Speaker 1: Publish or perish has never been so true as it is today. People are boosting their publication record and their citations by gaming the system hardcore. Like we're beyond just little cabals publishing together. This is a full-fledged underground system of trying to manipulate your career by using all of the very unethical and potentially illegal ways of boosting up the number of papers you publish as a scientist and today we're going to go through the ones that have come across my radar recently and I just cannot believe that this is where we've ended up as academics. Clearly it was going to get here right? You give clever people a metric to game and they will game it and on Twitter I found Authorship for Sale and these people aren't selling authorship by the way but they're just raising awareness and I cannot believe how crazy blatant that this has got. This didn't exist in my day and age and it's a very new account you know they're from January this year but look you just need to click on here and it's just people saying article for publication on sharing basis. It's indexed, you get to go on Scopus and they just have the position available and you pay to get that position on the paper author list. You know as an example a 2.58 impact factor journal will go from 900 US dollars for first author all the way down to 800 for third and I think that's probably three or 700 for US or 700 for fifth author. So it's just crazy to me that like we're just well beyond doing it sneaky. It's out in the open and people are going to get caught. It just goes on and on and on and you can see people looking for you know different authors for papers and here one and two is gone but you can get three, not worth it if you ask me. But yeah here we are just scroll through this and have a look at all of the different options you've got for buying journals for your name to go on and I understand why academics are doing this. It is so competitive out there that if you are not publishing with a really strong research group regularly and you've got a little bit of money there's no doubt that this would have crossed a load of people's minds because it is their job, it is their livelihood, it is everything they've worked towards and if you just can game the system by getting your name on a few papers, by collaborating, then of course that would cross people's minds but I cannot believe how blatant it has become. Highly cited researchers are working for multiple universities. What this means is that the university that wants to boost up their reputation can actually just pay other academics who are highly cited to list them as their affiliated kind of university in the paper that they're publishing. And what this does is raise the university, raise the profile of the researcher, but also the researcher gets paid a lot of money every year just to include them as an affiliation on the papers they publish. And so I found this guy, Rafael Luque, who was at the University of Cordoba in Spain and he's also affiliated with King Saud University and the People's Friendship University of Russia in Moscow despite holding full-time publicly funded contract with a Spanish institution and that's the University of Cordoba. And so he is a prolific, like super prolific publisher. I cannot believe how crazy this is. He has published 58 studies this year at a rate of one every 37 hours. Now, think about that. What games is he playing? And ultimately, he could be, arguably, he could be paying for positions on papers. He could be just publishing rubbish. He may have a massive, massive research group and multiple collaborations, But really, how is a man like him, a normal, everyday scientist, meant to look over and significantly contribute to papers every 37 hours? One thing that I love about this thing is that he just says that without me, the University of Cordoba will drop 300 places in the Shanghai ranking. They have shot themselves in the foot. Now that's just incredible. To me that just shows the arrogance of some academics to be like, I'm untouchable. The reason I'm here is because I raised not only my profile but the whole university and look, they've done the right thing by getting rid of him but they undoubtedly will suffer because they need to now play the game in a different way by maybe employing another highly cited researcher. So it just is just like all interwoven and just incredibly weird, if you ask me. And so he does admit to using ChatGPT to polish his text. Now, polishing and copying and pasting from ChatGPT is completely different. I really do think AI tools can help you streamline writing processes in academia by putting in papers, asking for it to, you know, change up some of the structures, the sentences, but it has to be your work. You can't just copy and paste from chat GPT because you'll end up with what they have said and this is a paper that has come out in 2021 called Tortured Phrases. And so what this study has done is had a look at the dubious writing style emerging in science, which is just essentially taking the AI and using it to generate papers. And this paper, I think, is just so sort of instrumental in highlighting how bad this has really got because they introduced this idea of looking for tortured phrases, which is easy for a human to pick up, but AI thinks that it's doing a great job. And so, you know, they've got samples here as counterfeit consciousness instead of artificial intelligence. and that's where a researcher's put in something they want to copy and the AI's spit it out and they've not looked at it and it's got through poor peer review. And another thing is that they found that there's dubious articles with a tortured writing style, citation of non-existent literature, which we know in my other video, go check it out here, ChatGPT is very good at producing what is something very sort of convincingly an article but goes nowhere, and that's changed now a little bit with ChatGPT4, but this is a little bit of an older article so it's on ChatGPT3, and also unacknowledged image reuse. And yeah, so here we can go through. If we go down, it's a long article and it's a really great in-depth kind of expose on what's going on, but this one really interested me. It was looking at really sort of well-known journals and looking at the article abstracts and looking for the GPT detector score of over 70. And it's just incredible that of 104 articles, you know, you've got 92% detection score. And I just can't believe that these are some very, very well-known journals in here. And I've actually tried to publish in a couple of them, but they're not able to get away and around or stop even people using AI to publish in their journals. And so tortured phrases not only gets around, I think, the plagiarism aspect, but also it just means that you end up with all of this rubbish science that's being churned and churned and churned for the sake of just publishing. It's not adding anything new necessarily. And you can see here where you've got reusing without acknowledgment. So this is the GPT detected article and then this is the original figure and it's captioned. So you can see that here, this is the original one. It's only got a 3.53% detection score whereas this one is 88.22 and it's got the same figure. It's just lazy without even sort of referencing or acknowledging where they got it from. I just think what this video is about is really the state of academic publishing and where we've ended up because of the incredible kind of pressure on scientists to produce because it all comes down to a flawed way of saying how successful we are as academics, which is the H-index. The H index is how many papers you have with that many number of citations. So the more you publish, the more you cite, it's just going to get more and more competitive. And you're going to have people that are paying to be on papers. You're going to have people that are spinning content using AI tools and creating these tortured phrases. You're going to have people gaming the system because universities see them as so valuable that they're willing to pay the researchers, the highly cited and publishing researchers to be part of their university. I don't have solutions for this, but I really feel like the first step is awareness and it's happening out in the world. People are doing this because the pressure is so high and it's happening on Telegram, it's happening on WhatsApp, it's happening on private groups and it's just a very tough sort of situations we find ourselves in and the one way that we can stop it right away is by not putting so much weight on the H-index. So there we have it. Let me know in the comments what you would add. And also, there are more ways to engage with me. The first way is to sign up for my newsletter. Head over to andrewstapeton.com.au forward slash newsletter. The link is in the description. And when you sign up, you'll get five emails over about two weeks. 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