13 Scientists Troll Scientific Journal With a Bogus Paper about Earth's Black Hole (popularmechanics.com) 65
"They're trolling us... we think. But how the hell did this get published?" asks Popular Mechanics.
Slashdot reader worldofsimulacra shares their report: Scientists have uncovered a bizarre, indefensible paper that squeaked through peer review at what appears at first pass to be a legitimate medical journal... 13 listed authors from wildly different fields throw together a series of escalating falsehoods. "Recently, some scientists from NASA have claimed that there may be a black hole like structure at the centre of the earth," the abstract begins. It only gets crazier from there:
"The earth's core is the biggest system of telecommunication which exchanges waves with all DNAs and molecules of water. Imaging of DNAs on the interior of the metal of the core produces a DNA black brane with around 109 times longer than the core of the earth which is compacted and creates a structure similar to a black hole or black brane. We have shown that this DNA black brane is the main cause of high temperature of core and magnetic of earth...."
One of the theories to explain the paper is that it was generated using "peer-review-tricking" artificial intelligence, which shuffles key terms and phrases and glues them together into something almost coherent.
Apparently you can't trust everything you read in the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences. The paper's title? "A Black Hole at the Center of Earth Plays the Role of the Biggest System of Telecommunication for Connecting DNAs, Dark DNAs and Molecules of Water on 4+N- Dimensional Manifold."
At the top of the paper, the journal has since appended a retraction, leading to a page warning "An internal investigation" has "raised sufficient evidence" that the paper is "not directly connected with the special issue Global Dermatology and contain inconsistent results...
"We apologize to our audience about this unfortunate situation."
Slashdot reader worldofsimulacra shares their report: Scientists have uncovered a bizarre, indefensible paper that squeaked through peer review at what appears at first pass to be a legitimate medical journal... 13 listed authors from wildly different fields throw together a series of escalating falsehoods. "Recently, some scientists from NASA have claimed that there may be a black hole like structure at the centre of the earth," the abstract begins. It only gets crazier from there:
"The earth's core is the biggest system of telecommunication which exchanges waves with all DNAs and molecules of water. Imaging of DNAs on the interior of the metal of the core produces a DNA black brane with around 109 times longer than the core of the earth which is compacted and creates a structure similar to a black hole or black brane. We have shown that this DNA black brane is the main cause of high temperature of core and magnetic of earth...."
One of the theories to explain the paper is that it was generated using "peer-review-tricking" artificial intelligence, which shuffles key terms and phrases and glues them together into something almost coherent.
Apparently you can't trust everything you read in the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences. The paper's title? "A Black Hole at the Center of Earth Plays the Role of the Biggest System of Telecommunication for Connecting DNAs, Dark DNAs and Molecules of Water on 4+N- Dimensional Manifold."
At the top of the paper, the journal has since appended a retraction, leading to a page warning "An internal investigation" has "raised sufficient evidence" that the paper is "not directly connected with the special issue Global Dermatology and contain inconsistent results...
"We apologize to our audience about this unfortunate situation."
To be fair... (Score:3)
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Then you'd *really* have some skin in the game.
What a bunch of crap (Score:3)
Is it April 1st?
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For journals with poor vetting processes, every call for papers is April 1st.
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There are plenty of "pay-to-publish" journals out there.
All that matters is that your check clears.
Yes, they will publish crap articles. But that is not news.
This is like announcing that your photocopier will print anti-vax articles.
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Is it April 1st?
No, it's money. Most people believe that scientific journals exist to publish important new papers containing established facts and plausible theories.
Actually most scientific journals exist to make money. As much money as possible in the shortest time - with an acceptably small likelihood of going to prison.
It's called "business".
Re: What a bunch of crap (Score:2)
Note the difference between "make" and "earn".
"earn" means in return for something of equal value.
"make" means theft, robbery, ursury, profit.
Not a complete surprise (Score:2)
How do these (supposedly) learned journals relax their vetting process so completely?
Haven't we, as a culture, consistently (in the last few decades) begun to depend too much on others (and machines) to do our thinking for us? There is that characteristic in Twitter, Facebook, popular blogs, (apparently) scientific journal review, etc.
When you take the herd mentality (of desiring to minimize the amount of judgement we have to exercise) and give it powerful technology, where will it lead?
Would it be prudent
Re:Not a complete surprise (Score:5, Informative)
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This isn't a learned journal that anyone has even heard of. It's some journal in Macedonia. Does anyone know where Macedonia is? It's some country nobody's ever heard of. Who would have taken it seriously?
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How do these (supposedly) learned journals relax their vetting process so completely?
It's the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences, not The Lancet. What were you expecting from a publication like that?
The Sokal affair continues to yield fruit (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a pattern the just keeps repeating itself, highlighting the flaws that continue to be widespread among sectors of the humanities and social sciences that are saturated with postmodernism, obscurantism, critical theory, and identity politics.
The Sokal paper is the foundational reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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This is in an alleged medical journal. If they're practicing postmodern medicine, maybe they already have a cure for covid.
In postmodern medicine, Covid is just a social construct.
Artificial intelligence will be here when ... (Score:4, Funny)
... the computer says, "Dude ... not today."
Until then, it's not here yet.
"contain inconsistent results" (Score:2)
Sounds familiair (Score:2)
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There are many super mario galaxy planetoids that have a black hole in it.
Appears to be a legitimate medical journal (Score:5, Interesting)
Lol. What is it that appears to be legit about this journal? It's called "Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences." That looks like one of the daily spam e-mails I get that start with "Greetings of the day!" and proceed to beg "esteemed doctor" to submit an article. Along with a multi-thousand dollar fee, of course.
This one actually only seems to charge 400 euro, although you can bribe them with another 800 euro to hit the accept button in less than four weeks.
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But it's a medical journal. Where do they get off thinking they can do legitimate peer review on subjects involving physics, geology, astronomy, etc?
They need to stick to medical topics. Like whether wearing masks can, cannot, can, cannot, ... block Covid-19. Or how THC is a cure-all for every known ailment.
Re: Appears to be a legitimate medical journal (Score:2)
Plus 1 funny, but no mod points. Thanks for making me laugh. My first thought was that sounds like a Sasha Baron-Cohen movie.
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It's less legit that the Nigerian Medical Journal of Heirs In Need of Financial Transfer Services.
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They have an H-index of 13. To put that in context The Lancet has an H-Index of 747, and the New England Journal of Medicine has an H-index of 987.
If you prefer impact factor, the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Science has an impact factor of 0.53, which makes it the 16020th most influential medical journal in the world. The New England Journal of Medicine has an impact factor of 37.91.
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I *personally* have an H-index that's higher than 13.
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The H-index is a metric usually used to rank scientists, not journals. I am surprised you could even find those numbers published for a journal. Are you sure you do not mean "impact factor" instead?
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The H factor calculation for journals is equivalent.
Kudos to Popular Mechanics (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes senses that Popular Mechanics has staff that reads scientific journals to discover interesting things to present to their more general audience.
But it is very sad that Popular Mechanics is apparently in at least this case the first line of defense against fake papers.
As someone who chaired several technical conferences, I can tell you that reviewing is people intensive.
In our case we have roughly 1,000 submissions for 150 slots, and like to have 5 knowledgeable reviewers for each paper, and don't want ask a reviewer to read more than 10 papers. So we need at minimum 100, and more typically 200 reviewers, as the expertise of a given reviewer even across the focused span of a single technical conference is not universal. And of course if these folks are good candidates to be reviewers, then they are also submitting papers to the same conference, so we need to make sure we are not asking them to review their own paper, or a paper submitted by one of their colleagues.
It would be great to use AI for review process; but gosh, didn't this journal at least keep one editor to read the final publication?
Even a scan of the paper titles would reveal something not right.
Not one, not two (Score:2)
FOUR articles were published. All by the same collective of authors, each next one getting progressively more outlandish.
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Wow, it looks like this is only the tip of the iceberg. This gang seems to have trolled a whole bunch of journals. Just google their names...
There is always mathgen (Score:2)
Trolls (Score:2)
"13 Scientists Troll Scientific Journal... "
Why are 4 or 5 members of the department of nuclear physics, sub-nuclear and radiation at the G. Marconi University in Rome, Italy, along with a bunch of dermatologists practicing to be trolls?
And trolling isn't even news these days when it comes to journals.
Wouldn't their time be better spend working in their fields or at least doing something productive like denouncing for profit journals?
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Or maybe their time would be better spent generating climate change and global warming propaganda? Nobody would dare strike down their papers if they did that.
Re: Trolls (Score:2)
Re: Trolls (Score:2)
You are assuming they are real people.
They might aswell be made-up alter egos of our Trumpista global warming denialist clown up there.
Check the references (Score:2)
A quick scan of the references section shows that three of the authors works are included. Maybe this is part of a plan to puff up their h-index, or that of other collaborators?
Bogus Journal (Score:2)
Who has ever heard of the "Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences"?
Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences (Score:2)
The articales failed to name the journal. An article mentioning _five_ retractions is here.
https://www.id-press.eu/mjms/a... [id-press.eu]
Having the title "Journal" in a website's name does not mean that they're doing proper peer review nor that they are considered reputable by anyone in the field. Part of the difficulty with modern publication is that it's difficult to assess which editors do the job of reviewing articles and ensuring competent peer review. It's become so easy to publish that any fool with a website ca
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Yes, but which [wikipedia.org] Macedonia?
For the young whippersnappers (Score:5, Interesting)
"The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline"
It's a real thing, it's in Wikipedia. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
PS. I read the word 'whippersnapper' for the first time in one of his books.
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Yes, it's a real thing, and dolled up to look like a research paper. It was first published in Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov did a whole series of spoof "papers" on thiotimoline. None were ever published in a peer-reviewed journal, so far as I know.
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But he did get asked a question about it at his doctoral defence, because Campbell forgot that he wanted it published under a pseudonym precisely in order to avoid that happening.
Who, now? (Score:2)
"Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences"
Not exactly JAMA or The Lancet, knowwhutimean?
sound familiar? (Score:2)
This reads like the time cube guy's stuff. Maybe he can finally get into a respectable publication now.
Chicken chicken chicken. (Score:2)
I thought the lack of filters on "journals" had been spotlighted with the publication of Chicken Chicken Chicken [wired.com]. Is it really a great surprise that many for-profit "journals" still exist?
Its a huge problem (Score:2)
We repeatedly tell the public to "trust science" and generally describe science as things in peer reviewed journals. So how is the public to know that this is crap? Or a bunch of papers on "ultra-dense deuterium", some in refereed journals are a cold fusion scam that slipped by some revieweres (most of them have been retraced now, but a few are still out there).
With no "root source of trust" how is the public to know what is an isn't real. Expecting non-scientist / non-engineers to spend a ton of time t
Don't blame AI (Score:2)
AI or no AI, if you allowed one of those papers past peer review it's because you pencil whipped the peer review. Review does NOT mean you read the title. It does not mean you spent 15 seconds skimming key words. It means you READ it, UNDERSTOOD it, and it made sense.
If, as a reviewer, all you're finding is word salad you can either give it thumbs down or if you're genuinely concerned that it's just over your head, give it a neutral review or just pass it to another reviewer.
High level trolling at it's best! (Score:2)
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A.I. can almost write sitcom scripts
But what will the manatees do?
job applicants must “optimize” their resumes since so many are now scanned by keyword-seeking bots before they ever make it to a human.
HR departments that do that deserve whatever they get.
Tinkering for money (Score:2)
A little brain on the heart (Score:2)
Several years ago, some investigators proved the existence a little brain on the heart which acts like a real brain in the head [1]. ...
Now, the question arises that what happens for this little brain during heart transplantation? Recent investigations show that patients who gave hearts from donors, obtain some characteristics of them. One of them was Sylvia who declared that soon after her operation, she felt like drinking beer, something she hadnâ(TM)t particularly been fond of before. Later, she obs
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The non-brain parts of your CNS have subprocessors all over the place. This isn't news.
So, what they're saying is.. (Score:2)
Also with regards to 'DNA waves', everyone knows that those come from 5G cell towers, which is why they give you coronoavirus!
</SARCASTIC_HUMOR>
(YES, I had to be that blindingly obvious, otherwise some dipshit will think I'm serious -- which prefaces the following: )
Gee whiz, I wonder if crap like TFA being possible could possibly be at least part of the reason why so many people have been so easily persuaded to NOT trus
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Article generator (Score:2)
I'm Shocked! Shocked I Say! (Score:2)
If you can't trust the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences to be completely reliable about things having nothing at all to do with medical sciences (or Macedonia) who can you trust?
Doesn't anyone care about grammar any more (Score:1)
It WASN'T... (Score:1)
GPT-2 strongly agrees with this paper because... (Score:1)
GPT-2 strongly agrees with this paper because it suggests that "high-density data is a plausible step that leads to large and consistent findings from the method, which leads to new insights about an unknown structural feature of a highly asymmetrical landscape."
"Our findings are very consistent with experimental observations of this technology, just as the dynamic terrain model in the 'SGM' model covers dynamic maps and forest plots, and with stable carbon isotope signatures in which, for example, the C