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The AI research paper was real. The "co-author" wasn't:
David Cox, the co-director of a prestigious artificial intelligence lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was scanning an online computer science bibliography in December when he noticed something odd—his name listed as an author alongside three researchers in China whom he didn't know on two papers he didn't recognize.
At first, he didn't think much of it. The name Cox isn't uncommon, so he figured there must be another David Cox doing AI research. "Then I opened up the PDF and saw my own picture looking back at me," Cox says. "It was unbelievable."
It isn't clear how prevalent this kind of academic fraud may be or why someone would list as a co-author someone not involved in the research. By checking other papers written by the same Chinese authors, WIRED found a third example, where the photo and biography of an MIT researcher were listed under a fictitious name.
It may be an effort to increase the chances of publication or gain academic prestige, Cox says. He says he has heard rumors of academics in China being offered a financial reward for publishing with researchers from prestigious Western institutions.
Whatever the reason, it highlights weaknesses in academic publishing, according to Cox and others. It also reflects a broader lack of rules around the publishing of papers in AI and computer science especially, where many papers are posted online without review beforehand.
"This stuff wouldn't be so harmful if it didn't undermine public trust in peer review," Cox says. "It really shouldn't be able to happen."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @09:15AM (7 children)
I thought it was common practice to list the head of the lab as author even though he wasn't involved in the research.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @11:02AM (3 children)
Depends on the lab, their ego, the paper, and the journal. Most places I know of, you still shoot them an email or have another approval process before adding them as an author just in case they don't like your research or whatever. Things like that is one reason more and more journals require a "contributions" section that says what exactly everyone did. Some journals even go so far as to not allow authorship at all unless you materially contributed. Either way, people aren't stupid and if they see the head of the lab just tacked on to the paper, they'll probably figure that it is a curtesy attribution anyway.
This is a different beast altogether however. They just made up that he worked with them without any sort of connection.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday February 22 2021, @11:26AM (2 children)
It has to be said that the categories for contributions are usually vague. You have "conception of the study", "critical appraisal of results", "critical review of the manuscript" (depends of course somewhat on the journal). In good faith, everybody, for any kind of contribution, can be fit some of those.
(Score: 4, Informative) by driverless on Monday February 22 2021, @02:14PM
... nodded at author while passing her in the corridor and enquired as to how things were going...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @03:55PM
There is a lot of bad faith too. Gift authorship is rife even in departments where the Chair has signed onto ethical guidelines blah blah for authorship. It didn't used to be this bad. The only position that is not completely corrupt is 1st - every other position in the author list you can assume it's a gift. Sucks for those who really did contribute. Also removes the leverage that authors have to get people to do some real work, why would you? You've already got authorship so move onto the next paper.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by KritonK on Monday February 22 2021, @11:04AM (1 child)
It's also common practice for heads of labs to know who their staff are, and what they are working on. According to TFA, David Cox did not know the other researchers and did not recognize the papers.
Speaking from personal experience when I was a grad student, I might have done all the work, but my advisor had suggested the topic, provided the necessary funding and, whenever I got stuck, I would discuss the problem with him, and he would suggest possible solutions. When it came time to publish a paper, he didn't need to ask to have his name included. I put it there myself, before mine, as I couldn't have done it without him. Conversely, if someone had asked him who's that KritonK character, who claims to have published a paper with him, he would have answered that he's one of his grad students, who's working on such and such a project; not that he doesn't recognize him or the topic.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @12:34PM
To be fair, since Chinamen look alike it would be difficult for the head of the lab to know who his staff are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @02:14PM
I might have misread it, but I got the impression that the Chinese researchers had nothing to do with Cox's lab, they just stuck his name on the paper. I read a different source of the article before seeing this here and that other writeup said that in another case a researcher noticed their picture stuck on the name of a different person, so the researcher wasn't part of the paper, and someone copped his picture off of one of his papers and stuck it on presumably a fictitious author.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by progo on Monday February 22 2021, @11:00AM
Given that you get social credit for working with someone if you simply claim that you did, and no one ever checks any of these things except occasionally trying to replicate the results, it seems likely that false co-authors are endemic in the system.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by progo on Monday February 22 2021, @11:02AM (14 children)
I thought the public did not trust peer review.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @11:42AM (2 children)
Nothing wrong with peer review, but OTOH many scientists put too much faith on it (as in: if it isn't peer reviewed the research shouldn't be trusted). Before early 20th century research was hardly reviewed as in the way it is done these days.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday February 22 2021, @02:17PM
Yup, it reverses the burden of proof. It's not "peer reviewed = probably OK", it's "not peer reviewed = probably not OK".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @04:01PM
If you think author lists are corrupted but peer review is not.... boy, you are in for a treat.
For about 5 years I have seen utter junk published by hoards of Chinese authors that only cite Chinese-authored papers. And surprize! The consequences are that Chinese get the promotions and fill up all the labs, bringing their lovely authoritarian 3rd world backward ideology. The Master Professor cannot ever be wrong, the useless ungrateful students are always wrong, thank you Sir thank you Sir for the honor of giving you authorship and all your esteemed Chinese colleagues.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday February 22 2021, @12:23PM (10 children)
Fraudulent papers are often believable, which is why, in academia, fraud was typically held at about the same level as paedo-murder-rape - the punishment for abusing the loophole that it's quite easy to get away with must be so harsh that it's not worth the risk, not even once. Which was all well and good while the punishment remained harsh, but nowadays it seems to be being brushed aside with less of a sense of existential threat.
I personally think there should be the introduction of institution-wide, or even country-wide, academic death sentences. Like the old "internet death sentence" of yore. There's more to "peer review" than just reading each others' papers - there's also policing how the work is being done, and policing is best done as close to the root of the problem as possible, the further away you get, the more nuclear you need to the policing to be. The institutions need to either root out their bad actors, or be rooted out of the academic system entirely.
What to do? Institutionalised Science needs to be funding people like Bik, who is currently Patreon-funded:
https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2020/12/31/2020-a-year-in-review/
"""
Since I quit my full time job in March 2019, I have been able to work full time on science integrity. I am still following up on leads from the 800 papers I found during my scan of 20,000 biomedical papers with photos (published in mBio), but most of my time goes into investigating papers sent to me through email or social media.
"""
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday February 22 2021, @01:12PM (2 children)
And this is just one of many problems with peer review. Yes, I have been aware for some time that a totally unrelated scientist's name could be tacked onto a work. It doesn't seem to be of any value, if the peer review is done properly, with the reviewers kept ignorant of who the authors are so that they will not be swayed by that knowledge. It could still sway the editors, especially if they don't take the time to check for this. As for extreme punishment, it's not a viable solution to a problem. Better to make it impossible to pull that stunt.
The title of this article says the AI research was real. But was it? If the real authors are willing to lie about who contributed, they'd surely be willing to tell other lies. Fudge the results, doctor the data, that sort of thing.
Another problem is this sort of questioning and reporting can go too far, and make everyone involved in similar endeavors too skittish. There's a lot of suspicion of science these days. I am thinking especially that there is too much rejection of perfectly good papers, for not doing more, being even better, even more significant. Like this one somewhat prestigious journal reporting that they received 57 papers, and accepted only 24. That's an awfully high rejection rate. I find it sick, really. Few enough people even make it through a PhD program. Applicants can be rejected at the start. Those who get past that can fail the orals, and be kicked out. Then there's the final barrier, getting past the "PhDABD" stage. If you make it and get the sheepskin, then you have several problematic choices. Try for a postdoc? Try to get a faculty position? Then, welcome to the world of Publish or Perish. Anyway, one would think that having gone through all the effort to earn a PhD, and succeeding, one would not be subjected to such high rejection rates on their submissions for publication, as if still students of dubious potential.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @02:57PM (1 child)
One of the core problems is that we produce too many PhDs.
There is a vast oversupply, leading to the problems you see here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @04:08PM
And yet nobody to do any work. The "grant winner" lottery has selected for the wrong people. You have an entire lab of expensive winners none of whom can do the work they promised but need to hire the cheapest, most pliant foreign visa-seekers to do it. Of course they can't do it either - who cares? Just churn out some shit and shovel it to whatever journal. The people doing the reviews are - surprize! - not the genius lottery winners but those same shitty PhD students that are getting hired to do the work. The real, seasoned scientists don't have a job any more - too expensive, too slow, too annoying - only winners and students churning out copy allowed.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Monday February 22 2021, @01:14PM
Just to support your point of view - as someone who has worked in large collaborations with complex data processing (nb physical sciences), the journal peer review is barely perceptible. The collaboration does all the peer review, and results have to be cross-checked by other labs and experiments. This is because it is impossible for anyone outside the collaboration to understand or check the nitty gritty of the data analysis.
Case study - no one believes the sterile neutrino results floating around at the moment. Why? Because:
* one of the main experiments (miniboone) published a result and then revised/retracted it.
* the main experiments have results that are both inconsistent with standard neutrino physics but also _inconsistent with each other_.
Another case study - apparent measurement of faster than light neutrinos (was in the news a few years back) were caused by a loose cable somewhere in the experimental apparatus. How can a journal referee spot this without having access to the experiment's apparatus? Clearly it needs to be checked by the experimenters and cross-checked by other labs.
Anything involving population studies (medical, social "science") - might as well not even bother as far as I am concerned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @01:15PM (3 children)
While it's annoying, I've got an account on ResearchGate and linked a few engineering papers that I was co-author on. RG sends me an email whenever one of my papers is cited, which sometimes turns up interesting research.
RG also sends me "Is this you?" emails, where it's trying to determine if I'm an author on some other work--so it might have helped David Cox find the misuse of his name?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday February 22 2021, @01:48PM (2 children)
This is what is partially weird about the story. Most people and organizations that matters in cases such as this subscribe to various services that check for those names (or keywords) to be mentioned in both digital- and more traditional print. There is a notification every time something new is found. So I find it somewhat odd that he, the co-director, of some fancy AI lab in Cambridge sits and does this manually. Unless he is just doing the old 'lets Google myself and see what we can find' (problem is that his name isn't really unique enough - David Cox, also it's probably an excellent p0rn-name). Still isn't this just the type of task he should instruct his precious AI to do for him?
That said it's an interesting problem. What stops anyone from just slapping a few names on the paper to increase or inflate the gravitas of the work, certainly if it's outside the Anglo sphere, after all most people don't bother checking Chinese, Russian etc. So while it might be more or less instantly caught if you tried it here it might pass over there since nobody is really looking that hard. That said most people probably won't mind all to much if the paper is good, possibly dishonest but if they can claim they didn't know they didn't know. After all this will increase your citation mentric, which is sadly a valid metric on you academic prowess.
I guess for him it's somewhat reverse tho, he doesn't want his name attached to a bunch of sub-par noname papers.
That said I don't think it will undermine the public trust in the peer review process, after all they don't even know or care what it is. Nothing to undermine then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @03:36PM (1 child)
Simple step for the journal staff -- send a form-letter-email to all the authors of every paper, using their published university email addresses (scraped from Uni websites, not supplied with the paper). Make sure that you get a "yes, I'm a co-author" reply from every author.
As noted, completely independent from peer review, and something useful for journal staff to do (as staff is less needed due to e-reviewing and e-publishing).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Monday February 22 2021, @03:50PM
There is no standard as far as I know and each and every journal does things a bit differently. Some, or most even -- highly subjective estimate tho, require something akin to what you suggest, some don't. For some you are supposed to supply data and not just the finished paper. Some used to require paper copies, not that common anymore I think and then they also had forms of various kinds that you had to sign to allow them (or grant them the rights to publish it).
Since citation has become so important there was a burst of new journals and more and more niche journals for smaller and smaller subject fields so while each field probably have like their premiere publication there are also a mass amount of less reputable publications or the alternative when departments or universities just start their own little publications just so that they can print and publish their own articles and papers as some kind of fail-safe. (and push the citation metric for their staff).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @06:11PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @11:03PM
I think you are double bullshit for besmirching peer review, you disgusting deplorable Flat-Earther, you!! You must be as stupid as the actual authors of the paper under discussion! BTW, how muchs is "lots"? Metric, or Imperial?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @11:03AM (3 children)
Is it more likely to undermine trust in peer review, or undermine trust in the Chinese?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday February 22 2021, @12:25PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Monday February 22 2021, @03:40PM (1 child)
What fool has any trust with the Chinese they have proven for almost three quarters of a century that they are blood thirsty barbarians out to kill anyone who does not agree with their system of government and does not have total subservience to it and the Chinese people.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @04:33PM
No, I wouldn't say that. Just bureaucratic ineptitude that can only be produced in 3rd world institutions plus nowadays the veneer of a US postal address.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Monday February 22 2021, @11:59AM (4 children)
This is dangerously wrong. This stuff would be *even more* harmful if it did NOT undermine public trust in peer review. In science, trust is an enemy, not a friend.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @05:11PM (3 children)
This is sophistry at best, and dangerously manipulative of words at worst.
There is not a universal single idea. Much like I trust an airplane pilot to fly me safely but would not trust them to perform surgery on me, science has multiple spheres of trust.
In this case, there is the idea of trusting or not trusting the findings, and trusting or not trusting the process. Cox is saying that this undermines the trust in the process, which is potentially dangerous in that it suggests "science is all a bunch of made up stuff anyway, so Ph.D. in medicine knows less than my cousin Suzy, who treated malaria using bleach."
I'll go one step further and say that not trusting findings, while valuable, can also be taken too far, too. "We haven't proven the world is round, I don't trust those findings!" There is skepticism, but there has to be a limit to that as well.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:47AM (2 children)
No. Science is in fact a sphere of /distrust./ Spheres of trust are religious artifacts. Science means distrust. Distrust your theory, criticize it. Distrust your results, replicate them. Distrust everything - test everything.
The moment you enter a 'sphere of trust' you have thereby left the 'sphere of science' behind in the rear-view.
"Ph.D. in medicine knows less than my cousin Suzy, who treated malaria using bleach."
Whether she has a Ph.D. or not is irrelevant. Suzy trusts the theory; isn't your researcher smart enough to doubt it?
If not, you might as well give her salary to Suzy instead.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:43PM (1 child)
This is patently false. Evidence: How many people are trying to calculate the diameter of the Earth, because we can't trust what others have said in the past? How many people are measuring the strength of gravity, or indeed that gravity exists? If you went to a research board suggesting an experiment to determine the molecular formula for water, you'd be laughed out of the room... and indeed, how could you even know there is a molecular formula at all?
The extreme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_skepticism [wikipedia.org] being put forward here is a gross oversimplification... impractical at best and disingenuous at worse. It is similar to saying you would never cross any bridge that you didn't personally build and test because "the person who built it may have had malice intent."
Yes, in "trust but verify" you need to verify, but that doesn't mean you never trust.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday February 23 2021, @10:33PM
You couldn't be more wrong. The size of the Earth has been the subject of /numerous/ calculations and experiments just over the past couple of centuries alone. Every few years someone does it again, a little differently, and claims to have produced the most accurate estimate yet. Then the critics get their say, and if it stands up to criticism people start using it. That's how science works. Exactly the way you say it doesn't work.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Monday February 22 2021, @01:54PM
Semi-OT, but it could apply to issues like in TFA: An occasional idle thought of mine is how I would create a system of trust for a peer-to-peer network I conceived about 20 years ago. It used pythagorean distance on hash values for routing. I wrote a client for classic MacOS as feasibility study, but dropped it when I saw how its handling of IP addresses would compromise the entire structure.
A better version would need some sort of onion-routing, where you only link to a fixed set (but not necessarily fully trusted) peers. The naive variant of trust control would be simply to disconnect spammers. But what if I'd like to extend the network to something usable for "safer" trading, like the 'bay? It would need finer trust control.
A manual (or maybe partly automatic) mechanism would establish a trust level for your links. If someone unknown wants to trade with you, the contact first goes over hops. If it's spammy, you can scold your direct peer, and the scolding can go along the whole chain until the established node linking the spammer will have to make a decision whether to keep the spammer on the net (maybe because the spammer paid for access?), and risk being disconnected, or unlink the spammer. On the other hand, if the trade advance is from someone well established and reliable, you can ask the hops (or maybe third parties?) for the trustworthiness, and if you get a solid chain of trust, you'll probably be safe.
Also, a crook can build a network of a million nodes with full trust, but that won't have the link from your bubble, so it won't help.
In the case of the article, if it was published on said network, the guy who was falsely listed would see the article, think "what kind of bullshit is this" and scold the upstream peer for delivering it. The scolding would maybe extend to a post-doc in Hong Kong (which is the only link to the author in mainland China), who would then decide it is in the best interest of his international career to down-rank the author in mainland China.
Of course the whole system would be unsafe against sleeper attacks, but so is any non-digital social community. I'd be curious on how it would play out.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @07:32PM (2 children)
It's common in China to put pictures of a white guy on stuff. They are called "white monkeys". The purpose is to lend credibility, since even the Chinese don't trust the Chinese. You'd think they'd stop doing that after Trump...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2021, @10:00PM (1 child)
There's no reason to stop because that was an orange monkey.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday February 23 2021, @02:32PM
But at least half of you didn't trust the orange monkey, clearly the theory is flawed or perhaps WHITE >> every other color which has I guess other implications. So pick your poison.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @05:20PM
TrUsT ScIeNtIsTs! Herpa-Derp
Yeah right behind me trusting in doctors who promoted smoking for 50 years, or various Colas before then. And a little ahead of the Fake News Media.
Stupid people refuse to accept that people in position of authority have financial incentives to lie to you. Blind trust is a sign of mental ineptitude.