Siesste, Thèse and Sun #academicchatter

I would love to see a scientific journal that focusses on computational reproducibility, where authors submit data and Jupyter/Rmarkdown notebook scripts. Only after those reports are compiled, does the work actually go for peer review.

This year, I am really feeling the extra pain introduced by bullshit generators, aka "AI", when it comes to evaluating research assignments. I keep second guessing whether things have actually been written by certain students or not. Especially those who've talked to me about how they've been using "AI" for their other projects. Le sigh

To reduce the extra burden of checking whether the cited references actually exist or not (thanks no thanks "AI"!), I have made it mandatory for the students to add all their references to a Zotero group library. It's been so helpful! Highly recommend this

@academicchatter

This must be summer... I have four papers to comment on! From the first draft stages to second referee report.

Sad but true #AcademicWriting #AcademicChatter #ErrantScience

I don't study fashion amongst graduate students, but I'm low-key thinking of pivoting my research topic just to have an opportunity to title a paper:

"From drab to drag: the grad garb grab-bag"

Yesterday the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics announced that Robin Lakoff, a professor there from 1972 to 2012, has died. I really loved Robin's pragmatics class in grad school. She taught us so much about pragmatics, the history of linguistics, and various other stuff. Partly I thought she was amazing because she was a deeply shy, reclusive person, but she was hilarious in class. And her jokes weren't re-used, they were timely to current events. One thing I learned from her is that lecture can be a performance, like theater. Another important thing I learned from her was from sort of an aside during one lecture: a field can keep expanding the set of questions that are considered reasonable to ask, and this is good. A question that comes across as silly and uninformed, like no actual linguist would ask that, might be a reasonable topic for inquiry 10 years later. She explained how a lot of the questions we were doing research on in the 90's were not considered questions a linguist should ask back when she was in grad school in the 60's or 70's, but by the 90's there were whole conferences on the same questions. Like the kind of questions where the rest of the class might giggle uncomfortably, and your professor would try to steer you back onto something reasonable. That one little aside during a lecture comes back to me often. She also taught us Gricean maxims and conversational implicature and presupposition, in ways that just astounded me sometimes. I only took one class with her and she was never on my committees or things like that, but I really appreciated her and have thought of her often. #linguistics #AcademicChatter

The latest FOSS Academic post involves more wrestling with the implications of #generativeAI for academic peer review:

https://fossacademic.tech/2025/08/06/reviewing-ai.html

In this post, I take observations from software #developers and #openSource podcasters (such as the folks at @latenightlinux ) about how genAI is swamping things like bug bounties and code reviews. This is similar to some of the issues faced by academic peer reviewers.

Update: seven months after this mess, the AHA has put out “Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in History Education.” Among other things, it suggests you can use generative #AI to “produce a historical image.” In case you were wondering if it was possible for AHA to become more embarrassing #histodons #history #academia #academicchatter https://spore.social/@abshlimon/113845432042219799

If you assume a 50% reproducibility rate (results from reproducibility projects vary from 12-61%), the line of irreproducible articles would be just below the "all articles" line in the logarithmic plot.
Just as a comparison to the red "paper mill products" line...

https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420092122

https://retractionwatch.com/2025/08/04/fighting-coordinated-publication-fraud-is-like-emptying-an-overflowing-bathtub-with-a-spoon-study-coauthor-says/#comment-2344111

Me again in German in Deutschlandfunk about Ghostwriting:

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/ghostwriter-fuer-wissenschaftliche-arbeiten-interview-debora-weber-wulff-100.html

And right after a discussion of the PNAS paper about the industrial sized problem of paper mills:

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/wissenschaftsbetrug-mittlerweile-industrielle-ausmasse-100.html

#AcademicIntegrity
#AcademicChatter

Do we have a hashtag for funded PhD announcements? We have @plantscijobs , but I can see I'm one of the few people who posts to it. Is there any hashtag we've lighted on for PhD jobs in general? @academicchatter #AcademicChatter

Does ResearchGate have a growing credibility problem?

"...we cite the case of Larry, a cat that belonged to the grandmother of Reese Richardson,..Last year, Larry the Cat got many citations from Richardson posting a fake profile and some fake article titles on ResearchGate, with Larry as the author. Larry went on to garner more than 100 fake citations on Google Scholar."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02182-w #AcademicChatter #Science #Publishing @plantscience @academicchatter

Me to an editor who addressed me as Dr.: Fyi, I don't have a PhD.

Editor: It's a basic mark of respect (wtf?); I'll make sure to address you correctly in the future *Dr* Gatta #AcademicChatter

Academics: sTuDeNtS aRe CoMmItTiNg AcAdEmIc MiScOnDuCt!

Also Academics: https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/scientific-fraud-research-papers-b2802247.html

"A 2024 #researchPaper introducing Med-Gemini included the hallucination ... and nobody at #Google caught it. When Bryan Moore, a board-certified #neurologist and researcher with expertise in #AI, flagged the mistake, he tells The Verge, the company quietly edited the blog post to fix the error with no public acknowledgement — and the paper remained unchanged." https://www.theverge.com/health/718049/google-med-gemini-basilar-ganglia-paper-typo-hallucination?ICID=ref_fark
archived https://archive.ph/x8dfr#selection-1721.165-1725.127

Scientific fraud is growing rapidly - here is a very recent publication in PNAS:

The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2420092122

And a report by the NY Times (gift link):

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/04hs-science-papers-fraud-research-paper-mills.html?unlocked_article_code=1.b08.TENU.C043JXpQJtyA&smid=url-share

Minor revisions!

...and apparently our method to derive competitive interaction strengths from empirical observation is considered "extremely elegant". That's a nice vacation start!

#AcademicChatter
#TheoreticalEcology
#EcologicalModelling
#PeerReview
#EcologicalNetworks

#preprint available here:
https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.01.25.577181

It always was a matter of incentives, but the script has been flipped for the worse.

"the scientific enterprise is now witness to widespread, organized defection from the scientific public goods game. Large swaths of players, among them many scientists, reviewers, editors and publishers, are choosing to no longer make genuine contributions to the pot."

Good write up on a recent PNAS paper.

https://reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a-do-or-die-moment-for-the-scientific-enterprise/

@academicchatter