It's why peer review is important
A.I uncovering huge amounts of scientific fraud which has direct effects on how Doctors prescribe treatments to patients
- Thread starter Problematic Pat
- Start date
I wouldn't need to, and that's the point.
Most people are beholden to information that is given to them. They can't do a test or analyze results to verify for themselves.
Too many people try to play the DATA game and don't realize they are just appealing to what someone else told them instead of doing it for themselves (though most can't, understandably)
Cmon man quit the bullshyt. Most people can search your name with the word vaccine and see you been on that anti vax shyt since day 1. No matter what YouTube tells you millions of lives were saved. I keep telling you keep
listening to these nikkas on the net and you gonna end up with biblical diseases you thought we were cured from.
And for the record you ain’t gonna scientist/research on the Coli. difference on this side is we stand on our statements.
A lot of these scientific fraudsters work for companies like Pfizer - who subsidizes the research at most prestigious universities, provided the researchers reach conclusions favorable to these multinational corporations.
I think this affects higher education more than the medical profession
‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point
Last year, 10,000 sham papers had to be retracted by academic journals, but experts think this is just the tip of the iceberg
www.theguardian.com
‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point
This article is more than 2 months oldLast year, 10,000 sham papers had to be retracted by academic journals, but experts think this is just the tip of the iceberg
Robin McKie
Sat 3 Feb 2024 11.00 EST
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Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.
Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud.
“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.”
The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published scientific papers. Shadow organisations – known as “paper mills” – began to supply fabricated work for publication in journals there.
The practice has since spread to India, Iran, Russia, former Soviet Union states and eastern Europe, with paper mills supplying fabricated studies to more and more journals as increasing numbers of young scientists try to boost their careers by claiming false research experience. In some cases, journal editors have been bribed to accept articles, while paper mills have managed to establish their own agents as guest editors who then allow reams of falsified work to be published.
Dr Dorothy Bishop: ‘People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science.’ Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
“Editors are not fulfilling their roles properly, and peer reviewers are not doing their jobs. And some are being paid large sums of money,” said Professor Alison Avenell of Aberdeen University. “It is deeply worrying.”
The products of paper mills often look like regular articles but are based on templates in which names of genes or diseases are slotted in at random among fictitious tables and figures. Worryingly, these articles can then get incorporated into large databases used by those working on drug discovery.
Others are more bizarre and include research unrelated to a journal’s field, making it clear that no peer review has taken place in relation to that article. An example is a paper on Marxist ideology that appeared in the journal Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine. Others are distinctive because of the strange language they use, including references to “bosom peril” rather than breast cancer and “Parkinson’s ailment” rather Parkinson’s disease.
Watchdog groups – such as Retraction Watch – have tracked the problem and have noted retractions by journals that were forced to act on occasions when fabrications were uncovered. One study, by Nature, revealed that in 2013 there were just over 1,000 retractions. In 2022, the figure topped 4,000 before jumping to more than 10,000 last year.
Of this last total, more than 8,000 retracted papers had been published in journals owned by Hindawi, a subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, figures that have now forced the company to act. “We will be sunsetting the Hindawi brand and have begun to fully integrate the 200-plus Hindawi journals into Wiley’s portfolio,” a Wiley spokesperson told the Observer.
The spokesperson added that Wiley had now identified hundreds of fraudsters present in its portfolio of journals, as well as those who had held guest editorial roles. “We have removed them from our systems and will continue to take a proactive … approach in our efforts to clean up the scholarly record, strengthen our integrity processes and contribute to cross-industry solutions.”
But Wiley insisted it could not tackle the crisis on its own, a message echoed by other publishers, which say they are under siege from paper mills. Academics remain cautious, however. The problem is that in many countries, academics are paid according to the number of papers they have published.
“If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivised to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm,” said Professor Marcus Munafo of Bristol University. “That is exactly what we have now.”
The harm done by publishing poor or fabricated research is demonstrated by the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. Early laboratory studies indicated it could be used to treat Covid-19 and it was hailed as a miracle drug. However, it was later found these studies showed clear evidence of fraud, and medical authorities have refused to back it as a treatment for Covid.
“The trouble was, ivermectin was used by anti-vaxxers to say: ‘We don’t need vaccination because we have this wonder drug,’” said Jack Wilkinson at Manchester University. “But many of the trials that underpinned those claims were not authentic.”
Wilkinson added that he and his colleagues were trying to develop protocols that researchers could apply to reveal the authenticity of studies that they might include in their own work. “Some great science came out during the pandemic, but there was an ocean of rubbish research too. We need ways to pinpoint poor data right from the start.”
The danger posed by the rise of the paper mill and fraudulent research papers was also stressed by Professor Malcolm MacLeod of Edinburgh University. “If, as a scientist, I want to check all the papers about a particular drug that might target cancers or stroke cases, it is very hard for me to avoid those that are fabricated. Scientific knowledge is being polluted by made-up material. We are facing a crisis.”
This point was backed by Bishop: “People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science and could end up running scientific institutes and eventually be used by mainstream journals as reviewers and editors. Corruption is creeping into the system.”
Scientific Fraud in the Age of AI
Scientific progress is built on experiments, data, research, and constant questioning. While fraud is not a new issue, big data and Artificial Intelligence present challenges that dramatically increase the risk of fraud. New tools need to be developed to identify and reduce scientific fraud...
Scientific Fraud In The Age Of AI
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By Susan Goldhaber MPH — March 12, 2024
Scientific progress is built on experiments, data, research, and constant questioning. While fraud is not a new issue, big data and Artificial Intelligence present challenges that dramatically increase the risk of fraud. New tools need to be developed to identify and reduce scientific fraud. Without them, the foundation of the scientific process is at risk.
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
As discussed by Drs. Miller and Young, a crisis is underway in scientific research. “Paper mills” publish fake or manipulated articles that resemble genuine scientific research; scientific journals are offered money for each paper published in the journal, and there are instances of more common fraud, including plagiarism, omitting negative results, and statistical manipulation of data.
The Alzheimer’s Case
In 2006, a paper published in the distinguished journal Nature reported the discovery of a protein, which forms plaques in human brains, that, when inserted into the brains of rats, caused memory impairment, as demonstrated by tests in mazes.
This finding was touted on the author’s website as “the first substance ever identified in Alzheimer’s research that has been shown to cause memory impairment.” It was cited in about 2300 scientific articles (a considerable number) about Alzheimer’s research. This article boosted the National Institute of Health (NIH)-supported research on this protein as a cause of Alzheimer’s from zero to $287 million in 2021. Numerous articles followed, culminating in the development of an Alzheimer’s drug in 2021 based on this theory.
Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist and professor at Vanderbilt University, was contacted by an attorney representing two prominent neuroscientists who believed some research related to the Alzheimer’s drug may have been fraudulent. [1] He was asked to investigate the images in the published papers that supported the theory that the specific protein caused Alzheimer’s. He found that the authors
Some scientists now believe that these experiments misdirected Alzheimer’s research for 16 years.
This is a dramatic illustration of why fraud detection is critical.
Detecting Fraud
AI Software: AI tools are being used to detect plagiarism, statistical manipulation, and image fraud in scientific publications. According to one scientific publisher, image fraud was the #1 reason papers were retracted from journals. Duplication of images, where the same image is copied, flipped, rotated, or cropped, is common. In some cases, doctored images make it look like the scientists carried out more experiments than were done.
The publisher Science recently announced that they will use the AI detection software Proofig to check all the images on a paper before publication. Proofig counts the number of features shared by different images within a paper and presents a graphical representation of the shared features. Although this software can catch image fraud involving data duplication, it cannot detect other types, such as images built on falsified data.
Human Fraud Detectives: Dutch microbiologist Dr. Elisabeth Bik has single-handedly caught numerous cases of fraud in scientific papers. She uses the image-detecting software Image Twin to help her detect doctored images. Still, she believes the human eye is often better than machines in detecting irregularities in images, such as the Western blot, used to separate and identify proteins based on molecular weight. These were the images that were determined to be fraudulent by Dr. Matthew Schrag. Ironically, there is no process to pay fraud detectives like Dr. Bik, so she uses crowdfunding to support her work.
AI authors: Another type of scientific fraud is using AI to create fake scientific papers. It is not known how widespread this practice is. A recent study investigated the use of AI to generate high-quality fraudulent medical articles. The authors used ChatGPT to generate a fraudulent article about neurosurgery. Here are some of the prompts they used to create an article in under an hour [2]:
- Suggest relevant randomized controlled trial in the field of neurosurgery that is suitable for publication and has a high chance of acceptance.
- Give me an abstract and the whole article, section by section, using scientific language.
- Give me materials, methods, and a detailed results section, including patient data.
- I need a discussion. Compare the results with published articles.
- Give me all the references.
- Suggest tables and charts to go with the results section.
- Provide datasheets for creating charts.
The authors then used AI detection software to check their article. They used the AI detector software “Content at Scale,” which states it has a 98% accuracy rate of telling whether the text is human or AI-generated. It rated the probability of AI content of this article at 48%, far from a convincing result. Another software tool, AI Text Classifier by Open AI, rated the AI generation of the article as “unclear.”
If researchers are no longer able to distinguish real from fake science, we could be on the brink of a nightmare scenario where
Potential Solutions
Science publishing needs to change. Traditional journals need to work more quickly; the peer review process typically takes months, and it is not uncommon for articles to be published up to a year after they are submitted. Much of fraud detection depends on scientific journals and academic institutions, which have an inherent conflict of interest to avoid the bad publicity that comes with retracted papers.
One solution is to require independent audits of any paper that gets federal funding. Independent auditing is not a new concept; it is a standard for the financial results of publicly traded companies. The U.S. spent $191 billion in 2023 on scientific research. Surely, a small slice of that money could be used to set up an audit system to develop better fraud-detecting software and to fund human fraud detectives. When fraud is detected and confirmed, there needs to be transparency, where the names and the institutions are rapidly made public in a database so scientists and the public can see the consequences of their actions. The credibility of scientific research and the scientific process is at stake.
[1] The neuroscientists were short sellers of stock of the company making the claims.
[2] As an author of several scientific articles, I find it almost impossible to comprehend how fast AI works. Preparing each section of an article is a laborious task, taking hours to days, and the discussion section typically involves countless hours of work researching previous results. Putting together the reference section is enough to make most scientists consider another profession!
Blackrogue
Superstar
I'm curious as to how the AI is discerning that the information is incorrect on its own. Cause from my experience it seems like it don't think on its own and just regurgitates what is came across on the net almost like a Google search but with dialogue. @bnew or anyone. What's the work around in this? Is it coming up with original ideas or is it a patchwork blanket trying to cover it's bases?
DaKidFromNoWhere
Superstar
MyApps is an idiot and ignored
Some of yall have a lot in common with them MAGA people you hate
Some of yall have a lot in common with them MAGA people you hate
Batsute
The Lion Choker
Scientific Fraud in the Age of AI
Scientific progress is built on experiments, data, research, and constant questioning. While fraud is not a new issue, big data and Artificial Intelligence present challenges that dramatically increase the risk of fraud. New tools need to be developed to identify and reduce scientific fraud...www.acsh.org
Scientific Fraud In The Age Of AI
Related articles
No, COVID mRNA Vaccine Won't Cause Alzheimer's or Prion Disease
Chemistry Papers Are Retracted Mostly Due to Plagiarism, Data Manipulation
Blood Test for Alzheimer’s: Close Or Hype?
Preying on the Fears of the Elderly
Healthcare's 2017 Bad Boys
By Susan Goldhaber MPH — March 12, 2024
Scientific progress is built on experiments, data, research, and constant questioning. While fraud is not a new issue, big data and Artificial Intelligence present challenges that dramatically increase the risk of fraud. New tools need to be developed to identify and reduce scientific fraud. Without them, the foundation of the scientific process is at risk.
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
As discussed by Drs. Miller and Young, a crisis is underway in scientific research. “Paper mills” publish fake or manipulated articles that
@Orbital-Fetus he kin to you
