‘Tortured phrases’ give away fabricated research papers

Analysis reveals that strange turns of phrase may indicate foul play in science.
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  1. Holly Else
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In April 2021, a series of strange phrases in journal articles piqued the interest of a group of computer scientists. The researchers could not understand why researchers would use the terms ‘counterfeit consciousness’, ‘profound neural organization’ and ‘colossal information’ in place of the more widely recognized terms ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘deep neural network’ and ‘big data’.

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Nature 596, 328-329 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02134-0

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 10 August 2021: An earlier version of this article stated that more than 500 papers containing tortured phrases were identified in Microprocessors and Microsystems. The estimate of 500 questionable papers in this journal was in fact based on several factors.

References

  1. Cabanac, G., Labbé, C. & Magazinov, A. Preprint at arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 (2021).

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