UTC No. 16206774

>>16205517
peer review prevents intelligent articles from being published because the average scientist that does the reviewing is a 100 IQ lackwit, so when something intelligent comes along they're too dumb to understand it

Anonymous at Mon, 3 Jun 2024 07:09:54 UTC No. 16207407

>>16197141
sure but jeets do that to everything

Anonymous at Mon, 3 Jun 2024 19:19:05 UTC No. 16208232

>“Breast cancer” becomes “Bosom peril.”
lol

Anonymous at Tue, 4 Jun 2024 04:29:41 UTC No. 16209146

>>16206774
Science is not a democracy, but peer review is. Thats why academia and science are two completely unrelated things

Anonymous at Tue, 4 Jun 2024 07:12:45 UTC No. 16209346

>>16204228
>methodology errors
Please describe how that phrase is different from “errors of method”

Anonymous at Tue, 4 Jun 2024 11:08:28 UTC No. 16209557

>>16209346
> Please describe how that phrase is different from “errors of method."

They mean the same thing. My point wasn't that methodology errors/errors of method aren't bad. My point was that methodology errors come with the territory of doing novel research. If people knew "the right way to solve the problem" we wouldn't need to do any research because it would already be done. So on some level you need to be willing to be forgiving of unintentional fuckups to allow for any research to be done at all.

The problem is that unintentional fuckups and intentional errors intended to hide something can be difficult to distinguish. You can't just 100% assume that any "error of method" is intentional or unintentional unless you have some real reason to believe that they were intentionally excluding something to avoid contradicting evidence.

Anonymous at Tue, 4 Jun 2024 11:13:42 UTC No. 16209564

>>16197017
>Before your eye the swimming rice am become the messy place.
Which word don't you get?

Anonymous at Tue, 4 Jun 2024 13:37:09 UTC No. 16209753

>>16209557
>My point was that methodology errors come with the territory of doing novel research.

Your point then is retarded.
Because if a field of research is novel proper methods need to be edtablished, calibrated and verified first.

This does not happen.
Most of the time if something is "novel" a methodology is applied which relies of extrapolations defined by vague and bendy criteria.
Often mixt with "simmulated" meme data, such as "monte carlo simulations" which is fed with initial BS data, and out comes BS.
But it will be interpreted in favour of the premise or hypothesis of the study.
There is no interest in finding the right method. It's point and declare, justified with simulated data, which again may include biases and counter factual scenarios as basis.
"Novel" research is a investment pitch. And if you can't dazzle thr investors with quality data, you can baffle them with bullshit.

Unintentional fuckups is the plausible deniability.
>oops we accidentally manipulated the data

Anonymous at Tue, 4 Jun 2024 14:31:39 UTC No. 16209817

>>16209753
> Because if a field of research is novel proper methods need to be edtablished, calibrated and verified first.

I'm sorry, how do you think they do this process? How do you develop calibrate and verify new methodology without also having uncalibrated and unverified methodology happen in the process? Most of science isn't like mathematics or theoretical physics where there are axiomatic/analytical "truths" you can point to.

If you're trying to develop a procedure to purify for imaging a novel protein or enzyme, there's no way to know exactly what to do without experimentation and "unverified" variation on methods which have worked on similar proteins/enzymes. Even then, when you get something that works, aside from some basic principles of bio-chemistry, there's absolutely no way to "know" whether there's a better/more efficient/less destructive way of doing this.

I think you just don't understand how science works outside of the compatively "simple" analytical domains like math/theoretical physics/computer science. There's no way to "verify" a modification on a methodology for a biological system in almost every practical case. You can get a heuristic sense of what works and what doesn't, but you will literally never know for certain whether there's a better approach until someone else produces one.

Anonymous at Tue, 4 Jun 2024 14:51:44 UTC No. 16209840

>>16209817
>I'm sorry, how do you think they do this process?

By skipping method validation.
Virtually all live sciences that research something novel skip the method finding, and jump right into hypotheticals with vague biased simulations and draw conclusions from that... to have a sales pitch for more funding.

And since you mentioned: proteins and enzymes.
That is the exact problem.
Instead of finding a a purification method, it is skipped.
But substituded with multiple tangential and surrugate methods and in silico estimations. Which is then sold as "purified" or "isolated", when you cannot even verify if the indirect methods represent reality, because without a direct method there is no way of calibrating.

The point and declare. Make up stuff with huge error margins, because everything has to go quick and fast.
If no direct method of proof or at least evidence exists, you cannot use a alternative/indirect/surrugate method, because to substitute a thing, you literally and actually must have the original thing, to show that its qualities in its natural state are equal, similar or at least comparable to the surrugate method.

The skipping of the scientific method and applying "The Science" meme techniques is the problem.

But to excuse the lack of patience and quality control, you also justify it:

>There's no way to "verify" a modification on a methodology for a biological system in almost every practical case.

And thats why it's justified to make up stuff and force p-values?
If that is your "view" of science, then you are delulu.
>because we have limitations
>we have to lie a little bit to fill in the gaps

Anonymous at Tue, 4 Jun 2024 16:13:45 UTC No. 16209942

>>16209840
How do you "find a purification method" for a protein that you don't already have good structural biological imaging of?

You seem to expect them to know the structure of the protein before the research which develops the structural model has occurred.

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 00:19:41 UTC No. 16210761

>>16209942
NTA and I know nothing of biology, but I think his point isn't that researchers should only publish positive results. Negative results are still useful in warning what not to do, and sometimes the researcher may simply not have the resources to check if their proposed method is truly valid or not. In this case, the expectation would be that someone else in the scientific community can help pick up the slack.
The problem is that this expectation isn't being met (why foot the bill for testing someone else's idea, when it's cheaper+faster to simply publish an idea of your own instead?) and so untested ideas are crowding out validated ones in the mindshare of the community. It's a classic tragedy-of-the-commons scenario: everyone prefers high-quality research, but no one's willing to invest their resources (money+time) in cleaning it up.

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 00:35:57 UTC No. 16210794

>>16210761
I did some computational biology research during my undergrad. It's certainly not my specialty, and I left that area specifically because I didn't like the ambiguity of it never being possible to "know for certain" whether you are doing things right.

I get what you are saying about the "untested ideas crowding out validated ones," I just object on some level to the very premise that it's even possible for an idea to be tested prior to publication in many of these fields. The ways in which one could vary each of the small steps and parameters in these processes explode in ways that would make a conventional physicist balk. It's just simply not possible to "validate the procedure" in the sense of "knowing whether it is right." All you can possibly ask for is knowing whether it is wrong in some sense which is in accordance with previous records of what not to do.

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 01:04:25 UTC No. 16210835

>>16209564
I dunno what rice means

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 01:41:53 UTC No. 16210870

>>16210794
>I just object on some level to the very premise that it's even possible for an idea to be tested prior to publication in many of these fields.
My field is economics (inb4 not a science) so I get where you're coming from: you could read the contents of my post as an economic model of research publication, but I have no expectation that every one of my proposed mechanisms can be tested to the degree that that anon demands. On the other hand, that's why I'm posting the idea for free on 4chan instead of trying to mathematize it up and publish it somewhere.
>All you can possibly ask for is knowing whether it is wrong in some sense which is in accordance with previous records of what not to do.
I'm happy to weaken the objective from "validation" to "falsification", I don't think it changes the point that researchers are underincentivized to even falsify current ideas. To stick with the pollution analogy, I'm not demanding that every researcher be held to "carbon-neutral" standards, merely that if these standards are relaxed then "cleanliness" would continue to fall, until something else (e.g. institutions, community norms) arises to allocate resources towards falsifying low-quality research.

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 01:54:20 UTC No. 16210885

>>16210870
> I'm happy to weaken the objective from "validation" to "falsification", I don't think it changes the point that researchers are underincentivized to even falsify current ideas.

That's completely fair. I just get frustrated when people who come from the rare disciplines where there are things like "analytical solutions" one can validate against demand that such things be produced in fields where it isn't just impractical, it's downright impossible.

I understand the hesitancy. I literally left biosystems modeling and biophysics to do EE because I much preferred having the analytical bounds and theoretical physics models to rely on. I just don't like making the perfect the enemy of the good (which we do when we demand that kind of "axiomatically validated standard" from something like a physical chemist where there might be well over a million degrees of freedom in a single protein binding experiment/modeling paper).

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 02:21:25 UTC No. 16210916

>>16210885
I sympathize with your frustrations, but I also think the distinction between the two isn't as set in stone as you seem to be suggesting. I'd go even further and say that a substantial amount of methods research involves turning the "impossible" into the "merely impractical", and point to LLMs as a concrete example of how an ingenious invention (i.e. transformers) overcame a combinatorial-explosive problem that everyone else believed to be impossible (i.e. the complexity of natural language).

Unless you're a researcher in the field, you'll never "know" what is "truly impossible", and I say these in quotes because even if you are researching in that field yourself, it is exactly the nature of falsification to discover that this boundary (i.e. scientific law) needs to be redrawn.

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 03:10:39 UTC No. 16210974

As the saying goes, you show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes. The problem is that there's a huge amount of bullshit papers out there. There's two parts to this, one of which is that there's a lot of papers, and the other that many of them are bullshit.

Scientists' careers are measured by metrics based on number of publications and number of citations. It figures that this will result in academia maximizing the number of papers and the number of citations. I have no real idea how to fix this part.

As for the other part, in fact there are strong incentives against retractions, so half the mechanism is there. Unfortunately there is between zero to negative incentive in anyone actually looking for and calling out fraud. It's a career-ending hobby if you're an early-stage academic.

So one part of the solution would be to somehow incentivize looking for and calling out scientific fraud. Peer review is basically the main official mechanism for this, something similar would need to exist post-publication where everyone is expected to partiticipate. It would simultaneously de-stigmatize criticism of published work, because now everyone is a bastard. Of course, this would need some thought to avoid forming the academic Spanish Inquisition (PubPeer already has instances of personal attacks). Not everything needs to be caught, or even re-reviewed, simply having a realistic chance of that happening would be a deterrent.

Publishers are definitely part of the problem, so they should also be part of the solution. I think they should be required to relinguish any fees they got for publishing fraudulent research, knowingly or not, and maybe a fine on top.

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 04:34:02 UTC No. 16211064

>>16210974
>There's two parts to this, one of which is that there's a lot of papers, and the other that many of them are bullshit.
I think only the second part is a real problem. If we could raise the signal-to-noise ratio, then a large number of papers should be a sign of a vibrant and flourishing field. Or if we raise this by culling the bullshit papers, then the problem of the first part goes away automatically.

The most robust solution I can think of would be to explicitly tie peer review (which is essentially community regulation) with career advancement. A scientist calling out fraud will help expel bullshitters from their community, but it also diverts their resources away from their own career advancement. Since national defence is a standard example of a public good, perhaps there should be a scientific equivalent of the military, with an army of "soldiers" recognized and promoted based on their efficiency in repelling bad science?

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 05:21:32 UTC No. 16211106

>>16209942
>How do you "find a purification method" for a protein that you don't already have good structural biological imaging of?

It depends on type of "claim".

If the claim is: "we have the hypothesis with technique x we can produce/synthecise a protein with the qualities abc" then yes. Creating a model first makes sense.

If the claim is: "we have have the hypthesis that in human tissue exists the protein x and it is the cause for disease abc"

Then you literally have to know if the protein even exists by finding it in a non contaminating way.
But this does not happen. It mostly:
>mixing reagents with tissue samples
>heating
>cooling
>washing
>adding reagents again
>incubation (letting the tissue rot in a petri dish over several days)
>repeat and exchange reagents until a protein comes out that fits the model

If you cannot have a baseline or find a thing in its natural occuring state, hand have no method of finding/purifying it (which is possible with various electrostatic seperation methods, and has been done), they will conceal an esotheric synthesizing method as "isolation/purification" to fulfill their hypothesis.
This meme is going on with all types of "chronic diseases" like ALS and MS.
>we found protein
>look at the paper
>literally alchemistic witch brew
>concocted from bacterial incubation and several odd other animal cells mixed
>claim to isolate shit with nickel-immobilized metal affinity chromatography
>but actually require a surrugate like western blot method to demonstrate it has been "found"
>but never showing uniformity
>literally excluding cross reactivity to westerblot which is a know problem
>literally excluding artifacts
>please give us more funding to cure ALS
>10 years later, no result because ITS AN ESOTHERIC SYNTHETIC PRODUCT
>repeat the esotheric method
>get funding again
>trust me dis time we cure ALS in 5 years

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 22:09:55 UTC No. 16212549

this thread is now being spammed to death with AI output in order to cover up the fact that nearly all scientific literature is just AI software output

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 22:32:05 UTC No. 16212586

>>16211106
Your last bit about the problems with ALS/MS research is 100% true, but I don't see how that problem can be avoided aside from having higher standards about medical funding.

My experience with biology research was very much on the biophysics/physical chemistry side of things rather than for applied medical science.

I wouldn't doubt that a lot of the medical papers are super hot trash because a lot of biophysics papers are super hot trash (though definitely not as much rent seeking) also. They just are at least trying to use some principles of physical chemistry when they can.

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 22:41:33 UTC No. 16212600

>>16212549
You seem to have some strange paranoia about these things. What in particular makes you think this thread is just AI output?

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 22:52:09 UTC No. 16212616

>>16196862
I suppose that scientific discoverers ought to acquire a grasp on the english language. Pain-inducing phrases can shorten the readers skill to belowstance what's being spoken

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 23:08:06 UTC No. 16212636

>>16199582
AI has not been around for this long. It's just bad and probably literal word for (uncompounded) word translations.
>>16197017
Since we are already throwing around anecdotes: We had a masters student in a lab course who had to write a report on some simulations. It took him a long time to finish his reports, and from what he put to paper it was very unlikely he could get through a graded exam, so he didn't make any progress in that course. You can't fail a report because it's not graded, and he needed to finish the course for his visa or something like that, so he kept retrying for 5 or so years, and he kept asking people to elaborate on some of his issues to do the assignment every year. After all that time, he apparently hunkered down, and managed to write comprehensible English, or at least have some third party or software do it for him, either way there were some awkward phrases but it was passable. So he finished and passed all his reports... but then his visa ran out and the exam cannot be taken remotely, so I guess it was too late.
Strangely, he must have passed other courses before getting to ours with similar assignments, but how he did we will never know.

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 23:12:03 UTC No. 16212641

>>16200680
Learning a language without immersion is difficult. I am in a country right now where people learn English in school only to never use it again, and you don't observe people getting fluent before their masters, which also tends to coincide with having done some intercontinental travelling, which means being wealthy.

I wonder if you think that EFLs are a mixed bag of honest+smart and deceitful+stupid in academia because they don't have the benefit of this easily testable filter.

Anonymous at Wed, 5 Jun 2024 23:26:04 UTC No. 16212661

>>16206774
I don't see that being true. Many reviewers are either lazy or may not have the required experience to adequately review it, but the latter doesn't seem to be about intelligence. One professor at my university is bothered by not knowing how to improve his research since most of his EPR discussion is left uncommented. Because barely anyone seems to know what to get out of EPR beyond basic spectra of simple organic radicals with well-resolved couplings, because barely anybody uses EPR.
Much of what I published has either gotten accepted as-is/minor revision to clarify or the reviewers give scathing criticism of my collaborator's work – without saying a singke word about my contributions. I tell myself that I am very thorough (which is a lie) but I am not going to believe for a second that the lack of difficulty for me is due to my own intelligence.

Anonymous at Thu, 6 Jun 2024 17:33:27 UTC No. 16217185

>>16212661
Unsurprisingly, the anon you're replying to has probably never been involved with peer review in any capacity. Such people seem to think that the problem is old guard stopping any new ideas, while the bigger issue is insufficiently careful questioning of results and arguments.

Anonymous at Thu, 6 Jun 2024 18:10:46 UTC No. 16217335

>>16212661
low IQ people are incapable of understanding the thought processes of high IQ people, if low IQ didn't lack that facility they would be high IQ

Anonymous at Fri, 7 Jun 2024 03:45:09 UTC No. 16218784

>>16203151
this
the "replication crisis" is just a politically correct way of saying "outright fraud on a massive scale."
they use the "replication crisis" euphemism as a way of trying to minimize how massively fraudulent science is

Anonymous at Fri, 7 Jun 2024 09:03:35 UTC No. 16219127

>>16218784
>they use the "replication crisis" euphemism as a way of trying to minimize how massively fraudulent science is
exactly.

See:
>>16209840

Literally Labnormies and biochem meme lords who think they are "doing science" do not even know how shit works.
They follow a protocoll for lab work, and get told how to interprete it, never questioning it.
Then hiring some bioinformatics guys and statisticians to make up shit.

Anonymous at Fri, 7 Jun 2024 10:31:17 UTC No. 16219237

>>16217185
Tbh the review process is largely good for catching carelessness for publications that fit the zeitgeist of the field. Intentional data fraud and p-hacking can easily get through, as it often is used to artificially strengthen arguments/results in a manner that dodges scrutiny, and there's no requirement to reproduce things with other groups prior to publication. I can see sufficiently novel stuff getting denied too if you pull a Mochizuki and drop a bunch of dense gobbledegook that you expect everyone to read and understand during a normal peer review time window. However, peer review isn't a black box; it's a thing that people who are busy attempt to sustain in good faith. You should really only be submitting stuff if you've done your due diligence in making sure it can be easily communicated, and if you don't you really only have yourself to blame for getting rejected.

Anonymous at Fri, 7 Jun 2024 23:28:29 UTC No. 16220882

>>16197017
>an absolute clusterfuck
I hate this. People give me things like this and I don't know what to say besides start over.

Anonymous at Sat, 8 Jun 2024 05:18:41 UTC No. 16221334

>>16206774

Anonymous at Sat, 8 Jun 2024 05:43:00 UTC No. 16221378

I'm going to blame thirdies for this.

Anonymous at Sat, 8 Jun 2024 06:59:33 UTC No. 16221468

>>16206774
Peer review isnt really going to stop valid ideas. Theres too many ways to propagate new ideas, and no one reads science journals anyway, you are better off just talking privately with some mid-ranked scientists over lunch (you pay) as you explain the ideas to them.
They all go "oh wow, i intially thought it was stupid but now that i think about it.."

Anonymous at Sat, 8 Jun 2024 07:45:03 UTC No. 16221516

>>16221468
>no one reads science journals anyway,
The problem is the pseudo intellectual NPC that outsourced his critical thinking.
They got the following algorithm installed, to judge the current state of "The Science":

Case: non peer reviewed
>Show some independent sesearch to someone
>pfff its not even peer reviewed
>pfff its not even in a quality journal
>not gonna read

Case: peer reviewed
>Show someone a peer reviewed study in a quality journal
>if: aligns with preconception and current narrative
>woah i freaking love science
>only reads headline & maybe abstract
>rest: not gonna read

>else:
>reads headline
>pfff its bullshit
>not gonna read

Anonymous at Sat, 8 Jun 2024 07:50:07 UTC No. 16221520

OP is a man who puts penises in his anus

Anonymous at Sat, 8 Jun 2024 21:43:48 UTC No. 16222915

>>16221378
They don't control the academic publishing industry, the academic publishing industry, like the rest of the publishing industry, is almost completely jewish owned

Anonymous at Sun, 9 Jun 2024 03:58:30 UTC No. 16223669

>>16219237
Mochizuki is a fair example, but an extreme one.

But my personal experience is that even fairly mundane mistakes arising from incompetence rather than dishonesty can pass through. Even in top journals. I'm extremely paranoid about my work being flawed, and it really bothers me that the reviewers very rarely ask the right questions. In fact the actual arguments are almost never challenged, it's always about novelty, impact and formatting types of things.

Worse, I know of examples where pure bullshit makes it through and nobody will call it out because of politics. And my former idiot PI liked to talk about how he just reads the abstract and looks at the pictures as a peer reviewer.


>>16221516
What it boils down to is that everyone is very busy all the time, there's always a ton of papers to read, and almost all of those are actually shit.

Anonymous at Sun, 9 Jun 2024 17:51:53 UTC No. 16224952

>>16223669
you're not busy, you produce nothing and you have enough spare time to post on 4chan

Anonymous at Sun, 9 Jun 2024 19:17:52 UTC No. 16225175

>>16224952
I'm in industry nowadays, and I'm guessing you never were in academia

Anonymous at Sun, 9 Jun 2024 21:23:34 UTC No. 16225419

>>16196862
oxymoron?

Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 04:21:08 UTC No. 16226160

Software that detects ‘tortured acronyms’ in research papers could help root out misconduct

Generated by plagiarism disguisers, these red flags can point to deeper problems with a paper

https://www.science.org/content/article/software-detects-tortured-acronyms-in-research-papers

Any paper that uses the acronym CNN to stand for “convolutional brain organization” probably wasn’t carefully written and revised by human authors. Instead, researchers say, such “tortured acronyms” are likely the work of software that altered earlier wording—“convolutional neural network” in this case—to disguise plagiarism, while neglecting to change the acronym. Now, journals have an automated tool for finding such suspicious mismatches, which often signal a serious problem with the paper.

The group behind the acronym detection, led by University of Toulouse computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac, previously developed a range of automatic misconduct detectors on the publicly available Problematic Paper Screener (PPS). The system automatically scans the scientific literature weekly and flags papers that have tortured phrases—nonsensical paraphrases such as “glucose bigotry” instead of “glucose intolerance”—cell lines that do not exist, and other giveaways that signal potentially grave problems.

Now, the group has added tortured acronyms to its list of red flags and is offering free software for publishers to screen for previously unidentified tortured acronyms in paper submissions, they will report next week at the World Conference on Research Integrity in Athens, Greece. It will also announce that its system has uncovered a major trove of thousands of suspicious conference papers from 11 different publishers using tortured phrases.

Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 04:22:10 UTC No. 16226161

The PPS is “some of the most significant work” in the growing field of misconduct detection, says Ludo Waltman, who studies scholarly publishing and research assessment at Leiden University. Anyone can download the list of known tortured phrases from the PPS, although Cabanac says he knows of only a few publishers screening submissions against them. But Kim Eggleton, who supervises peer review and research integrity at IOP Publishing (IOPP) is one of those who do—and adding tortured acronyms to the surveillance will make it more powerful, she says. Her staff spots acronyms that do not match the phrases they are standing in for “reasonably often. … A way to automate that process would be amazing.” But detecting deception is only half the battle. To date, the PPS has flagged more than 15,000 papers with tortured phrases; only 2760 have been retracted.

The effort has been ongoing since 2021, when Cabanac and his collaborators launched the PPS and began to identify tortured phrases. The list of phrases has grown manually and laboriously to more than 5000 known “fingerprints” of potential misconduct.

To expand the PPS’s functionality to acronyms, Alexandre Clausse, a Ph.D. student at the University of Toulouse, sampled 75 papers the PPS had already flagged. He used the acronyms in these papers—both tortured and not—to build software that could automatically detect additional suspicious acronyms, based on the giveaway of mismatched initials. In testing the software’s accuracy, he generated a list of 185 new acronym fingerprints to add to the PPS, as well as software that publishers can use to detect previously unidentified tortured acronyms in paper submissions.

Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 04:23:12 UTC No. 16226164

One rich source of “tortured articles” is conference proceedings—potentially because the review process for these is often run separately from a publisher’s normal review process, Eggleton says. In earlier work, Cabanac and his colleagues flagged hundreds of conference papers published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for containing tortured phrases. Now, they are reporting similar problems in conference proceedings from 10 other publishers, including IOPP.

IOPP’s experience illustrates how tortured language can expose deeper problems. In 2022, IOPP retracted nearly 500 papers from conference proceedings after the PPS flagged tortured phrases in the papers. When Eggleton and her team investigated, they found reams of other problems—fake identity, citation cartels in which researchers insert irrelevant references to one another, and even entirely fabricated research. “The tortured phrase is what makes you look in the first place,” she says. “It’s always an indicator that something somewhere is not quite right.” She suspects the hundreds of conference papers were all generated by a paper mill—an organization that sells authorship on fake papers to researchers desperate to boost their list of publications.

Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 04:24:41 UTC No. 16226165

Because of the problems with conference proceedings, IOPP has changed how conferences are handled. The society publisher has invested heavily in new technology and expanded the team that oversees their conference proceedings. All their conference content is now subjected to a range of screening processes—including for tortured phrases. “Our rates of misconduct dropped off a cliff at that point,” Eggleton says. But as bad actors learn what publishers screen for and change their tactics—including better disguised tortured acronyms—“It feels like we’re always slightly one step behind.”

The problems being detected by the PPS are a signal of broader problems in academic publishing, Waltman says. Researchers working in “publish or perish” cultures are incentivized to churn out as many papers as possible, pushing some to resort to unethical tactics such as buying publications from paper mills. And open-access publishers that charge authors to publish their work also have an incentive to publish as much as possible, which could lead to laxer quality control. But although screening at publishers is helpful, the arms race between screening methods and tricksters means it is unlikely to stem the tide of problematic papers entirely. The only real way to properly solve the problem is to fix the incentive systems, Waltman says: “We need to tackle this problem at the source.”

Anonymous at Tue, 11 Jun 2024 02:15:12 UTC No. 16227809

>tortured acronyms

Anonymous at Tue, 11 Jun 2024 13:28:34 UTC No. 16228357

>>16196862
I don't like the term "tortured phrases" to refer to that. Honestly feels like it was coined by some Chinese that barely knows English, it's weird.

🗑️ Anonymous at Wed, 12 Jun 2024 02:20:19 UTC No. 16229613

>>16228357
do you have a better euphemism?

Anonymous at Wed, 12 Jun 2024 17:40:48 UTC No. 16230680

>>16228357
whats a better term?

Anonymous at Thu, 13 Jun 2024 04:52:24 UTC No. 16231802

>>16228357
it was probably AI generated

Anonymous at Thu, 13 Jun 2024 05:36:30 UTC No. 16231860

>>16230680
Enhanced interrogation of prose.

Anonymous at Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:08:30 UTC No. 16233555

>>16231860
peculiar prose could work, it has the same appealing alliteration as mixed metaphors