“We recently received a double-digit number of submissions from authors in the Far East… where we had strong evidence of machine generated content. Nothing made much sense in these papers, the authors, with their yahoo and aol type email addresses, frequently supplied false university affiliations, among other glaring problems. I suspected that these submissions were a test of our detection systems more so than anything else.” That is Udo Schuklenk, professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, writing in his capacity as one of the editors of the journal, Bioethics. His editorial was prompted by his journal’s publication of a critique of an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) for, among other things, multiple citations to “bibliographic fictions” (seemingly the result of unacknowledged AI use), which led to the latter article’s retraction. The now-retracted JME article is “Panem, corticoids and circenses: the ethical fallout of Enhanced Games,” by Alexis Demas (who, Schuklenk notes, used a yahoo email address and whose stated institutional affiliation could not be verified). The critique of the JME article, published (open access) in Bioethics, is by Ognjen Arandjelović (University of St. Andrews), and is titled “Against Moral Panic and Citation Fiction: A Critique of “Panem, Corticoids and Circenses” and a Proposal for Editorial Gatekeeping on Reference Integrity“. Arandjelović discusses the reference failures and what to do about them in section 4 of his article, and I recommend people look at it. Here’s the introduction to that section: It is tempting to treat reference failures as a mechanistic problem that could be addressed through technology and bureaucracy by installing more automated checks, tightening and enforcing checklists, reminding authors of their obligations. Not only banal, that response misdiagnoses the failure mode. In a publication culture where fast-turnaround commentaries are rewarded, reviewers often treat references as decorative rather than load-bearing, and journals rarely suffer meaningful consequences for bibliographic unreliability, low-grade fabrication, and high-grade sloppiness become rational strategies. The core issue, then, is not attempting to help authors avoid mistakes. Authors know this. Rather, the challenge is in making it costly (in probability and consequence) to submit work with citations that do not exist or do not support what they are cited for. In other words, what is needed is deterrence, not assistance;..
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