Gizmodo is unsparing: “Unadulterated gibberish snuck into Springer Nature’s Arabian Journal of Geosciences, and not for the first time.”
The publisher Springer Nature was forced to retract over 40 papers from its Arabian Journal of Geosciences after realizing they were nothing more than garbled jargon. This is just the latest in a series of shoddy research papers getting past the publisher.
First reported by research journal watchdog Retraction Watch, the slew of retractions comes on the heels of other issues at the publisher, where hundreds of papers were previously flagged with “expressions of concern” for research integrity breaches…
They read a bit like a college student throwing around big words to cover up a lack of understanding. Though purportedly written by humans, the content of each paper definitely reads as if it were put together by a computer that doesn’t quite grasp speech patterns or grammar. The papers are filled with redundancies and generally lack logic.
Isaac Schultz, “Science Publisher Retracts 44 Papers for Being Utter Nonsense” at Gizmodo (November 5, 2021)
The editor of the journal has suggested that the autobabble papers got into the journal via hacking. Retraction Watch says that that does happen, giving an example.
Here’s the Retraction Watch piece on the current spout of nonsense.
As we’ve noted earlier, it’s getting to the point where “Trust the science!” is sounding more ridiculous all the time. It’s like saying “Trust the mountains” or “Trust milk.” It’s not a rational response to a lot of what we face just now.
You may also wish to read: Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. SteakUmm on the philosophy of science The thing is, the saucy social media team at Steak-Umm has a point: What does it mean to say that science is “true”? Was all the contradictory nonsense barked at us during the COVID pandemic “true”? That isn’t even possible. Yet all the barkers will insist that whatever stuff they said was “science” and we will, it seems have to believe them on that one. But with what outcome… we shall see.