alt Hacker NewsSurely this is gross professional misconduct? If one of my postdocs did this they would be at risk of being fired. I would certainly never trust them again. If I let it get through, I should be at risk.
As a reviewer, if I see the authors lie in this way why should I trust anything else in the paper? The only ethical move is to reject immediately.
I acknowledge mistakes and so on are common but this is different league bad behaviour.
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this brings us to a cultural divide, westerners would see this as a personal scar, as they consider the integrity of the publishing sphere at large to be held up by the integrity of individuals
i clicked on 4 of those papers, and the pattern i saw was middle-eastern, indian, and chinese names
these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the journal for accepting the paper. they don't see the loss of reputation to be a personal scar because they instead attribute blame to the game.
some people would say it's racist to understand this, but in my opinion when i was working with people from these cultures there was just no other way to learn to cooperate with them than to understand them, it's an incredibly confusing experience to be working with them until you understand the various differences between your own culture and theirs
Isn't this mostly a set of citation typos? To me this mostly calls for better bibtex checking, writing and checking bibtex is super annoying
What field are you in?
In many fields it's gross professional misconduct only in theory. This sort of thing is very common and there's never any consequence. LLM-generated citations specifically are a new problem but citations of documents that don't support the claim, contradict it, have nothing to do with it or were retracted years ago have been an issue for a long time.
Gwern wrote about this here:
https://gwern.net/leprechaun
"A major source of [false claim] transmission is the frequency with which researchers do not read the papers they cite: because they do not read them, they repeat misstatements or add their own errors, further transforming the leprechaun and adding another link in the chain to anyone seeking the original source. This can be quantified by checking statements against the original paper, and examining the spread of typos in citations: someone reading the original will fix a typo in the usual citation, or is unlikely to make the same typo, and so will not repeat it. Both methods indicate high rates of non-reading"
I first noticed this during COVID and did some blogging about it. In public health it is quite common to do things like present a number with a citation, and then the paper doesn't contain that number anywhere in it, or it does but the number was an arbitrary assumption pulled out of thin air rather than the empirical fact it was being presented as.
It was also very common for papers to open by saying something like, "Epidemiological models are a powerful tool for predicting the spread of disease" with eight different citations, and every single citation would be an unvalidated model - zero evidence that any of the cited models were actually good at prediction.
Bad citations are hardly the worst problem with these fields, but when you see how widespread it is and that nobody within the institutions cares it does lead to the reaction you're having where you just throw your hands up and declare whole fields to be writeoffs.