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Wiley shuts down 19 science journals and retracts 11,000 gobbledygook papers
By Jo Nova Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry.
The most shocking thing is that no human brain even ran a late-night Friday-eye over the words before they passed the hallowed peer review and entered the sacred halls of scientific literature. Multiple papers included technical-sounding passages inserted midway through, what Bishop called an “ AI gobbledygook sandwich.” Nearly identical contact emails in one cluster of studies were all registered to a university in China where few if any of the authors were based. Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases.
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