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by meowface 1864 days ago
(Easy/cliched joke, but)

>If I can't figure out what a paper is supposed to be talking about, it's fake.

Depends on the field...

1 comments

The engineering/materials science/physics ones were fairly easy to identify for me. Usually it would be one or two sentences that were grammatically cohesive but would make a statement that didn't make any sense if you had even a basic understanding of the topic. One that stood out to me was an astrophysics paper that said a planet was orbiting solar wind. I don't have to be a PhD to know that's BS.

The medical and biotech ones are much harder.

Yes, this mirrors my experience. Fields that have my interest are pretty easy in isolation (just looking at one subject), but fields that are remote can be a challenge.
In this instance, the medical and biotech generated stuff are much harder to identify because the algorithm doesn't need to introduce grammar issues. For instance, here is a random paper abstract that I changed, can you spot the change? Hint, it is one of the Greek symbols or a number.

Three highly pathogenic β-coronaviruses have crossed the animal-to-human species barrier in the past two decades: SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. To evaluate the possibility of identifying antibodies with broad neutralizing activity, we isolated a monoclonal antibody, termed B4, that cross-reacts with eight β-coronavirus spike glycoproteins, including all five human-infecting β-coronaviruses.