Secrets Exposed: How Top Academics Illegally Boost Their Career

[@BeWorded]

I once wrote a paper and a senior colleague who loves to talk but lazy to write as me to add him as a co-author before submitting it to a journal. I did. He asked me to forward the paper to him so he could send it to the publishers. I did only to see the paper published with his name as the first author and mine as the second author. I was angry for days because he didn't write nothing in the paper. Of course, that's the last time I ever participated in this academic dishonesty!

[@sunway1374]

Sorry to hear about your experience. I have seen this happened in an institute I formerly worked at. One professor did this regularly, especially to his phd students and younger researchers from abroad. He was exploiting their more vulnerable position (being junior, foreign, unfamiliar with their rights, etc).

[@alcedob.5850]

I'd be angry for years.

[@almthanihamza8877]

You should take action against him, This is your own efforts..

[@francishunt562]

Should never have added his name in the first place.

[@lindaabraham8715]

You need an editor for grammar.

[@drd4059]

The best way to deal with plagiarism is to test the "authors" on knowledge of "their" publication at a public meeting such as a conference. I once had the pleasure of grilling a grad student who had the gall to present my work as his own.

[@OntologyofValue]

This is a great point... however, I wonder if I would pass such a test by myself... After a few years, the details of your projects just evaporate from your head. Or don't they? :)

[@chrisdonnell7200]

Yea, but how? It's not easy to do this even in well understood subjects (see the abysmal state of grading and academic dishonesty in university courses). But when you start getting into niche fields and new research, there's a very limited pool of people capable of testing these things. We have enough trouble just getting people to thoroughly peer review a paper, where are the time and resources going to come from to quiz the author on top of that?

[@drd4059]

@@chrisdonnell7200 The best that you can do is patrol your own lane. Actively look for others using your work without attribution and call them out. The deeper problem of course is universities lowering academic standards to the point that graduates are incapable of performing original research and are incentivized to game the system. Perhaps the cure is to limit researchers to a small number of publications per year (2I ) and instruct the researcher to select and publish only their best work.

[@SR71YF12]

Great video on an important topic! I can tell you that this record of 1 paper every 37 hours has already been surpassed. At a university in Sweden, there are two very well-known researchers in neurodegenerative diseases (including the most well-known type of dementia) who both have close to 2000 publications to their names. One of them already has 118 publications to his name this year on PubMed. Last year and the year before, he had about 300 each year. On a recent paper, he listed 6 affiliations so I am expecting that he soon will exceed the magical number of 365 papers per year, i.e. 1 paper per day. At the pace he is going so far, he is well on track for it.

[@michaellawrence3513]

Sadly i doubt every thing i read that comes from academia. After doing grad work i realize that the data collection, publishing bias, and peer review process is all game-able and now ive lost confidence in scientific papers

[@Blueprintsforsuccess-r3g]

Anything more than 15 papers in a single year should not be acknowledged by universities. we need to change the rules

[@geetatripathi2454]

Glad these issues are being addressed. Academics also use ghost writers to publish their papers and don't give any acknowledgement. Some people work for them since they atleast get some income. Actually lot of nonsense is happening in academics for people to have their names in Scopus Index.

[@OntologyofValue]

Great materials as always! In every competitive environment, people will play the game they encounter - and you cannot blame them. This is why I believe the only solution is to change the rules of the game - for instance, by limiting the number of papers you can publish per year so that researchers have no choice but to compete on quality. Or, reduce the number of new openings for PhD positions so that everyone who completes a PhD has an effective chance to stay in academia (as it used to be a few decades ago...) and people are not incentivized to cheat.

[@Lavabug]

Seriously, this. Capping the number of papers per year would enforce quality over quantity. Especially agree on reducing the number of new PhD students. If a factory produced 10 rejects for every 1 working product, it would be a major problem. An academy that produces 10 research PhD's for every 1 permanent job is equally a disaster.

[@Teilnehmer]

Yes, these are very good ideas, easy to implement as well..

[@OntologyofValue]

@@TeilnehmerThank you :)

[@OntologyofValue]

@@Lavabug This! Academia (just like the whole public sector) has become a slow, inefficient, machine.going nowhere and spitting out jobless PhDs. No wonder that private businesses slowly take over research from research institutes.

[@MapleYum]

Publishing pressure was one of the top reasons I left academia. Whatever happened to quality?

[@avs3488]

Not all researchers are good teachers. We weigh the academic performance by published articles but there should be some other standard to weigh those who teach with all their hardwork, dedication and honesty and dont cheat for publication

[@piretkivi3218]

There should be a respectable academic journal that ONLY accepts articles written by ONE PERSON. Those articles with seven trillion authors are becoming a joke. I always wonder who did the work and who is just there.

[@alessiafaggian999]

What if you have experiments? One single person cannot do everything! For example I do living cells and microscopy, my colleague mass spectrometry and the third one surgery. Three disciplines completely different that work together for ONE paper ....who will be the single author? Who will write the manuscript with results of the others two?

[@geetatripathi2454]

Absolutely

[@piretkivi3218]

@@alessiafaggian999 This is a valid concern. There are two solutions that come to my non-academic brain: 1. Write an article that has three parts. Every part has a different author. Every part is written by the author of that part. The slightly different styles prove that there is no funny business. 2. Sign a contract that says that fake authors will be hanged and semi-fake authors will spend the rest of their lives in prison. After the first few public hangings the cheating will stop. p.s. Articles with a celebrity should be illegal. I have seen articles where one author is famous. I suppose the work was really done by the others.

[@TheGrmany69]

Just reference of the authors per part.

[@alessiafaggian999]

@@piretkivi3218 agree, and this was what we did and the role of prof was to smooth style Abruptly we spot a unexpected name the "daddy's girl"

[@hubomba]

How could someone think they could get away with 1 paper every 37 hours? Euler published at a rate of 1 manuscript per week but ( bit of a big but here ) he was the most prolific mathematician to ever live.

[@zmesopotamia6792]

I would add that in many countries with high level of corruption (e.g., Iraq), some academics force postgrad students to include their names on papers that they haven't contributed to. And many of which have most of their work being published in internal journals that doesn't worth a cent in terms of academic reputation and decency.

[@12e3pi]

Thank you Andrew, career decisions corrected by your hardwork, high-wader boots and torch, holding👃, touring through this insufferable despicable academic cesspool.

[@louielefevre3152]

Professor ... I've been a viewer of yours for some time who thoroughly enjoys your video postings! Well done! Hope to contribute more in comment and banter in subsequent videos.

[@bolorbold4627]

English speakers have huge advantage on writing papers they can do it much faster than non english speakers. Chat gpt significantly reduce this imbalance.

[@womenscvresearch]

I really enjoy your videos. Thanks for being a positive voice of reason.

[@abdalrhemramadanalhomsi5318]

Fantastic video.. however world is changing and of course Academia is a part of this change .. I think the future is full with surprises .. thank you

[@littlebrit]

There are always some bad apples, but the problem is that academic system design is not self regulating. Universities only act when there is a scandal in media. They need outsiders to mop up their dirty floor.

[@kjanttigvu6887]

I'm interested in the intellectual honesty aspect of ChatGPT to generate papers and potential plagerism. It should be clear to >anyone< that at best, AI can provide a bare-bones foundation upon which to hang your own original research. However, the AI gets the info elsewhere. How do you have AI cite what it bases its output on. As close as I can get is in having it to include sources at the end of what it writes. But how do you get it to cite its individual statements in situ that come directly from the sources it lists at the end of what it writes - the traditional (Source/Author, page) format following such statements?

[@ovidiuzlatian3607]

Hi, I managed to obtain numbered in-text citations by adding the exactly these words to my prompt. Also ask for real references to lower the number of fabricated references it outputs. However, sometimes to the end of the list it gets references slightly out of scope of the article, so be careful. Hope this helps.

[@kjanttigvu6887]

@@ovidiuzlatian3607 Thank you!

[@ch.k4580]

You are not making it easy for me to stay in academia 😉. I am really shocked and I am really thinking of leaving. Having now a PostDoc position, since I had a really really bad PhD and I want to give it another shot. I love doing science but hearing all these things makes me think if I want to serve this system. Thanks for your insights!

[@willnill7946]

I thought this video would be about like half man half pig hybrids. That’s some dark research

[@arthurs.6334]

Academia is perfectly balanced with no exploits whatsoever

[@chrisdonnell7200]

Speedrunning academia any% (glitches allowed)

[@diodio520]

The system is the people, and it is on academics to change it. It is among themselves to choose to promote honest work, but instead they set up indexes for themselves to game. 🤦🏼‍♀️ Try to get a fresh hypothesis through this system. 10% grant success should be considered high for the waste of tax money like this. It's unprecedented. 🤬

[@mpty2022]

i totally agree with your conclusion... success is just a number in academics

[@SR71YF12]

I have to partly disagree though with what you are saying from 9:19. Yes, there is tremendous pressure to publish ("publish or perish", indeed) but it takes something more than just pressure to be a "super-producer", most importantly having certain types of personality and character traits. There just is no way that a normal human being can follow the Vancouver and ICMJE rules for co-authorship and at the same time be able to publish at the astronomically high rates that we are talking about here. There has to be a responsibility on the part of the researcher. But since almost nobody seems to care about the Vancouver and ICMJE rules anymore, and there are no real consequences for disregarding them (except for extremely rare cases), even those who do care are eventually going to be forced to play the game albeit at a much smaller scale than the super-producers. Something is very rotten in the kingdom of Academia!

[@MiguelSilvaFX]

Well...one way of shorting all that Kiosk science from all the rest, is by making mandatory, experimental live data uploads to a publicly accessible data repository,. Another great way to evaluate writing is to make it mandatory writing of a document on a publicly accessible open-source platform. For that matter I began 2 years ago, prototyping smart DAQ electronics to reach that level of trustworthiness in my scientific communications.

[@ankitjain2347]

So i am wondering, as someone who is starting of doing independent research, how can i be sure or check of the literature articles / research are good enough. I mean half of these are behind pay walls and the rest which are free are a bit all over the place in terms of citations and peer review. What is the best way to be sure of the fitness of a literature research paper? How do I be sure that I don't end up reading so many papers then having to realise that either the research or paper itself was contentious.

[@ankitjain2347]

Would like to know what your methods are? Especially given my field of enquiry is in social sciences.

[@jais8766]

Yes a video on this topic plz

[@lucabonaccio]

There are so many scandals in academia none is talking about just because the system "has to work like this"

[@iranjackheelson]

This is crazy and such a dissappointment... do you think certain kinds of discplines are more susceptible to these manipulations than others? Would love some opinions on that!

[@muhammadqais372]

Kindly make a video on PhD directly after Bachelors..........

[@MrGTO86]

My lecturer published some of my colleagues term paper on their behalf before it was even graded. It didn't even take two weeks. I'm sure his name is on their paper. 😬

[@wasfianazzal2779]

I was watching myself, having finished 2 years in my Ph.D. program and still not being able to publish anything =)

[@AlumniQuad]

These researchers need to start making Smart Choices®!!!

[@korawichbikedashcam6293]

Agree with the h index problem. One way that I can think of is instead of citation rewards it should be about contributions award. What is the best way to capture social contributions? I don't know. It's still better than looking at a citation score as you have pointed out here.

[@peteri1190]

One professor I found would self publish their rubbish writings, then continue to cite their writings in letters to journals for an extra boost

[@cicciobaciccio2177]

Imagine if one day Anonymous breaks into the databases of npg, Elsevier, etc. and release all the information concerning reviewers identities for manuscripts that have been rejected/accepted. John Wick underworld compared to what you would learn from reviewers/corresponding authors pairs would look naive. Especially the parts when all the phones rings when an "order" comes in...

[@barumbadum]

Thank you Andy!

[@intrapsych1843]

Employers don't give a dam about your published papers. They don't do anything for anybody in the business world. It may be something to brag about but don't let it make your head too big.

[@hoppingwren]

Surely the twitter account is a scam? I believe they would take people's money for the promise of a position on a paper, but I don't believe the journal article would actually come out... does someone have an RA to investigate if these actually get published?

[@olunet]

Ha! That existed dozens years ago - I have received emails suggesting publications in Elsevier from some Russian company many years ago

[@charlottebarnes5052]

So, as a student, other than “tortured phrases” is there a way to filter these “junk papers” (because they are like academic junk mail)? How can I check a paper’s GPT detection score?

[@RonniiV]

Just google GPT Detector. There are many.

[@64standardtrickyness]

You're always gonna need some metric for promotions or just who gets to keep their job but maybe something where the fewer authors on a paper the better otherwise sharing has no cost so they sell willy nilly.

[@DvdBdjzDvl]

This is spanish "picaresca" in all its glory.... and spanis bureacracy fighting back. Professors with tuition arent' doin shite research-wise, so the ministery created a system of acreditations that is almost impossible to achieve for human beings. It was a matter of time that a market for paper authorship appeared.

[@analuizazaninotto8166]

That's so disappointing! I never heard about it, but unfortunately it makes sense.

[@64standardtrickyness]

"one and two's gone but you can get three not worth it if you ask me" I do hope he means paying for authorship in general isn't worth it not just paying for the third author isn't.

[@Alhamzah_F_Abbas]

Indeed this become trendy nowadays. and I think there are many other dark-sides to boost publications and citations

[@areascoda2912]

all of these scam academics should start respecting goddess Saraswathi or goddess Athena and have some appreciation for truth and knowledge.

[@64standardtrickyness]

Are you allowed to put multiple institutions on your paper wouldn't the institution you're supposed to be working for get upset?

[@danielbazan09]

I hope this thesis advisor I´ve just found is not setting me up just for only for her´s h-score sake :o

[@jasonali4122]

I am sorry, but you almost certainly are. Once the system has finished milking you, you will be spat out.

[@nikoweng137]

allow me ask a stupid question, the prof position is permanent in Europe and North American so nobody can fire you. why prof have to publish paper ?

[@DrAndyStapleton]

Not a stupid question. They need to publish a lot to stay relevant and competitive for grants, get promotions, increase their chances of moving to a more prestigious institution, attract students and collaborators, pressure from the university and department and many more reasons.

[@MusangKing-b3o]

Head of the government can fire a university professor or demote him.

[@erickgomez7775]

Euler has got nothing on Luque

[@pamphletier]

There are certainly good reasons to put less weight on h factors and publication records, but the current alternatives only seem to lead to more subjective hiring and promotion decisions.

[@gozzilla78]

You cannot even put two vectors in total order; how could one even dream of doing that with people? But any metric claims to do exactly that. (By the way, also your insurance company does that with you, when they calculate how "worth" you are in money...)

[@boxeriain]

Hi Andy, so "GPT 4" is different from "chatGPT" as there is no such thing as 'chatGPT-4'. Probably a bit pedantic of me, but my PhD colleagues were saying the same thing without realising. Hope that's okay 👍🏻 - Iain x

[@IvanToman]

There is for Plus subscribers. It is significantly better in finding relevant research. It still fails at providing correct links though, but titles and authors are usually correct, while in previous versions were almost all made up.

[@boxeriain]

@@IvanToman hello! Thanks Ivan. So I am paying for access to gpt4. Is the plus sub thing a thing on top of what I'm doing?

[@IvanToman]

@@boxeriain Hi, no that's it, "Plus" is just a paid version, $20 a month. There, you can chose from dropdown which model to use (3.5 or 4). Free version has only access to 3.5 at the moment (I guess that will change soon but paid will have plugins that are currently in beta and generally not available to anyone yet).

[@manymoms920]

That Spanish uni academic could have been more subtle but he thought nah. Idiotic

[@sojibrajii]

Hello Sir, Are you looking for a professional KZbin thumbnail designer?

[@travel4love]

❤

[@boredscientist5756]

Great! Oh well, it seems I am first 😂

[@MusangKing-b3o]

Kung Ming replied, "There are scholars and scholars. There is the noble scholar, loyal and patriotic, of perfect rectitude a hater of any crookedness. The concern of such a scholar is to act in full sympathy with his day and leave to future ages a fine reputation. There is the scholar of the mean type, a pedant and nothing more. He labours constantly with his pen, in his callow youth composing odes and in hoary age still striving to understand the classical books completely. Thousands of words flow from his pen but there is not a solid idea in his breast (📃Western academics and scholars with "Publish or Perish" mentality📝✒). He may, as did Yang Hsiung, glorify the age with his writings and yet stoop to serve a tyrant as Mang. No wonder Yang threw himself out of a window; he had to. That is the way of the scholar of mean type. Though he composes odes by the hundred (publish papers!!📝), what is the use of him?".