BJKS Podcast
A podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related. Long-form interviews with people whose work I find interesting.
BJKS Podcast
107. Nick Wise: Publication fraud, buying authorships, and tortured phrases
Nick Wise is a postdoc in fluid dynamics at Cambridge University. We talk about his 'detective work' on publication fraud which has gotten more than 800 papers retracted to date, including tortured phrases, discovering Facebook groups and Telegram channels in which people sell authorships on papers, how 'Special' issues can be exploited, and what we can do about this.
BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.
Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon
Timestamps
0:00:00: How Nick got involved with publication fraud: tortured phrases
0:18:26: Why do people try to publish nonsense papers?
0:24:27: The ecosystem of fraudulent publishing
0:30:22: 'Special' issues
0:49:02: How does Nick do this detective work?
1:00:37: What can we do about publication fraud?
1:38:52: There are practically no jobs to work full-time on fraud detection
1:49:37: A book or paper more people should read
1:55:13: Something Nick wishes he'd learnt sooner
1:57:21: Advice for PhD students/postdocs
Podcast links
- Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
- Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twt
Nick's links
- Website: https://geni.us/n-wise-web
- Google Scholar: https://geni.us/n-wise-scholar
- Twitter: https://geni.us/n-wise-twt
Ben's links
- Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
- Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
- Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twt
References & links
Episodes with Eugenie Reich: https://geni.us/bjks-reich
Episode with Elisabeth Bik: https://geni.us/bjks-bik
Episode with Adam Mastroianni: https://geni.us/bjks-mastroianni_2
Dorothy Bishop awards 2024: https://www.ukrn.org/2024/03/28/winners-of-the-2024-dorothy-bishop-prize/
Nick's guest blog post on Dorothy Bishop's blog: http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2022/10/what-is-going-on-in-hindawi-special.html
Nick's talk at Cambridge: https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/4117618
Everything Hertz podcast: https://everythinghertz.com/
James Heathers's series of posts on Hindawi: https://jamesclaims.substack.com/p/the-hindawi-files-part-1-the-timeline
Coffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/@Coffeezilla
Barnaby Jack's talk at DefCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkteGFfvwJ0
Cabanac, Labbé & Magazinov (2021). Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals. arXiv.
Mastroianni & Ludwin-Peery (2022). Things could be better. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2uxwk
Reich (2009). Plastic fantastic: How the biggest fraud in physics shook the scientific world.
[This is an automated transcript that contains many errors]
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:00:00] See, I mean, as I said before we started recording, the reason I'm kind of quite you know, why I'm really looking forward to talking to you today about your stuff is because I've talked about fraud and misconduct and those kind of things a few times now on the podcast. And actually by pure chance, your episode will be coming out just after a double episode with Eugenie Reich, who
Nick Wise: Oh yeah,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: book Plastic Matastic about.
Jan Henrik Schroon the fraud in physics and who now works as a lawyer in kind of whistleblowing contexts. So by pure coincidence your episode is coming out directly after that one. So we'll have like, three episodes in a row on this topic. So I've done a few of those episodes, but what's really cool about your stuff is that it's a completely different kind of misconduct.
So most of the stuff I've done so far has focused on Manipulating data , making updates uh, duplicating figures and that kind of stuff. This is, you know, it's a nice thing about fraud. There's always more, there's always a [00:01:00] new kind of fraud on the horizon. So yeah, really look forward to talking about that.
And, I mean, shall we just maybe start by Yeah, classically kind of how you got into this. I mean, so you were doing a PhD, I believe, in Cambridge in some sort of fluid mechanic engineering
Nick Wise: yes. So by background, I'm a PhD in fluid dynamics and sort of applied maths in an engineering department or the engineering department in Cambridge. And about three years ago, just over three years ago now I was trying to write my thesis and was therefore on Twitter. And saw a tweet by Elizabeth Bitt who I'd followed for some time on Twitter.
So I've been interested in yes, not only not actively, but been aware of and interested in scientific fraud for a while. This is something that's interesting. And I find, I guess, crime or financial manipulation, all these sorts of things, you know, whether it's reading, you know, asking about [00:02:00] Enron or, you know, just some sort of like someone trying to get away with something and some scheme and something and then how it all unravels, right, is interesting.
Um,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: very fascinating.
Nick Wise: right, everyone, you know, true crime podcasts and all these things are very popular. So And so I saw, you know, Elizabeth tweeting out these various, you know, spot the duplications, spot which images flip, right, and I'm awful, but I never, could never do it unless it was like a potato print, right, like that someone had used to, you know, or an exact duplicate.
And even then, if it was in a grid of images, I'd still take forever. So I was aware of it. I thought what she did was really interesting, important, but could not partake in any way myself. I never saw that being most of them yet. biomedical sciences normally were the things she was looking at, and again, I have no awareness of that, or, you know, that's not my field at all,
so I didn't
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: to me that the kind of image manipulation she does is also fairly I don't know if it's too biology, it feels to me at least, or at least the kind of stuff I do, I never [00:03:00] see images where you could duplicate something. It's always some sort of summary statistic or something like that.
Nick Wise: You need to have a field with a lot of images, right, you know, and there are lots of things I've oh yes, you do your western blot as proof that a thing has worked, you have your histology slides or your images of cells or something to prove that you did grow these things, or Again, I'm already running out of words.
I don't know biomedical stuff. So yeah, she was doing that and I thought it was really cool, but couldn't partake. I just watched her do it. And then, yeah, I think June three years ago, June 21 she shared the preprint. by Guillaume Cabanac, Alexander Makhazinov and Cyril Labbé about tortured phrases. So, I don't know if this has already come up on this podcast at all
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: No, not at all. I've not talked about this kind of stuff at all. We've only had the other side of France, yeah.
Nick Wise: Okay, so yeah, for the uninitiated, so they were, all three of them were computer scientists, and [00:04:00] they, while reading computer science papers, had noticed repeated appearance of some unusual language in the papers. So in, you know, in English or any language, but in English, there are multiple legitimate ways to say the same sort of thing and you don't want to repeat yourself, you know, you change wordings, you know, but there are particularly in science or technical language, there are some technical phrases which sort of have to be like that, right?
So an example is artificial intelligence. The phrase is artificial intelligence. If you change it to man made intelligence or man made consciousness, although maybe, you know, on a thesaurus it says all those have a very similar meaning that's not the phrase, right? And so they were seeing text like that, right, where the text maybe made sense in English, But the sign, you know, the technical language was lost, right?
It was not using the correct technical terms. And what [00:05:00] they surmised was happening was that people were trying to hide the fact that they had plagiarised. So if they just grabbed, you know, copied a chunk of text from another source, and just copied it straight in, it Now with Turnitin and Authenticate and, you know, all publishers are using those sorts of things, it would just be immediately, flag up, you've plagiarised this chunk of text, it's over there, paper rejected.
So, to avoid that, they used these freely available bits of software which do paraphrasing. And, certainly in the early days of these bits of software, they were really crude. So, They would take the source text, and they could only recognise pretty much strings of individual words. They would go through word by word, and they would go to a thesaurus, look up that word, pick the first, synonym in the list, and replace it.
And they'd just go through word by word, through a paragraph of text like that. Now, [00:06:00]obviously, if you do that, you produce a text that makes no sense whatsoever, probably. Most likely it will make no sense. But! It will not trigger Authenticate or Turnitin or your plagiarism checking software at all. So, if a journal or conference, whoever, is relying on Turnitin or Authenticate so heavily that no one actually reads the text, right?
Because if you understand no English, it immediately makes no sense. But if you are only using Turnitin or plagiarism for plagiarism checking, then it just gets a big tick and your text gets through. And again, if your peer reviewers aren't paying attention, and this is assuming that everyone involved is well meaning, but you know, if your peer reviewers are real and trying to do an okay job, but they're just rushed and all that, you know, English isn't great, or whatever it is, you know, [00:07:00] then this stuff gets published.
And so they had found hundreds of these papers with phrases such as man made consciousness for artificial intelligence.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Heat transfer, I think, was another one
Nick Wise: That was me,
so, well, so, so they had found these phrases from computer science and they wrote this preprint and so I saw this and thought that was really interesting and cool and I also quite like wordplay and puzzles and things and so I wondered if the same sort of thing could be happening in my field of fluid dynamics so I picked a couple of technical phrases, that would only have one right way really of saying them, Plugged them into a little paraphrasing widget online and googled that phrase and up to pop hundreds of papers. So I think the first one I tried was, yeah, heat transfer, which is a, again, a concept for which that is the phrase. And the phrase that was spat out was warmth move, which doesn't make any sense. I mean, one of[00:08:00]
the classic, one of the classic things with the paraphrasing software is, you know, there are many words in English which can act as both like a noun or an adjective or a verb.
And it has no idea, like the software has no idea which meaning is, because it's not seeing it in context at all, it's just seeing this one off word. So if it picks just the wrong meaning, or it picks it as a verb instead of a noun or whatever, then you get something really nonsensical.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Both heat and transfer can be nouns and verbs, yeah.
Nick Wise: Exactly, right. So you get yeah,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I think English is a particularly interesting case. I think You know, I grew up mainly in Germany and I think in German this would work quite as well because there's just, I mean, I think, you know, in English there's so many, because it has all these different influences also there's so many synonyms for many words that actually often mean the same thing.
Just because you might have one from Latin, one from Germanic and that kind of stuff or Middle English or whatever. But
Nick Wise: And I guess the fact that there's also not really any Yeah, there's almost no verb endings, there's no adjective idle agreement, so sort [00:09:00] of everything is standalone. So yeah, and I guess if, after I typed in warmth move into Google, if nothing had come up then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
But instead there were several hundred papers that appeared and I tried a couple more and found and that, that's basically the beginning of my Journey in
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: The villain origin
Nick Wise: Yeah, that's my Villaneligian story, exactly. So, I think I even replied to Elizabeth on Twitter saying, I found some more, not really knowing it.
And she said, you know, put them on Pubpeer, a website I'd never heard of.
And so I started putting these things on Pubpeer yeah, papers with these, and particularly there's a real snowball effect with these social phrases. Again, if someone's taken a whole paragraph, there's probably not just one, and I'll paraphrase all of it.
You find that paper with, you know, the tortured phrase you already know, [00:10:00] but then in that paragraph you see other phrases, and now you've, again, you're like, if you can work out what that should be you've now got a second tortured phrase to add to your list of things.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So just briefly, in the beginning, so, uh, can we imagine it literally as you just going like, huh, what's the term, you know, I could think of, and then you just try out a few, Google it, and then basically one by one responding on PubPear, or
Nick Wise: yeah, yes,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: not to all of them, I don't know. That sounds maybe you did, I don't know.
Nick Wise: I mean, I think, to begin with, I just have, I can get quite obsessive about things, so I'd definitely be spending several hours of
an
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you were supposed to write your thesis.
Nick Wise: and instead of writing, exactly, and yeah, I had all the motivation in the world to do this, because then I didn't have to write my thesis.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Did you also check for I mean, it sounds like there, you know, there were hundreds of articles, but presumably you would also have to check that it was actually a tortured phrase and not just, I mean, I did a systematic search for something recently and, you know, again, two nouns and sometimes in the actual use they would be, you know, [00:11:00] one noun, comma and then another thing and it would be like a list of different things.
So there's many cases where the search engines just don't see punctuation and that kind of stuff.
Nick Wise: yes, and like, full stop, you know, the end of one sentence, the beginning of the next sentence, you know, that can happen. So yeah, always, it wasn't my only confirmation wasn't just Google says this contains this.
It was,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: really did put in a lot of,
Nick Wise: it was, yeah, going to the paper, going, and the real fun well, a fun challenge is find, trying to find the source text, right, so that's, that can be an exciting or interesting little puzzle,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I
Nick Wise: you've only got the tortured nonsense thing, and trying to work out what it's done to get the search term, search the right string into Google.
That's such that it throws up. And once you've got it, you know, you've got your Rosetta Stone sort of thing, that's a real way to find then a load more tortured phrases, because you can see what it's doing, you can cross reference.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I saw so there was the, I think this was [00:12:00] actually, I think this might actually be how I first heard about you, that you won the Dorothy Bishop Award uh, this year, and they said the, in the, you know, little reason for why you got it, or why you were one of three people to get it it said, overall, it's quite, it is frankly astounding how one early career researcher with no funding for this work has single handedly achieved the downfall of numerous paper mill users.
and owners by clever detective work on the internet. And I think that's already a good example of clever detective work on the internet. I mean that is, it's basically piecing together evidence and uh, uh, I can, yeah, I can, I mean, I've never done this and I, I should probably do this for my own stuff now.
You know, some of those tortured phrases but I can definitely see the appeal of this kind of, yeah, puzzling it. together and seeing um,
Nick Wise: one thing that's a, what's that, the era of tortured phrases is, or should be over, and it's massively declined. Because as I said, the software, when it began, [00:13:00] you know, text analysis and Understanding how sentences worked and not viewing just, you know, the text only as words, you know, separated by spaces.
Right, but seeing it all together. So, yeah, the first bits of paraphrasing software were word by word and the output was utter nonsense. And if any competent or semi competent reader of English read it, they would know it was junk. So you're relying on no one reading it or caring. But even then, so pre sort of generation of new text, right?
Pre AI, pre chat GPT, but still their new versions of paraphrasing software came out which could they could change the order of sentences. They could swap clauses within sentences. And so if you're trying, if your aim is to get below a certain percentage similarity on Turnitin, You need to do a lot less manipulation of individual words if [00:14:00] you're starting to swap around chunks of sentence and the order of sentences and things you only need to change many fewer words, and so the chance you get the tortured phrase is much less likely.
So that's one thing there even before, sort of, chat GPT sort of AI the text analysis and paraphrasing software had improved already So that you didn't need to change every single word. And that combined with the fact that So, once I got, let's jump back slightly, Once I got involved with these tortured phrases and posting them on PubPear, It wasn't too long before Guillaume Cabanac, one of the authors of the preprint, got in touch with me. And said, you know, I'm seeing what you're doing this. And I actually have this, here's this website I've built, Where we've created sort of a dictionary of fingerprints, as you call it, of tortured phrases, and, you know, every night we search new paper, search the literature, and anything that's flagged, we sort of, um, collate them, and with, you know, which journal is it, when was it [00:15:00] published which phrases appear, and allow you, you know, so that instead of having to go to Google every time, and we can work through the list, sort of try and get all of them, sort of thing, even though they were being published far faster than it was.
checking them, but still. So that's how I sort of got involved with that.
But of course also, publishers can use exactly the same list to screen incoming submissions before, you know, before they even bother sending them out to peer review. So there are publishers who use what DM created to screen their submissions. And I see no reason why every publisher shouldn't do that.
Um, And
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: a phrase we'll hear more than once today.
Nick Wise: Perhaps, yes. But if you know, that immediately gets, sort of, gets rid of the appearance of any of those tortured phrases in the literature. It's not to say that people, obviously, people are still trying to avoid plagiarism by getting round it rather than writing original texts themselves, but they've had to move on to more sophisticated [00:16:00] methods.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Fraudsters could do Similar things. Look at what phrases to avoid or something like that if they know about this,
Nick Wise: Yes, and one of the things, anything that's publicly available to help detect fraud is used to try and get away with fraud. So fraudsters will use Turnitin to check, they know that, you know, oh, there's more than 10%, 15 percent similarity that Turnitin returns. That's when the journal will say, you know, the similarities, they either disreject or come back and say, you need to edit some text or what have you done here?
So. before the submission, they will pass it through Turnitin themselves and, oh, it comes back as 9%. Great, we've done enough. We've done enough paraphrasing.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, and I guess this is also just from what I, from what, the way I understand it is this is just an inherent problem in any kind of crime detection in the sense that You know, even if you take something as obvious as what the police does and that kind of stuff They can't rely on stuff that they [00:17:00] can't reveal how they got the information kind of I'm presuming at least in most cases You know because you can't just go like well, he definitely did it can't tell you why and i'm presuming, you know And i'm assuming in front of a court that's not going to hold you have to say how and why you measured it and why It's a good method and has to be approved and whatever something like that and presumably here's the same thing if you want to have a some sort of democratic You system, then you have to share how you say, like, how you found out that someone committed some sort of fraud.
And then it has to be open so then people can use it to
Nick Wise: Yes,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: around it,
Nick Wise: is this arms race, exactly. So,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And this was also something, you know, I mean, it's not like I had a brilliant insight here, but it seemed to me that that kind of type of fraud detection. There was a very short period of time when this was really applicable and now there are infinitely better ways to make up stuff without actually doing anything.
Nick Wise: Yes, again, it's sort of surprising that [00:18:00] people still bother, basically. And yet, there are still new papers full of tortured phrases being added to Guillaume's problematic paper screener
every
day.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, Chattopadhyay is free. You can use the free version. You don't have to pay. Yeah. Anyway, the, um Yeah, luckily as, you know, there's all sorts of other stuff you did. So also it's not like this is the end of your story. But I thought we have to maybe take a slight step back. Because I think a fairly obvious question here is, Why do people bother with this?
Because, you know, you mentioned as soon as anyone actually reads this it's clear that it's nonsense. There's what's the incentive here? You know as I said, I talked to Eugenie Reich and in her you know, we talked about Jan Hendrik Schoen and in his case it was obvious what the incentive was.
He was at Bell Labs, he was producing You know, people thought he might win the Nobel Prize, right? It was very there were lots and lots of very obvious incentives for why people, or why [00:19:00] he would commit this kind of fraud. But like, what's the point in So presumably the journals that do this are not the top journals, or even the decent journals, I would assume, most of the time.
So what's Why? Like, why publish complete gibberish? What's the point
Nick Wise: So, I mean, so people really like to assume that, it'd be nice and comforting to be like, oh these are, there's the nice journals which I read and publish in, and then there's these other bad, okay, I know there's some bad journals, and of course anyone can set, I can set up a journal tomorrow, right, I need a website, That's it, right?
That's all it can be like. It's, this is now the international journal of ABCD and pay me 100 and I'll host your PDF on my website,
right? I can, you know, that, so, and of course you can't stop, of course someone can do that, you can't ban that happening, right? So there's always this scale of journals. But yeah, it's not just some journal you've never heard of or some publisher you've never heard of.
These things with tortured phrases got [00:20:00] published in Basically every journal you'd care to name, and certainly all, you know, your Elsevier, Springer, Natures, Wiley, Tenerife, right, all the big publishers, Q1, high impact factor journals. And again, it's not just that, very rarely was someone stealing an entire paper.
They weren't taking the entire paper, paraphrasing the entire paper, and sending that in. That was unusual. What was far more common is they were Copying a bit of text, which they couldn't be bothered to write, right? So like the literature review, so there's a load of literature reviews, which are, which consist of the abstracts of half a dozen pa like relevant papers.
And they have paraphrased, the abstracts have sort of gone, you know, Smith 2010 did, and then it's sort of the abstract paraphrased. And that, you know, that's their literature view, [00:21:00] right? You mean, 'cause. That's boring to write, or they thought it was, they're like, you know, or, for example, methodology, you know, there's some technique where they can't be bothered to introduce this technique, or even just so, you know, if you want to hear, here's a recent review on this technique, go and read it, instead they, you know, they feel they have to have some text saying this text how this method works, whatever they've done and there's only so many ways of saying it, but what they've done is taken someone else's explanation of how it works, And then paraphrased it, again, to avoid being accused of plagiarism.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Right, okay, so we're not actually talking necessarily about completely made up stuff. Even, it could
Nick Wise: No, there's lots
of, yeah, it's people, stuff they did. But
my paper needs a literature review, it has to have one, I don't want to write that. And then, yeah, followed by some potentially real, potentially really good, you know, there's no, it doesn't have to be one or the other, um, you know, [00:22:00] results, discussion, sort of things.
But again, if you're prepared to do this, you may well be prepared to cut other corners as well. So you. your research probably isn't amazing.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, that's probably, it seems to me that is probably what most people are going to do these days with LLMs, right?
Nick Wise: Yeah, and I think now that's what people are using ChatGCP
for
exactly.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, I don't think, I don't think I would ever do it just because I, the writing for me is the best part. Even if it can be really frustrating at times.
So I think this is by chance, something I'm not inclined to do, but I could totally see that. That's what
Nick Wise: Yeah, just, and obviously there are lots of people who are motivated for different reasons, sort of, or to use some, you know, to speed up their writing process, or it could be they found it really difficult it could be, yeah, they're pushed for time, and that could be a PhD student trying to get a conference abstract out
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Well, sometimes the reviewer wants you to cover this topic that you don't think is relevant. So you're like, ah, whatever.
Nick Wise: Yeah, Yeah, exactly. There's all sorts of, you know, or [00:23:00] it could be a paper mill who are just trying to produce as many papers per day because that's how they make more money, right? So there's lots of different,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: the whole spectrum.
Nick Wise: yeah, of reasons why someone might want to use this sort of tool. And then, so but still, what's the, you've produced a paper which has clear junk and nonsense in it. So, yeah, there are some which, you know, either the peer reviewers don't notice, don't care, editor doesn't notice, doesn't care, because the rest of the work is okay. But there are even ones where it is full on junk. Again, you've got to get it through the journal, but obviously for the author, it's, I have a publication, right?
Tick number goes up. So you have a publication and then all of this was sort of getting towards now as a publication manipulation of why do people want more publications? Well, you know, for career, for promotion, for all these things. So. Every publication has a references section, you can then give citations to your friends, or to other [00:24:00] people at your institution, or to people who've paid, or to yourself.
Though that,
again, That's
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: one.
Nick Wise: that's something that is flagged up and fairly obvious so that, again, people tend not to do because it's so obvious. But. even just with, you know, two or three people you can just cite each other in a little triangle and it's much less obvious what's happening. Or you can cite people who you've been paid to cite.
And we're getting down to this ecosystem. So yeah, let's say you've produced some junk paper, right? Whether it's chat GPT you want it to be pub or, I think really the deciding point is you want a publication, right? You need a publication. You do not have either the time, the money, the effort.
whatever, to actually produce a good bit of science and write a paper , but you want your name on the paper. So there's several different ways you can go about this. You can go to a paper mill and sort of pay [00:25:00] to pretty much have a paper produced and then a paper mill needs that paper to be published.
Lots of them say you only pay on publication, you know, no money up front. Some of them might be 50, 50. But plenty of them say payment only after publication. And so they want that paper to be published. So, okay, we've got to get it through peer review, we've got to get it past an editor. So some of them play the numbers game. You submit the same paper to a dozen journals. It doesn't flag any plagiarism things because it hasn't entered the system for any of them. You know, it hasn't turned it in, it isn't going to flag that you've submitted it to 12 journals. And then you see which journal is, you know, editor isn't paying attention, You see which peer reviewers give you the easiest ride, and which whoever said, you know, if anyone says accept, you withdraw your submission from all of the other journals, and now you have your paper published. You know, in doing so, you have massively wasted everyone's time. You know, loads of peer reviews have had to be done multiple times for the same paper, [00:26:00] when only one set needed to be done. That still, there's a risk that your paper's just too bad for anyone to publish it. I mean, again, you can always move down the journal list, and there will always be a journal that will publish your paper at some point.
It's just how far down this list you have to go. Another way to make sure the peer reviews are good is to organize that you know who the peer reviewers are. So there are still journals which ask authors for suggestions for peer reviewers.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I think all of them actually do, right?
Nick Wise: I, some people have stopped it because it's so open to manipulation,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I think all the ones I've submitted to have
Nick Wise: okay, right, well, so you, again, if you
put someone
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: mean, they'll act on it,
Nick Wise: it doesn't, but finding peer reviewers is hard, and again, if you submit it to some journals and one of them acts on it, well now you can just have the peer review say whatever you want.
So that could be, again, that could be your friends, that people might notice if it's at your institution, but if you're [00:27:00] working through a paper mill you can have a network of people so you ensure that they're not known to the author, they're not a previous collaborator with the author and they could be, again, they could be real people, or then they could be the named person is the person who does this peer review, and they're just being essentially bribed by the paper mill.
Or the paper mill could give the details, or sort of the name of a real person with an academic profile, but a fake email address for that person, and then again, now someone who's just employed by the paper mill can pretend to be academic however, and give a very positive peer review. And in all of that you're still trying to dupe the editor, but the sort of, the most certain way to get your paper published is to simply bribe the editor. Then. You don't even have to really, I mean, the editor can just be like, yeah, peer review happened. Or they can accept anything, right, if the editor's on your team, then you can publish anything. [00:28:00] So,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, maybe too. If I, yeah, I mean, so I think yeah, it's kind of wild, like how much of a, how much of a scope this industry has of, Just getting nonsense or made up stuff published. And I mean, I think we'll probably try and go into lots of the individual points you made. Just had two brief comments.
One is that yeah, actually about the journals. I had a friend who worked at scientific reports and as like a, Senior editor or whatever, I don't know exactly what the title was, but apparently, yeah, they regularly had meetings about like how to stop paper mills because it's just, I think Cider Reports is like the right sweet spot where it's a good journal, but it's not that great.
So like they get like lots of submissions of, yeah, just made up stuff and I don't actually know how they ended up dealing with it, but just wants to add that that it's definitely a big problem at major journals. As we all read articles from.
Nick Wise: Yes. Yeah. And I say, [00:29:00] in the case of scientific reports, perhaps they haven't fully dealt with it yet. Diplomatically say that. But they are by no means the
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, Yeah, and I mean, from what I understand, it really is just a matter of, yeah, I didn't have I've published there and I didn't have a great experience with standard reports, and I probably won't publish there again. Even though it got published, but I do understand just the scale of the problem they have is enormous, and I don't envy them for it.
So I understand why, yeah, it's difficult. The other funny thing I just realized is that I just remembered that you know, talking about tortured phrases, I realized actually Google gave me a tortured translation phrase of one of your tweets. So I, you know, looked at your name just to find your website or, you know, whatever.
And it translated one of your tweets about paper mills literally into German as basically paper. So the word paper, you know, Has two meanings in English, right? As like a publication and as the literal material. So in German, it doesn't have that. It's just the [00:30:00] material. So it literally translates its paper mill into like paper and then factory.
Nick Wise: Nice. Thanks.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So I guess actually that's quite common with translations, I guess, to get these kinds
Nick Wise: Absolutely, finding the context
is tricky.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Because at first I was like, what is he talking about? Why is he talking about you know, people who produce paper? But then it quickly became obvious that, yeah, it was about an actual paper mill.
Yeah. So, I mean, as I said, like there's a bunch of other stuff you've done. Maybe do you want to, should we maybe talk about, um, I mean, this is not unique to Hindawi, but something they like to do with their special issues.
Nick Wise: I think of sort of different way even within that couple ways of working or, so, in, is it 2022 or something again lots of people, if you get, if you're willing to commit one kind of academic fraud you often come out willing to commit another kind of academic fraud.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Whilst you're at it,
Nick Wise: Exactly, or just, you know, they're all convenient to helping you what, [00:31:00] do what you're trying to do, sort of thing. Why restrict yourself to one? So I noticed that, you know, lots of these papers, the tortured phrases, were showing up in random Hindawi journals. I mean, you know, and also all the other publishers, but plenty of them were showing up in these Hindawi journals.
And some of them had really weird titles, or were very bizarre topics, which didn't seem to match the journal they were in even slightly. Or they had one sort of little keyword, almost tagged, looked like tagged onto the end of the title. So if you could write a paper on anything and then say, using big data of the end of your title basically, and that would mean it could fit in a computing some, you know, some computer journal, even if what you're actually talking about was like English teaching or playing basketball or something like [00:32:00] this.
And loads of these papers were won in special issues, and particularly most of these ones were from China, this particular set of way of doing things. I'm slowly realizing that there's just these thousands and thousands of these papers all often looking a certain way, all in these special issues.
And there was one in particular that I looked at and wrote about on Dorothy Bishop's blog, if you're aware of that. And There's this yeah, special issue in the Hindawi Journal, and it had 60 odd papers in it, and 50 odd of them all had the corresponding email address from the same tiny or regional Chinese university, but none of the authors went to that university, and all of those email [00:33:00] addresses were of the form, I think it was not, 1980 and then four more random digits, or four digits afterwards, but they weren't actually random because they were, some of them were nearly consecutive, it was like consecutive, nearly consecutive eight digit numbers, 55 email addresses, all of this at a small Chinese regional university when none of the authors are from that university.
And instead of searching that email address, I found out that you could just buy the email addresses online. You can buy academic email addresses online, because again, you just need one corrupt IT person. Someone with the ability, and again, there's lots of, there's going to be lots of people who want, you know, paper mills.
But other people, you know, but there's a demand for ac to have academic email addresses, so therefore someone will be willing for the right price to provide you with all those academic email addresses. So you could just, B, someone clearly bought bulk, bought a block of these email addresses and when was using [00:34:00] them for their paper mills, papers to all these Chinese authors. And none of the papers made any sense. And that was just this one sort of, it was so, so obvious sort of thing. And Hindawi have been paid 2, 000 or 1, 500 for each one of those papers and there were, in particular, the email addresses thing was really not quite there were these email addresses also appearing in a few other special issues but that clearly was a fairly one off thing and most people weren't quite that stupid but there were, you know, there were special issues, again, full of the same kind of nonsense, you know, and the special issue was, you know, Had 300 papers in it, you know, it doesn't feel very special.
That feels like a drip tray, right. And this is a collecting NF, you know, just push more things into it. And I think the problem is, yeah, the [00:35:00] Hindawi guest editor sort of system as they really wanted to expand. And one way to do that is just to get more editors involved is to say, well, do you want to run a special issue, suggest it to us.
And in theory, you know, we might say yes, we might say no, it looks like they always said yes. And you run the show, you're in charge of sorting out the peer review, you're in charge of accepting or rejecting papers and of course the money rolls in, the money rolls over to, rolls off to Hindawi, and clearly for about two years, everyone just looked at the balance sheet going up and rubbed their hands, and no one wanted, no one looked behind the door.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, just to put it in perspective, I think I think I saw you talk, you gave I think in your department at Cambridge. I think it's online and I think you said something like, you know, this is one. journal at Hindavi that has, you know, this many papers at 2, 000 each and there's, you know, dozens of journals or whatever in the [00:36:00] publisher.
So they're making basically millions per year off of stuff that's just made up and clearly, like obviously
Nick Wise: Yeah, just completely obviously nonsense, but the authors, particularly in China there are many universities where you need a published paper in order to graduate even with a master's and
you might need, you know, one, two, three papers to publish to get your PhD.
And so that drives an enormous, you know, that's most people's master's projects or whatever aren't, you know, they're not great or they're not amazing, you know, most or plenty of them aren't suitable for publication and you don't need, you know, so faced
with
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: point of a master's thesis. I
Nick Wise: exactly, you know, but faith,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: learn stuff and be exposed to stuff. Yeah.
Nick Wise: yeah, so you're still training, you're still so, and that's, yeah, that's even if you're doing something which sort of is research, but there were plenty of things that it's clear from the titles, you know, Because again, the title had to be relevant enough that I guess some, the [00:37:00] person could show it to a committee, right?
Someone could read the title and just, you know, title, name of the person. Ah, yes, you have your paper. And so that's why there were so many on teaching English as a foreign language or different teaching concepts. Because to be a, to qualify as a teacher, you need, you know, from your university, you needed your paper.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah.
Nick Wise: so. And also, I think, lots of policemen as well, like police officers, again, to graduate from police college. And this is often these regional colleges, which are, you know, training teachers, policemen, these sorts of things
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So just one question I have that's a general question that maybe is interesting in this context. who's paying for this stuff? Because like you have so many costs, right? You had I mean, depends, you know, obviously not everyone uses all of this, but for some of this, you know, they pay for special services for some of them.
It's. It's, as we'll probably get into later, when people buy authorships on [00:38:00] papers you have the publication costs. I mean, I guess some of them pay for some of the others, but especially because you mentioned, I think some of the Hindawi open access or processing costs were like, as I said, like a thousand, 2, 000 or something like that per article.
It's like, where does that money come from? Is it just in this case, for example, maybe the students themselves
Nick Wise: I would think so.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: part of their education costs, basically.
Nick Wise: think so, absolutely. They've been given, certainly, yeah, they've been given an unreasonable demand, and, you know, they need to graduate by this date in order to go and start job X or to move on to their next thing,
and
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: tuition fee, basically.
Nick Wise: Yeah, it's just, yeah, they've already paid for tuition or that thing and, you know, them or their family will pay to make this happen so they can graduate and move on with their lives.
And that's, I think, part of the thing as well. The paper doesn't need to be any good at all because the, it's only worth, it's only use is as a line on someone's CV or even basically for their graduation committee. Or, you know, once they've graduated, it doesn't even matter to them if it gets retracted. [00:39:00] So no one's.
They've graduated as a teacher now, they're working as a teacher, it's done its use, right? It can be of one
use
only.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: their degree retracted if the publication gets, yeah.
Nick Wise: and, unless it's like obviously fraud, then maybe it's a slightly different thing, but
yeah.
perhaps. So I think a real, so one of the real insights into how these things work, was, again, I spend a lot of time digging around on the internet, digging around on social media. So there are. So yeah, there are Facebook groups dedicated to the buying and selling of scientific papers and of authorships, and of all different bits of corruption and some of them are sort of fairly geographically focused, and some of them sort of are anywhere in the world and you have people who work at paper mills hosting.
And sometimes doing it under their own names, or certainly at least under sort of fairly identifiable profiles. And so you can go to, [00:40:00] and lots of them, again this is where I'm sort of nervous about giving away too many details, but, you know, lots of them haven't bothered to, haven't locked their profiles.
So it's just public, right? So you can just go, you can just go and look at their Facebook profile, right? And so often you just see a picture, you know, even if it is a real picture and a picture of them, well, you're some guy in Pakistan or you're some guy in China, they can't do anything with that. But some of them have very interesting posts.
And again, if it's unlocked, you can just scroll back through for as long as you want. And so one of these people who is a what said they were Chinese. So I've had a fake English name or I'm. They're called Jack Ben, which doesn't sound like that's two first names, you never really have that as a surname.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Also, as I've been told, Ben means stupid in Chinese.
Nick Wise: oh really?
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I have been informed that by Chinese people, yes.
Nick Wise: Ah, very nice.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So I mean, it's kind of [00:41:00] ironic name. I don't know whether that's intentional, but
Nick Wise: I didn't, yeah.
um, nice. And so they had lots of posts saying, you know, I am a Chinese publishing agent and I need help from, you know, I'm looking for editors who will work with us. You know, we can help each other. And they would also have posts saying, you know, looking for peer reviewers , we will pay 10 per peer review.
Again, you know, it's clear, you know, we're going to suggest you, you're going to write a favourable peer review, we pay you 10, the paper gets published. Pretty easy. And right at one of their earliest Facebook posts, they shared a link to a PDF on an online repository, which contained the proof of, for any editors or people considering helping them, so you don't want to get scammed, and if you're going to do, if you want to compromise your morals or commit misconduct, you do want to get paid for it.
It'd be a real [00:42:00] mug if you did all that and then, having done it, they didn't pay you.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, it's also not the thing you can go to the police to.
Nick Wise: Yeah, exactly, right? Who are you going to complain to? Complain to your boss? Complain to the police? Yeah. And so they had the evidence to try and convince someone that they would really do this. And so what they had was images of lots of papers that they had successfully published, and best of all, they had screenshots of bank transfers of them paying someone around a thousand dollars per paper for getting the paper published.
And they had attempted to redact bits, probably with a mouse or something, which is quite hard, and so they had often completely failed to redact the information. And again, particularly helpful, they had [00:43:00] often, in some cases, they had used the reference number for the paper as the reference for the bank transaction.
So, I could just type in the reference number from the bank transaction and up popped this paper in the Hindawi special issue And the name of the person on the bank transfer was the guest editor of the Hindawi special issue Couldn't really be more complete
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, it's
Nick Wise: than that And this person was being, clearly being paid about 1000 per paper The special issue had, well some of these persons special issues had over 100 And they deserve more than one special issue, they deserve several. I'd say they easily had a few hundred thousand dollars. If we assume that they were indeed paid about a thousand dollars for every paper there, then that's several hundred thousand dollars they were paid [00:44:00] for essentially no work at all in one year.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Good salary.
Nick Wise: Not too shabby.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So I just want to say this just for people considering doing this. Just be aware that you can, in principle, fake a bank transfer. You could just make that up also. So it could still be a scam. I just love how like, this is dumb on so many levels.
Nick Wise: Yeah, of course they could, you know, you could indeed,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: a bank transfer. It has to, it can't be a scam now.
There's a picture that looks like a bank transfer.
Nick Wise: indeed. And this. This editor, or this academic, who wasn't even an academic, you know, they're an academic at a Middle Eastern university. And, I suppose I should say that this is a story that made it to, I think, science, and the guy's name is out in print, so I suppose I shouldn't be so coy about it or so this is already public.
But anyway, yeah, Jordanian academic who had a little website for his business doing publishing services The office is [00:45:00] on Google Maps, you can just, you can find the address it's got the phone number, you know, I didn't, I leave that to journalists, I do not ring up these people yeah, I have not got to the stage of having a burner phone for this sort of, you know, I leave that for journalists.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: You don't actually interact with the people. You just read and post on Puppet.
Nick Wise: I try and avoid interacting, yes,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, is that actually why is that? Is that just because that's like a different kind of thing? I mean, in a way it would be fun to just call them and see what the process is like.
Nick Wise: Yes, I suppose I'm trying to avoid confrontation, generally, and, yeah, I sort of, although, I mean, I do all this in my own name, which various people have said is really stupid but I do it in my own name and you can just see it and you can, I have Twitter and you can DM me on Twitter, people do.
You can send me an email, you know, my email address as an academic is very easy to find, you can find my academic email address and send me an email. So in that sense, it's sort of, [00:46:00] oh, what's it worth if someone also has my phone number? But for that, I know that I have sort of, that's a step I haven't gone to.
But yeah this Jordanian academic, you know, so he's a guest editor of multiple special issues, collectively hundreds of papers in them, he appears to be paying a thousand dollars. And he's also, because he was Also a clarivate highly cited researcher um, or top, I said that I think, and the top, you know, top 2 percent scientists and this sort of thing.
Because again, when you are the guest editor, one, you can put a, you know, it's allowed to put a few of your own publications in there. You know, there's guidance and things, but it's, I think even
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, there's a reason why you're the guest editor in principle, right? Because you do
Nick Wise: you're the expert on this, right? So you could include a few things. Yeah. So he can, one, he can put out some papers of his own and also he can make it a condition that, you know, Oh, you have to cite me a few times. And again, if you've got a hundred papers and they each cite you three times, [00:47:00] you know, it's not even excessive, sort of on any one individual paper case.
That's still, you know, each special issue, you're gaining hundreds of citations. Yeah, so it was in his national, you know, the national news for being one of Jordan's high cited researchers, top scientist, the things until a couple of years ago when, you know,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Probably still is a highly cited
Nick Wise: Well, he would, yes, he's in there, but when science started putting some, you know, bleach in the water sort of thing and removing the people who were clearly gaming the system, or some of them, and yeah, they removed him. And so, I think that, yeah, that sort of led to, or was definitely, I think, I was one of the people trying to, of many people trying to shout about Hindawi's problems, all these special issues, and you know, we're up to 11, attractions now after the special issue program.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so you're running a question. Hindawi was bought by Wiley or something like that, right? they? Yeah, just
Nick Wise: Yeah. So, the, there's a
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: like this year or something like that, right? It's all
Nick Wise: no, so no, they [00:48:00] bought it before, I think in 2021,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay.
Nick Wise: they, or 2022, they bought it basically as this was all really kicking off. And I imagine couldn't believe how much money they were raking in, what an excellent purchase this was. But yeah,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I see. So they probably saw just the results and thought Oh, this is a very profitable business.
Nick Wise: saw that publication numbers were going up
by
30%, 50 percent a year. Yeah, and they, so there's a guy called James Heathers, who's
a, he's doing a, sort of a series on Hindawi and its acquisition process, and due diligence, or lack of, and all these things. Sort of right now, I think there's been a couple of blog posts out, and there's more to come.
And if someone wants to find out more about,
um,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: of other stuff we talked about
Nick Wise: what's going on there.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: guess also just for context, he'll probably also talk about at some point then on the podcast with Dan Quintana, the Everything Hurts. Would be surprised if they then also do an episode about [00:49:00] that.
Nick Wise: Yeah, probably one may already have done.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah.
Yeah, maybe again, because I'm, you know. It's fun doing the detective work and it's fun hearing about detective work. So I'm just curious, like, how do you just like practically, how do you find out about these things? Because I mean, you have the Facebook groups, you have telegram channels or whatever it's called.
How do you even get to the point of knowing that? Took me step by step. Yeah. How'd you get to that point? Because this is all like, I'm not surprised these things exist, but like, how do you find them? Basically, how do you find evidence for them and that kind of stuff?
Nick Wise: I mean, if, so if anyone here just wants to go to Facebook and type in Co author or Scopus or something in Facebook search, they will find groups, public groups.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So it's that poorly hidden. I thought it was like you went down the rabbit hole and then found a link to a group and, you know.
Nick Wise: no, it's all, and most of them aren't private because they're people who want to sell things, right? If you don't want to hide from your customers. [00:50:00] And also, I mean, and one thing to be clear is this isn't illegal, right? Nothing anyone doing here, almost certainly or in most cases, the majority of cases is not illegal.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Right.
Nick Wise: So there's no, you know. People have said, oh, Facebook should be taking this down sometimes, for example, or It's well, but, why? Or sort of, what would be the grounds for that, right?
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: You mean like it's basically just a journal has a publisher has a journal and there's an editor in that and. As an, you know, as a reviewer, you don't say that you're like when you do a review, you don't say that you didn't get paid for it, whatever, so it's just,
Nick Wise: So, yeah, so there's things which are, you know, we might be morally wrong, Or they're definitely just, they're against the terms of service of the publisher, You know, and they're grounds to discover, to then retract the paper, and things like this. But there's not, criminality doesn't feature anywhere in that.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: right, so hiding it, it doesn't help you [00:51:00] legally, it just Maybe prolongs how long it takes people to find out. But then again, there's so much of this, it might not even make that much of a difference for your career. You know, if you, as I said, like in many cases, this is for a one off publication you need or whatever, then.
Nick Wise: Well, and lots of them are, so there's things which are, they're just sort of signposts. You know, it's like a message board. It's find out, you know, we'll help you with your publication, right? Ambiguous. Everyone knows what it means, but we know we'll help you. We offer lots of them have a scale, you know, offer multiple services.
So some will offer translation services. See that's fine, right? You know, will it improve the English? Potentially. Okay. Okay.
Sort of
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that's very useful. Like I've read many papers that I, as a reviewer, where I thought like this would really profit from
Nick Wise: Right. The thing is sort of, you know, again
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: going over it. Yeah.
Nick Wise: yeah, so it's, but again, it's sort of, at what point does improving English become just re writing it
Right. There's this, it's a slight, you know, this spectrum of sort of Definitely Okay. Services to potentially Okay. Depending how much you're using it and how much
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah.
Nick Wise: what you've done.[00:52:00]
And then, you know, things, you know, we offer data analysis, we offer programming again, potentially fine. Potentially. Okay. But. Also in there, you know, it goes all the way to, you know, and will help you get your paper published. And again, people generally, Some people do need advice on what is a suitable journal for the thing and how the publishing system works and stuff.
So there's, again, potentially legitimate things that could be under that, but there's all, you know, it just goes through into
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah.
Nick Wise: and we bribe the editor or we get this thing published.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's also on the legitimate side, like I've definitely seen, you know, I mean, as part of my PhD, we had a a writing like little workshop, like academic writing kind of thing. And, you know, some people just do this on a one on one basis. I mean, this was like a group
Nick Wise: Hmm, of, course.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so there's also, yeah, as you said, like it's a bit of a sliding window from you help someone improve their sentences and you really work with them. And then they are a better writer afterwards and it helps everyone too. Yeah, they just write the article for [00:53:00] you.
Nick Wise: Yes, exactly. So yeah, there's signposts, you know, you know, this is our WhatsApp number, this is our website, things, and you to there used to be. Or it used to be more common for there to be adverts for authorship, which were hid no details. So we say co authors wanted, you know, here's the title of the paper.
We're going to aim for this journal, first authorship position, 1, 000, second 900, third author, corresponding a hundred dollars extra. Call this, you know, WhatsApp number. There are still loads of those adverts out on Facebook.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, sometimes you said, yeah, with the title and everything, right?
Nick Wise: Yeah, exactly. So, and I honestly can't remember what prompted me. I suspect it was someone, somewhere I saw someone found one, or they found an example of an advert and I decided to look myself. And then, in particular, there was one profile, again, I think one real person, one Tunisian guy who was just, [00:54:00] starting in about the end of 2020 and going over so by the time I started looking at this, which I think was about autumn 2022 he had loads of adverts out and also that's also more than enough time for papers to be published.
So I could just type the type, you know, copy the title into Google and find the paper immediately. And you would have some paper with 12 different authors, 12 authors from 12 different nations, frequently 12 different disciplines. Um,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I like the example you had of the econ department with a x ray
Nick Wise: right. And
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: and what was the other thing? Just like two completely different techniques that no econ department has ever owned.
Nick Wise: yes there's all the, so I think this starts to reveal or as an example of how much publishing is based on trust, how much the entire publishing system is based on trust. And the system, when someone realizes that if you just lie, there's nothing to check, [00:55:00] the whole thing starts to fall apart.
So it, how these people would work mostly is. they would, with a few authors on the paper, they would submit it to a journal, and then once it got accepted, you know, it went out for peer review, they got the revisions back, you know, accepted subject to revisions, and at that stage, they would then put out the advert, saying, we have these positions available.
They would sell them, and then at the, when they sent their revisions back, they would add a load of authors. And And say, you know, oh, well the, you know, in doing the revisions, these people help. You know, this person did this person,
whatever,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: can happen,
Nick Wise: which sort of can happen. But in fact, actually they don't think in the, again, in editorial systems can be that you can just add authors and if no one notices in, just it happens.
So lots of the traction for these things say, [00:56:00] you know, this paper was submitted with these five authors in the course of the revision stage. The four, the first four authors were including the corresponding author, were removed and replaced with these 10 authors. The the authors did not obtain permission from the editor like they're supposed to, you know, they did not ask for exceptional permission for this, and which we shows, you know, the system such as there is that if you want to do this, you're supposed to ask permission from the editor, but if you don't, you can just do it anyway. So there's this sort of, this trust system built in. But yeah,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I wonder, I'm trying to remember back to the, I mean, you know, I don't have that much experience with publishing stuff, but yeah, I guess you just get accepted and then you get passed on to the what's it called? The,
Nick Wise: editing or
the
typesetting team,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: different team. So I guess, I don't think anyone would notice.
Yeah, not sure.
Nick Wise: But [00:57:00] so yeah, back in the, you know, a few years ago, you know, 2021 2022, these adverts were coming out, this guy was posting all the adverts and he would have all the information. And then I started going through and finding all the adverts that matched the published papers and putting them on PubPear, tweeting about them.
They got a bit of traction. RetractionWatch rang him up. So, yeah. And said, are you doing this? And he said, oh no. And then he stopped posting for a few weeks, and then started again. But, now, the posts say, and he's still doing this every few days he's still going. Right, and he hasn't stopped in any way. Now it says, we have papers in cancer mechanical engineering, earth sciences. Here's my whatsapp, call me. And so, that's it. I think, again, this is a sort of the arms race, or the once you reveal you know how they're working sort of thing, they can make a simple change and I can't do anything. [00:58:00] And I'm sure this person is still successfully selling authorships to papers every week.
And there are lots and lots of people like him. And just once you realise someone was looking. Because to begin with, again, clearly so blasé, clearly no concern at all. Anyone who saw his post would care, right? The only people who'd be interested would be either people who wanted to buy the paper also, or people who didn't want to buy that paper, but they were still happy that, with the concept of authorship being sold.
But yeah, he's still publicly posting these things. It's just now, you just have to go to his WhatsApp.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Have you ever done that? Or are you just in the kind of public facing things?
Nick Wise: Only on pub, yeah. So I avoid, yeah, again, To join a WhatsApp group you have to reveal
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: right.
Nick Wise: least your number. I have a UK phone number, that's going to be fairly, I suspect, unusual in lots of these, [00:59:00] in these groups and I think might,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I don't know if it doesn't really make it. Yeah, I guess maybe, yeah.
Nick Wise: I think, you know, seeing the country code sort of thing stick out, or at least raise questions, whereas if you have one from, you know, the same country where the people will be, is being run
from.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: sure you can get that.
Nick Wise: Oh, of course, right. I can, it's definitely, it's a thing that can be spoofed or just you get a card with that. Of course it's possible. Yeah. Yeah. But I just haven't got to that
stage.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: task right now, without planning to, is just to try to get you into this. I don't know exactly why, but maybe it's just because I know it sounds a little bit interesting, but I'm not going to do it myself. I want someone else to do it.
Nick Wise: And the same with, and so that's where telegram, you can be, you know, you have to provide a phone number, but you don't have to share that phone number with anyone else. So again, then you can,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I see.
Nick Wise: so that's why I use telegram quite a bit. And it's also where, For example, different countries favor different media, different social media. [01:00:00] You know, some are banned, some social media, you know, so Facebook, I believe, is banned in Iran. Or certainly they don't, certainly it's not where this stuff happens. As far as I know where there are lots of Iranian telegram channels.
Um,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I saw something random recently, isn't it? I thought Google was banned in China, I don't know whether that's true. But I thought that was, or Gmail, is what I
Nick Wise: Oh, well, it's quite
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But I saw like an actual paper with a Chinese author whose corresponding email was a Gmail address. I was like, huh, okay, maybe it's, I'm not quite sure how that works, but
Nick Wise: think there's a thriving trade in VPNs
and
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: probably that.
But I thought it was interesting to put that on your published paper. Um, Yeah. We've now introduced a bunch of different types of propagation fraud that you've looked at and investigated. And the big question is what can we do about this? I mean, this is often as an, you know, I feel like there's a necessary distinction here between what can you do as an individual who, you know, isn't going to be majorly involved in this and just wants to like, [01:01:00] I guess.
pay attention to things and maybe notice things that they wouldn't have noticed otherwise. And then maybe also for people who maybe like you do this a bit more involved or like what journals should do differently or whatever. Yeah, I don't know. Do you want to just take it from whatever makes most sense now for you?
Nick Wise: Yeah, so I think the big challenge, almost all of this is driven by people wanting more papers and needing those papers to be cited more. And there's some different reasons why people want more papers, but you know, primarily it's because either explicitly or implicitly it's required of them. So whether you are the Chinese trainee teacher who needs their paper just to graduate and be a teacher you are the Chinese doctor who needs to publish how many papers a year just to get to be promoted to your next well whilst run it. Whilst being a doctor all the time, which obviously is so time consuming and full on.
Or you are a, you know, a PhD [01:02:00] student in some country who wants, to get a visa in, you know, to leave your country and go to you know, to get a postdoc in a better university in a, you know, say in a Western university, an American university or even within your own country. Say in India, there's a sort of a points based system for promotion.
And you know, you just, the more points you get, the more you will get promoted. So
there's a
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that's, I think, I don't know how explicit it is in other countries, but that seems, sounds very familiar here. I, I know like, I swear I did my PhD, I think if you wanted to do a cumulative thesis, there were, like, you know, points for different journals, probably based on impact factor or something like that, for the discipline, some slightly more nuanced, but, yeah, and if you needed a certain amount of points, and,
Nick Wise: right, exactly, you know, points make prizes and that's all of the incentives for all of this to happen. And so I think there's, [01:03:00] this is only going to stop when there's not that pressure.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Ah, so it won't.
Nick Wise: Right. I mean, to some extent, sort of, yes. Or, the metricification of, whether it, you know, h index, citation counts publication counts just focusing on essentially quantity of, certainly of publications is just drives this, and it doesn't drive good research and I'm not even sure it drives more research, it drives possibly the same amount of research cut into smaller pieces doesn't drive, I don't know, people taking a risk by trying something interesting that might not work, you know, you need, most postdocs, you know, if you didn't get a paper or several papers out of a postdoc position that would be seen as, you know, a failure or unsuccessful.
So you need a [01:04:00] project which you know will produce something.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, so you take like the the safe options,
Nick Wise: yeah, exactly, you take the safe options.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: of small safe options, basically. Which, I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's one way of doing science. But yeah, if everything is that, then.
Nick Wise: Yes, exactly. So yeah, not everyone should be taking massive risks, right? But there should be, you know, you want some people to be just trying things and seeing what happens. Even, you know, and then to fail as well but not for that, not to be the end of their career, right? Because someone else has just been doing little small steps, which they knew were going to work before they started and just keep ticking out the papers and then keeps citing their previous ones in those paper.
And it just all builds up and again, they're not doing anything necessarily wrong, but as you push it to the extreme, you know, that enables other people to sort of push it to its extremes.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I mean, yeah, as you said, like there's, I think most people would do some aspect of that [01:05:00] in their own work, but yeah, obviously I think it's like you can see how with those incentives people are pushed to do more and more extreme versions of that. I don't know. I mean, it seems to me now there's, I mean, it seems to me there is a bit of a counter movement now in the fields that I'm familiar with.
I mean, so economics seems to be a bit different anyway in terms of publications. They, I mean, I'm an outsider to this, but from what I can tell, they basically have like their five journals or four, something like that, that are just, that's all. Like you have those five journals and you publish in those, then you're good and everything else almost doesn't matter.
Okay. Might, Might not, this might be a bit of a caricature, but I think they have much more of a focus on like big papers that take years to produce. But it seems to me also that like in psychology neuroscience, there is more of a focus on. So, you know, one paper in Nature Neuroscience is worth a lot more than, you know, three or four papers in a much, much smaller journal.
Nick Wise: I think this really depends on, [01:06:00] yeah, field, but also, you know, nation, country, and how familiar people are. People have to know that journal is really good, and that's the one that matters, right? And if you're you know, a university or without a background in that you don't have some mentor, someone to tell you that oh this is the place, this is what you should be trying to do, this is what you should be trying to do.
I think one of the examples is in mathematics where generally it's sort of, there's a mathematics research which doesn't really have this problem, you know, for example, you know, in maths the author No one worries about who's first author, it's all, it's alphabetical, always. There's none of that hierarchy thing there.
And there are, you know, the top maths journals, the places you want to publish in. But there's also an MDPI journal called Mathematics, with a really high impact factor. And in fact it's higher than some of the major [01:07:00] maths journals. That churns out. so many papers that, I guess, some maths happens in them, and, but, you know, these papers are citing other maths, and it's able to rise up the rankings when you just judge them by impact factor of the maths journals, if you, again, if you just look at impact factor.
So if you're someone naïve. then you might choose to publish there because well this is the best journal and because someone assessing you might go oh you've published in this journal If you're being judged on publishing in the journal with the highest impact factor, you know, if that's the, that must be the best one, then it sort of, it becomes a self fulfilling thing of, you know, well now that's where some people are going.
And you have the people sort of in the know who get, who go, ignore that, the impact factor is meaningless. We just, we publish in these journals.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, definitely. And I mean, also just to clarify for what I said earlier with the counter example, it's [01:08:00] not as if that doesn't introduce its own set of problems associated with people just trying to do whatever they can to get into one of those journals. It's not as, it's better. But it did seem, it does just seem to me that at least in the fields that I'm familiar with there is a bit of, well I say there's a bit of a move away from more papers is better, but I mean at the end of the day more papers is still better.
Unless like I think some grant agencies say give us like five papers or something like,
Nick Wise: so I think that, that's one way you can, it's give us your three, five best papers
and
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you don't have that restriction then I mean it also makes sense, right? If you're trying to hire someone and one person has four papers and one person has eight and it seems like the, you know, they have good paper.
Yeah, sure. I'll give it to the person who does the same but more.
Nick Wise: Right, exactly.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah.
Nick Wise: it just does lead to, all of this horse trading and all this, you know, whether it's the person who, labs where everyone is, and the lab is on every paper,
for example, right? Yeah, you know, [01:09:00] no money changing hands or anything, you know, nothing as untoward as that, but just, you know, Everyone, or, you know, the head of the department, or the head of the lab is on everything, you know, and they've got 150 papers a year or something, or there are these people. Um, And again, no money exactly is changing hands, you know, it's just, it just says supervision, you know, is their role in the credit thing. So I think something that could be, in terms of what can we do about even trying to stop some of these, you know, Okay we can't stop with, no one's going to change the incentives, so we've just got to try and make it harder for the fraudsters.
I think it can be helpful to try and think like a hacker. Also, so lots of people, I mean, so when I first started investigating authorship for sale and, you know, finding these papers, which is very clear. Here's the advert, here's the title, here's the paper, six months later in your journal, emailing a different chief, you know.
They will often be. outraged, right? They'd be horrified and outraged that this could possibly, that this could happen, that anyone would do this, [01:10:00] that it would happen in their journal. How dare someone? Um,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Times this year. Yeah.
Nick Wise: you know, that's, you know, that's just not what you're supposed to do. So I think likewise, it shouldn't be so surprising that people would want to bribe editors, that people would try and organize peer reviews such that it is favorable. The publishing system is this big, complicated system, and people will try and exploit it at every single point. And I think thinking like a bad guy, sort of thinking of well, how would I, if I wanted to, if I was so minded, how could I try and subvert the system?
How could I break it? How could I get in and get something published when it shouldn't be? Because it's, yeah. And I think that sort of mindset can be helpful at least in trying to shut some of these loopholes and yeah, tackle some of these issues.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [01:11:00] It seems to me, and I don't know whether this is true at all, but like my intuition is that I mean, I guess this is probably generally the case with a lot of bureaucracies that you just make it so annoying to commit fraud that you might as well just do it properly. But by doing that, you also put lots of like hurdles for everyone in the way that just
Nick Wise: Absolutely. It's also annoying for everyone else, right? So, for example the credit authorship sort of attribution sort of thing,
Right. Which is, which, who did what, right? The little thing at the end which I think is, one, slightly helpful, even just to know, oh, this person did the experiments and this person did the analysis, sort of thing, that could be helpful for just assessing whether someone
is competent or whatever. But of course you can just lie, right, you can just, so, you know, I mean it was, you brought it up earlier, one of these papers where, you know, there were 12 different institutions Authorship sold papers. They'd filled in the credit thing, and [01:12:00] said this guy who was at an economics department in Tashkent, Uzbek University, I think, the economics department, had done x ray diffraction.
And it's
like,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: something else.
Nick Wise: yeah, maybe, I can't remember, yeah, probably, definitely, yeah, x ray diffraction. It's do
they have
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: here. And scanning electron microscopes.
Nick Wise: okay, no, right. It's Is that common in the economics department? I don't think so. There's like, why? So, I mean, sometimes it can give the game, again, if people are just so dumb, but they could easily have just said he did instead, you know, revision and editing, and then they wouldn't have had, you know, but but people can just lie.
And so I've, I think I mentioned this a while ago at some conference, and someone said, Oh, well, maybe rather than just this simple statement about, you know, this person did the writing, and this person did the experiment. You know, there should be a paragraph sort of really explaining what each author did and really going into a bit more detail.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Because [01:13:00] that's going to solve the problem, yeah.
Nick Wise: Yeah, and it's well, you know, you just created a load of work, everyone, almost all of whom are not Frozdas, and the Frozdas can still just lie. And just, and you've just made more work for everyone. Ultimately you just sort of do have, there's always going to be some trust, right, unless you're going around with a camera, you know, you have to film yourself doing every single experiment and send that in as supplementary information to the, you know, then ultimately you do have to trust that people have done what they, you know, said they've done.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But what would, so I'm curious like what your position is on this. I remember I talked to Adam Mastroianni a few months ago. So he's done I mean, so he did a regular PhD and published in great journals. But then since then he's trying to, basically he got kind of famous at least as famous as you can be in our circles for posting and a preprint on SciArchive called Things Could Be Better.
And it's just it's basically a, he at the same time published it on his [01:14:00] Substack blog. And that's kind of what he wants to do for his publication. So not go to journals anymore, but publish things just on the internet for people to read. Just get. Because of that, because it was very well written and very funny got a lot of feedback and attention through that.
And his general argument is that he, I don't know where he got this from exactly, but that science is a strong link problem. So basically saying that it doesn't really matter too much how bad the bad stuff is. It just matters that the good stuff is great in the sense that, you know, let's say we take some of the papers that you've been talking about.
very much. Does it matter? Are they going to influence the scientific environment? Not really. They're just going to fall aside and be basically instantly forgotten. And so I'm just curious with the discussion we've had so far what kind of your position is on this? Should we You know, try and get to make it really hard for these people to to get away with this.
If it comes at the cost of other people, [01:15:00] or should we other people having to do more work, or should we just say well, people are always going to try and do some sort of annoying shit, so we're just going to let a certain amount of error just happen and, you know,
Nick Wise: So I think, yeah, I think the problem is that the bad papers interact with the good ones. so, if those bad papers aren't so bad that they're completely excluded from any sort of ranking or anything like this, but, for example, you know, every one of those bad papers will have a references section giving citations to a load of other papers which could be bad or they could be good, right, so, in that way, all these bad papers, you know.
someone could arrange to publish a load of bad papers which cite papers that they want to have on people who they want to have more citations. Again, if these papers are not great but good enough that they're still in a journal that's in Web of Science or on Scopus or something like this, that person has more [01:16:00] publications.
They're now more likely to get a job over the person who is writing the good paper, potentially. Again, it depends how much people are being judged on just the numbers or the quality of the paper, right? But I think a big problem with it is, like,
how do
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: people are going to be judged right now on the numbers that's not going to change for a while. Yeah. Even if we try and change it, it's going to be there for a while.
Nick Wise: But I think, and the pre print, like I'm putting on this substack thing, I think there is this problem, and I don't think I have a solution to it, but just, there's too much stuff.
There's too many papers. You, no one can, no, no researcher, pretty much, can read all the papers coming out in their field. You just, you know, even reading one paper a day properly is, you know, with doing a lot of stuff, it's probably difficult.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Unless you define your field incredibly narrowly. Yeah.
Nick Wise: Right, you And yet most things have got, you know, dozens of papers coming out every day. So, you need a [01:17:00] filter. Traditionally, or one, one way is, Oh, well I'll read the things from the goods journal, you know, I will look, this journal is hard to publish and it only accepts good things, so I will read the papers, I will prioritise at least reading the papers from this journal, this is my filter. If you say, well I'll just put it on a pre print server, you know, if everything's pre printed, well now, you're going to read a load of stuff that's not great, even if it's not like fraudulent or but you're right but you would like to read the best you know the best the most interesting works in your field in the small the finite amount of time you have for reading papers and fine so okay we're now You know, I guarantee that someone will create some sort of ranking, some internal ranking on the preprocessor for trying to be like, this is, and there are, I think, you know, this reader recommends this one, negative, whatever.
You'll then get armies of bots clicking on these things. I mean, and I mean, one thing, a good thing about the current system or potent, you know, a thing that could still, idealistically, I believe should be possible and good, is that If you are someone from, someone that no one has heard of, [01:18:00] from a minor university or something, I believe that if you publish, if you produce a really good bit of work, you can still get it published in a goods journal. And then other people who would never have, you know, they don't know your name, they've barely heard of, you haven't heard of your university, it's from a country without a reputation in this field, but somewhat, you know, they, because they read the papers in that top journal, they become aware of your work.
Whereas if that person had thrown that work in the preprint server, no, how is, who's going to see it? Because people then have to have their own, you know, people come up with other filters. I read the stuff from Good University. I read the stuff that's coming out by Professor Whoever or Professor Whoever's students. There's always, people are always going to need a filter because there's simply too much stuff to possibly read. And so if we remove the journals filter, It's going to be replaced [01:19:00]by other filters, I mean, people will have to come up with other filters. And some of them may be less desirable in terms of, you know, Oh, well I only read stuff from the US.
Or, you know, I only read stuff from famous universities I've heard of.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I agree in principle. I mean, I think Adam's case is really interesting because I mean, by pure coincidence, I was actually one of the very first people, like his thing got like 30, 000 downloads in a week or something, right. But as he said not because of a blog post, like he was kind of a little bit annoyed because he wanted to give attention to his blog, but he basically just put it up.
And there's a, there was a, I think, I don't know whether this still exists, but at the time there was a SciArchive bot that just posted the most recent publication on SciArchive. And by pure coincidence, I was. Procrastinating on Twitter at the time and so I saw it when it had 20 views or something like that and But I think you're completely right in that one of the, so there's basically three reasons why I read the thing.
The first reason was I thought the title was like, things could be better, like what the fuck is this shit? Like it, it sounded like it was so dumb and I was [01:20:00] kind of clicking on it just to make fun of it almost you know, it was that kind of, Procrastination I was doing and but then I saw, wait, Adam Mastroianni, I recognized that name because I'd actually, I read a paper from him before and it immediately says, does it say Harvard, no, it actually might not, I don't know whether it says Harvard University on the preprint itself, but I definitely recognize the name and then third, it was incredibly well written and I would recommend basically everyone read it, but I think, I mean, this is I asked him a little bit, I think he, he doesn't, Maybe he's just being too modest, but I think he's just a very good writer who can also get away with that.
But I think, and he writes on topics that also are like fun to read compared to like incredibly technical,
Nick Wise: well again, once you're known, then you've sort of, your people, you know, If he puts out another paper, you're going to probably go and read it, right? You become, as will other people. There's someone who, this week or last week was in the Sciency News for saying, for proposing that they're removing the journal titles off their CV.[01:21:00]
Right, so on their CV, they're going to still include their papers, but they're not going to include the titles, they're not going to include the journals, so they're not trading on the cachet of the journal. But I feel, what they've done is create a minute more work for anyone reading their CV who is now going to have to just go and find whichever journal they're in.
Right. And, again, it, I feel that's a thing that you can do as a really established person. Right, you have this, you have the privilege now that people are going to read your work anyway because you're famous, or you're knowledgeable, or you're established, at the very least you're tenured or whatever. And if you're someone trying to establish yourself, a way is to be like I got my paper into the top journal in my field.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah.
Nick Wise: and people, you know, and then people will read it, and maybe, you know, they invite me to a conference, they invite me to talk about it, or whatever, you know, that's or you know, I'm from small country, whatever, or without much funding, but I've managed to do this and I bring it to the world stage by taking it to, [01:22:00] putting it in this journal.
If
I,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: when you really pay attention when there's like a paper in a top journal and it's from a small place you've never heard of like, huh. Well done.
Nick Wise: yeah,
exactly,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: upstream, like fighting upstream, swimming upstream here.
Nick Wise: hmm, And if you put it on your own personal website, I've got, you know, you may as well just shout it out a window, right? I mean,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Which I do sometimes.
Nick Wise: yeah,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, no, I think it's, it's very difficult because like I think the people who, you know, are the very established people do this. I think they do it from a very good
Nick Wise: oh, I totally understand the
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: but yeah, I agree. I'm not sure this really Solves the problem for people who aren't well known, even if that's what the purpose was.
But so, so your yeah, you kind of think like the journals should obviously, I mean, I agree that journals, like if they want to have relevance, then they should try and do this because otherwise what are you doing? Um, like, Sorry, I mean, like be more vigilant to these kinds of
Nick Wise: absolutely, I mean, yeah, they could, I
Without do [01:23:00] some things better, and some of them could do so much, so many more things better. I think it's hard to argue that the major publishers shouldn't just have more people trying to fix things. Right, and fix, even fix, deal with historical things. Right, there's sort of two slightly separate challenges.
Okay, we could sort all of, you know, we could have much better filters and to stop crap being published or the system being manipulated tomorrow, but we still have to then go back and deal with everything that has previously happened.
And, and I think right now, I think some publishers definitely just, you know, you have, everyone's doing everything or, you know, they, you haven't got that separation.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, I think theirs might also be other incentives, like you don't want to shit on the work of your previous editor or whatever in chief,
Nick Wise: but I think,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: bit harder. But yeah,
Nick Wise: but I think there's just not the commercial, like it's not commercially useful.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: mean, where would Hindawi be without,[01:24:00]
Nick Wise: Well, okay, until you have some like Hindawi level catastrophe, right.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Well, but I mean, even, but even though, I mean, they're still probably more profitable than if they didn't do any of this, right?
Nick Wise: No, I think they've lost, Wiley
have lost, I believe, quite a lot of money They, because they paid billions or millions, I don't know, it's hundreds of millions, they paid a significant amount of money,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: more than a hundred euros. Yeah.
Nick Wise: yeah, they paid a very significant amount of money to buy Hindawi and
that has
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: big case. They actually got, yeah, got in trouble because of it. But,
Nick Wise: yeah, their share prices down with things like this. But, Yeah, without something of that scale, and of course that publicity, I mean, it's the publicity of it that really made, you know, people, are they going to have to do something about this? I mean, in fairness, they did, eventually, do something about it.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: but I feel like there's two things that come up all the time here that are applicable here. Again. The first is that, you know, we only [01:25:00] basically catch. The really dumb cases that are
Nick Wise: Mm hmm.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so big and so obvious that like just everyone sees it immediately and goes yeah That's not good.
The specialist is with 500 papers in it or whatever you know, like that's an obvious thing where like you get into trouble, but You know and then for individual scientists you have you know Jan Hendrik Schoen who published like eight papers in nature and science in one year and you know, or you have yeah, basically the people who You know, fly to height at the sun while committing fraud.
Those are the ones we find, but someone who just occasionally, you know, adds a little bit of a you know, boosts their CV occasionally, with a, you know, little bit of fraud here and there, you're not going to find them. Yeah.
Nick Wise: are Things might start off small and then you have to, if, so if you're doing, again, you're manipulating, improving, massaging your data. Once you've made some claim that's only possible, or have some discovery that's only possible because of a bit of fraud, [01:26:00] see every time you try and replicate or build on that, well it, well, it's now on sand sort of thing, so you, everything that follows from that is going to have to be also manipulated because If you were honest, you'd find, you'd discover that the first paper was wrong, right?
You
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I wonder whether anyone's done that. Like intentionally, that would be ingenious. Create like intentionally this like big claim. And then two years later, you know, publish it in like a huge journal. And then two years later go like, ah, we did an unsuccessful replication. And then everyone's oh, well, good on you.
You
Nick Wise: uh, that's, you have so much integrity, yeah. So honest.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: a good move. I bet someone's, I
Nick Wise: oh,
bold,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: one of my heuristics is if you can think of it, someone has done it. No matter what it is, if you can think of someone doing it, someone has done it, so yeah, probably someone has. Other, yeah, the other kind of recurring theme is that not for fraud per se, but or like misconduct or whatever, but for I mean, it's just interesting because I work roughly in like social [01:27:00] decision making and yeah, I mean, gossip and the reputation, all these kinds of things are very powerful tools for maintaining a system.
And I guess this is also kind of where we are here, right? Where a journal just acquires a reputation. I mean, it's probably forgotten very quickly. You know, once you read a paper that's 30 years old, you have no idea what the journal is, but a Apart from a few cases but yeah, like now you're going to think more, are you going to submit something to Hindawi if you think you're doing good science? If you know about this, yeah,
Nick Wise: exactly. I think, yeah, this is, again, the, like I said a bit about, yeah, about the maths journals, for example, where in some countries or in some areas They know which journals are actually the good ones, you know, not accounting for impact factor, you know, knowing that's the thing that's just gamed and manipulated and not representative, and then other people who just don't have that [01:28:00] information look at the, and have no reason to disbelieve the impact factor or anything, you know, they go, oh this is how it's ranked, oh here's the ranking, that's, you know, that must be a good journal.
I will submit my work then. so there is,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: thing there I find is that Google Scholar, they have their rankings, right? And they always do them by H index of the journal. So like whoever publishes the most just is the highest. So like plus one, I think is often very high there and that kind of stuff. It's kind of interesting, like the Met, but I don't know why they choose that one.
It's,
Nick Wise: yeah, I don't know how the h injury sort of journals
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I think it's just the same thing, like over the course of a year or
Nick Wise: oh, okay,
you just,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: or whatever,
Nick Wise: what square can you put in,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: many citations. Yeah. But yeah, but I guess, so it seems to me then that you know, what you're doing in general and also right now, what we're doing is part of the, this is part of the solution in the sense of just say these are things to to, Look out for, as an individual scientist, and ways in which journals can improve, and then, yeah, that's the main way forward
Nick Wise: yeah, I [01:29:00] think
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: and lost, and,
Nick Wise: it's, be aware that all of the, sort of every single part of the publishing process, sort of, oh, it's in some people's interest to manipulate that. Whether that's, okay, yeah,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: You could phrase that in a much more fraud friendly way. Each part of the publication process can be exploited if you really want to.
Nick Wise: yes, and there's people who want to do that and you can make their life easier or harder sort of thing and I guess it's trying to make it harder for the fraudsters without making it awful for the honest people, and that's a big challenge. But even just being aware of it, right, of not assuming that every, you know, be aware of it.
some peer reviews might be done by people who are friends of the authors or being paid, that,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, that happens a lot with people who are friends with the authors,
Nick Wise: yeah. that,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: like a fringe thing, yeah.
Nick Wise: that if someone, you know, if, you know, if a peer review comes back and it [01:30:00] says, oh, we recommend the authors add these five references to their paper to make sure it is up to date, and they're all by the peer reviewer tell them not to, you know, sort of,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I think, yeah, and I've seen people, so I'm generally probably like you, conflict averse. And don't also don't like when other people like publicly necessarily point things out. I think, I mean, it's just not, it's not like a, an opinion. It's more like a gut feeling. I have but like I do like it when people say oh look I got this comment in peer review And then you see this person just like suggesting five papers by the same first author and you're like, yeah You can be publicly ashamed for that That's just
Nick Wise: But I think, I guess, also be aware that this happens at sort of, at every scale, right? It's not just authors trying to, you know, so there are institutions who, there is, that, it seems fairly clear that there, there is an institutional push to their [01:31:00] academics to try and, raise the citation, you know, raise both the numbers of publications, but also citations to that institution, because university rankings are, some of them are judged on how many citations research coming from that institution gets, right?
So there's now an institutional incentive to boost that because then you get, if you get into the top 1000 world universities, top 500 world universities, you will get more international students, they will bring more money, you know, you will get more, maybe more government funding, etc.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, I remember when I ucl and they had the in the neuroscience roughly they had an introductory lecture to all the people who were, you know, starting a master's in that area at UCL. And I think, you know, one of the introductory guy, one of the, probably the Dean or something like that.
I don't know exactly, but you know, the state statement he made literally was like, well, in the last 10 years, UCL was the second most cited institute for neuroscience in the world. And, you know, we're going to get [01:32:00] Harvard too. That was the official statement, right? And I mean, I get why they say it, right?
It makes sense, but
Nick Wise: But again, because that's, if that's how you're judging people, then you see that's, I mean, a little, another thing, a little kind of fraud that we haven't even mentioned yet is, um, affiliation sort of fraud. Institutions paying researchers to say, or to be affiliated with them, and the academic never sets foot in the institution.
They just say, oh yeah, I'm also, you know, I have a visiting something over here. It became a really big thing in Spain I think last year because a Spanish academic called Rafael Luca. Had said that his primary affiliation, not just an affiliation, but his primary affiliation was with a Saudi Arabian university.
And his secondary affiliation was where, at the Spanish [01:33:00] university where he actually worked. And what this meant was that all of his in, again, deciding rankings in the universities, They give all of the citations to Hit that he was getting, and this wasn't the only thing, maybe he was, you know, gaming.
He was getting a lot of citations and producing a lot of papers, and they were all being awarded to the Saudi Arabian University. So it was higher in the rankings.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. And related to that, just one of the, one of the meaner types of fraud, I feel like, is that I've seen is when people include just a random famous person as a middle author. Just think, that's, I think that's, I don't like that one in particular, I guess, because it's mean to the famous person. It's
Nick Wise: oh, you mean without the famous person's knowledge?
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, just put them in.
Put them in as you know, one of the middle authors or something. And then, if people are like, oh, that person is involved in the paper, good. [01:34:00] And then, I've seen a few people on Twitter go what is this? I don't know about this. People literally finding out afterwards that they supposedly had this paper.
Nick Wise: I just haven't really, is people making up authors, like fake authors, which is, so there are,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: for what purpose?
Nick Wise: well, this is, yeah, so,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah,
Nick Wise: some institutions I guess, particularly outside of the West reward academics if they collaborate with, well, international collaboration, particularly a collaboration, right?
You're not just doing, you know, you're yeah, you're collaborating internationally you know, you get to be on with a French academic and American academic, whatever. Well, so one way to do that is to invent a Western academic, which means particularly because in the same way that if I was asked to invent the name of a Chinese or Japanese person, I would probably get it embarrassingly wrong, right?
I'd pick some, I'd get surnames and first names the wrong way around. I would put, you know. [01:35:00] a first name, which was in, you know, from one, even like decade matched with a surname that was from a different part of the country. And they're like, well, who possible, but for quite unlikely that these two cultures, you know, these two different parts of China would have a name like this, I think.
So there was so there was one there's a guy called Dragan Rodriguez, which is sort of a mix of like, like a, like a
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: and Spanish or something
Nick Wise: Yeah, so it's like Rodrigo is okay, yes, and then sort of some yeah, central Eastern European Balkan sort of name.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, those names exist.
Nick Wise: but yeah, both of those names exist and plausibly they could exist together
as that
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: what I mean. I mean, as someone who has parents from two different countries, that stuff definitely exists, yeah.
Nick Wise: Yeah. And but yeah, and, but this person didn't, you know, they only existed. on the titles of about, of a few, of a, more than one, like several papers by this, again, with a common [01:36:00] author. And it means that, yeah, they had done international collaboration, so they probably got some sort of reward for doing that.
One of the dangers, obviously, is that once someone starts to have a publication portfolio, well, now you could, they can get a Google Scholar profile, someone can, you know, they can get an email address. And there are lots of institutions which don't have institutional email addresses. They're still using Gmail, they're using Yahoo, right?
Not every university around the world has the infrastructure for academic email addresses.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Well, I mean, I actually, for my PhD, I didn't even use my PhD email address because I knew I was going to leave at some point. So I just made a gmail address for my science
Nick Wise: Right, exactly. So you can, you know, you see, you have a Gmail address or something. And now, well, for example, you know, this person could have applied to, you know, Dragan could have applied to Hindawi to run a special issue. And now it's not even, you know, you now have got a fake guest editor. And if someone goes and looks, they'd find a Google Scholar profile with these publications.
You know, Dragan could also be a name you give, you could also use this [01:37:00] profile to be a peer reviewer for, again, whoever you wanted to. So you can start to create these things.
And my,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: there's a story of someone like you finding this out and then pretending to be a dragon and like taking advantage of all this stuff.
Nick Wise: so, and my favorite, my very favorite one of these is and again, it was in the Hindawi Special Issues, like one of these issues papers, where the author was someone called um, Clement Farrand, which is,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay.
Nick Wise: a city of a hundred thousand people in France. But they had tried to find, I don't know, a name and had somehow mixed things up and instead of finding a French person they had found used the name of a French city, which sort of sounds like it could be a name because it's a sort of a two word.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. And Clermont is uh, there are names that sound very similar to that in French.
Nick Wise: And this again, this is the extra mess of it. This, that, that made up person was the [01:38:00] corresponding author. And they had an email address from a school in Burundi Which, which was called something like King's School, or King's College School, like Burundi, so it sounds a bit like university, and it was the same website where you could buy buy the Chinese university that I mentioned, you know, right at the start in bulk, you could also buy email addresses from this Burundian school and so someone had decided they'd rather have that, but yeah, having, you know, fake author named after a French city with a Burundian school email address.
It's sort of a perfect little nugget of nonsense.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of fun, the kind of stuff people make up if you forget about what it
Nick Wise: Yeah, I mean that's just so stupid.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, I mean, so what are you, the question is kind of, what are you doing right now because you, I mean, you finished your PhD, right? You're still doing [01:39:00] this, still spend lots of time at Facebook and saying no, no, it's for research.
Nick Wise: Yeah, so,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. How are you doing like new types of fraud that you've found and you're doing or yeah.
Nick Wise: yeah, so after my PhD docing as well. And that's now pretty much finished. So I'm still doing some teaching. But trying to see if I can make this work as a living. I'll try and find a way to turn this this hobby that's got wildly out of hand into something which someone might pay me to do, to try and tackle some of this stuff.
Um,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: There? I mean, I think I might've, maybe I talked to Elizabeth. I can't remember. I think I talked to someone I think and said there's sometimes like universities might have someone who's you know in charge of like research ethics or something like that is I mean, there's I mean a famous case, I guess who does someone who does something in a different vein is the [01:40:00]CoffeeZilla guy on youtube who investigates like fraud in like Crypto and all this kind of stuff and then posts like long videos that are super entertaining And I guess that's a whole different way of doing it but yeah, i'm just kind of curious, like how does how does one do that?
Do you know?
Nick Wise: I mean, I say, I don't yet I think this is, despite the massive, the scale of the problem, there's very little resource being thrown at this. That publishes. Every publisher has a research integrity team of some size or scale. Yeah, all I would say are too small, but equally something that's important to me is being able to look sort of at anything and having spoken to people on those teams at publishers, you know, once you work for, you know, For commercial reasons, you can't just start looking here, there, and everywhere, you know.
There's already enough stuff to deal with at your own publisher even if commercially you have that [01:41:00] freedom anyway. And so I, you know, would have to stop, you know, tweeting about weird things I found, you know, writing blog posts about NF, things like that. And also would be restricted, even then restricted to the publisher I was working for.
So,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, this might've been actually James Heathers who said that on the, one of the recent episodes on their podcast. I think it might've been him who said something like, someone in that kind of role at a journal said in response to a public comment we don't look at comments made anonymously on the internet or something like that, which is a complete proactive way of dealing with the situation.
It's just going you know, we have our formal way that we have to, people to go through. And I mean, it seems like that's exactly not what you're doing, right? You're doing like these innovative kind of ways of finding, as in checking people's WhatsApp groups. Um, You know, innovative ways of like finding this role, which is much more interesting
Nick Wise: Yeah, and trying to, yeah, not just looking at the paper, but looking at, you know, [01:42:00]find the paper mill, who's running the paper mill, how does it work, who's involved with it, those sort of things, yeah. But yeah, so publishers, one thing, then yeah, as you said, universities, I mean, not every university, but quite a few universities have, you know, a person or maybe a few people who are, again, the research integrity people for that institution but they are mostly, well, small teams and universities don't like spending money and, you know, the trying
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you want to be the university that has a guy poking in
Nick Wise: well, I mean, there
is
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: holes and potentially antagonizing journals
Nick Wise: indeed, right? So, and then once you've, so once you've taken that away, there's sort of very little left. There's a few there I know, like science infrastructure companies, right? So for example, you've got, um, dimensions, or the um,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: the name of the company? No.
Nick Wise: Well the digital science, sorry, you've got digital science who make, you know, [01:43:00]dimensions, this is like academic search engine, they make altmetric, if you see, they make loads of, they, they own Overleaf, most pertinently to me they they do also, you know, you have.
Clarivate, who, you know, running the web of science and doing these sorts of things. And again, they have people who are deciding what goes in the web of science list and things. They are making, they are looking at journals and making decisions about what they're doing, what they're supposed to be doing.
But still even then, there's not many of these types of things running out already. So there's a couple of companies like that, which again, private companies doing things. I mean, I think one of the interesting things is that there's I'm not saying exactly, I don't know exactly how I want, in my fantasy world as president, I want this to be, but like, there isn't a science police, right, and again I don't know if exactly I want the science police, but there is no, certainly in the UK at least, there is no overarching body that is investigating [01:44:00] allegations of misconduct. Universities might choose to investigate allegations of misconduct against one of their researchers and then they could, if they have, right, if pushed, if they have to, and then they could still decide that Ah, well, it was probably done by some PhD student who left a while ago, and we've also, they say they've lost all the data, so we'll believe them and so don't do that again, you know, and, you know,
and there's
nothing
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: of a, to use, I mean, to use the word police just as a, for lack of a better term the whole idea is that it's supposed to be independent and not part of a journal or a university, right?
Nick Wise: exactly, there's regulate, yeah, I mean maybe regulator is the better, you know, investigative regulator. I think in the US there is something more like that, just there's the ORI, the Office of Research Integrity who, are investigating what happens, you know, with all the millions of dollars that, you know, NIH or whoever gives that in grant funding.
[01:45:00] They, I think last week, they released this report saying that someone had committed research, you know, research fraud or misconduct over years and a dozen NIH grants and they have, yeah, and they have the power to do that investigation, to go to the In this sort of real oversight way They're not siloed to one publisher, to one institution They are
looking at the whole
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: what I understand there from my, literally the last episode I did with Eugenie Reich I think she said so I asked her, like, why not more fraudsters are in prison for committing fraud, and wasting everyone's time and all that kind of stuff, and I think she basically said , the only, usually the only cases in which people do go to jail is if they, commit fraud and then based on that get grant funding or
Nick Wise: Yeah,
it's your misusing government money
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: financially from it in a direct way. So yeah, that's probably why that was set up there because it's [01:46:00] government money that's being
Nick Wise: But I don't even think we have even that in the UK I don't know
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: to question what like a welcome trust or anything or
Nick Wise: Yeah,
UKRI I
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah.
Nick Wise: don't know who would be responsible for investigating this thing If someone, there's allegations that someone's wasted a load of UKRI funding, for example. I don't know who that would be.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: It's so crazy. I mean, it's, I mean, in a way that I'm not that surprised that this is a kind of niche job title or job description that you're going for. I'm not surprised by that, right? But I'm kind of surprised that given the scale of this, of like how much money is just like being wasted for, you know,
Nick Wise: Yeah.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: That there isn't not every major, like every country with a big scientific infrastructure like most western countries, that they don't just have like three people doing this.
Nick Wise: It feels like the, it feels,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that much
Nick Wise: yeah, it feels like the return on investment should be really quite high,
to have a, few people.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: even if there's five people and they have a really good salary, I [01:47:00] mean compared to the billions you spend in funding, yeah.
Nick Wise: exactly, and money going to, you know, paying to publish this, you know, this fraudulent. So, you know, you. You don't catch it earlier, it then goes, you pay for the privilege of publishing it in whichever journal and
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, let's put it this way. The, the, The 12, 000 pounds or whatever it is for nature communications or human behavior or nature for open access charges. I guess you just need to catch like 20 of those per year and then you can have a very nice salary and it's paid for.
Nick Wise: Absolutely, yeah. But yeah, it does feel that given the, yeah, the size of the whole enterprise the fact that there, yeah there's no one, as far as I'm aware.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And I guess journalis one of the thoughts I had, maybe because some of the stuff sounds vaguely investigative, like investigative journalism, but I guess that they're probably not interested in the same story over and over again, right? Like,
Nick Wise: There is a bit, yeah,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, it's interesting once or twice, but then at some point it's yeah.
Nick Wise: yeah.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: we don't need the fifth [01:48:00] story of another guy doing the same thing.
Nick Wise: Exactly, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so, yeah, they have been interested, there have been some stories but yeah, you know, they don't want to hear the same thing twice, right.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah, I guess it's an open question. I don't know. I even, for a brief moment, I thought about something like the Center for Open Science because they do this big infrastructure in terms of like, yeah, creating the infrastructure that everyone can share their data for free. But it's different, I guess.
It's not really, it's more making sure that the people who want to do the right thing can do the right thing rather than finding people who cause all sorts of problems. Oh, yeah. People who find problems, that's what I mean, not that you're causing problems per se. Okay,
Nick Wise: in terms of, yeah, the who could pay me to do this stuff, this would be a somewhat unopened question, or it's the one I do not currently have the answer to.
But
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: well good luck.
Nick Wise: [01:49:00] exploring. Mm
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, but I guess, I'm assuming you've been in contact with some of the main people who also do this kind of stuff and
You know, like Elizabeth or James, they probably would know more than most other people.
Nick Wise: Yes, I mean, so Elizabeth, yeah,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, I think she also on a podcast said like there's some stuff when she might be hired by some sort of consulting team to do something like that.
So there are things like that, but it's not super predictable
Nick Wise: Yeah, it's not predictable, you don't know what, yeah.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Necessarily.
Nick Wise: Oh yeah, I don't know, I don't know about James.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. At the end of each interview, I ask my guests the same three questions. The first is, what's a book or paper you think more people should read? And this can be, it can be old, it can be new, it can be famous, it can be completely obscure.
Just something that you think more people should read.
Nick Wise: I think something I'd recommend, or something I was talking about, like the hacker mindset in terms of, I guess if you're trying to approach [01:50:00] a system thinking about how someone would try and break that system, what all the different like entry points that someone could try and attack. And so something I quite enjoy watching every so often is. Talks from hacker conferences like Black Hat and Defcon.
And some of them are incredibly technical. You know, they're going into, you know, how we dismantle the, you know, this, or work out this chipset's instructions or something, right? And it's way, you know, over my head. But there are others which I think are, one, often very entertaining talks in their own right, and very interesting.
But from so there's people whose job is called penetration testing. So they are paid by companies, but also even by governments or institutions to say, sometimes physically, try and break into this facility. You know, we give you within, you know, these are your rules of operation. [01:51:00] Can you know, and this is, you know, the week you're going to do it.
Try and, you know, can you get through the reception desk? Can you access the servers? What can you get to? And I find those really interesting. Often these people are quite you have to have a lot of confidence, you have to have other things. But what you can do when you just, you know, walk through with confidence you know, wearing a high vis vest or having a
lanyard or a t shirt that says IT on it, right?
You can go almost anywhere. And some of, so some of these and I think And they're looking at all the different possible ways that you can break into a facility, or different tactics. And the same with, you know, social engineering things, where someone's, you know, job is to try and ring up, just ring up a company, like Cold, and try and get through to the person who will give you some information that they're really not supposed to give you.
I find, yeah, I find those really interesting, and I think that the approach taking that sort of approach, or [01:52:00] thinking about it from that perspective, for the publishing system I think could be quite helpful actually trying to, I think it's what the bad guys are doing, in terms of, it's what the, you know, they are seeing where can we get in, what can we manipulate, who's trusting something, which they're just taking on trust, if we can just lie, you know, where are the chinks, sort of in the armor.
Um,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Thing I can link to? Or I mean, you can also send it to me if you can't think of one right now, but it would be cool if I had like one that's like a good starting
Nick Wise: oh, well, I think,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: sounds really interesting.
Nick Wise: So the I think I've watched quite a few of these penetration testing ones, but it's another talk which is my favorite one is from a guy called Barnaby Jack, and this is from maybe 15 years ago now or something and he
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: That also sounds like a made up name by someone trying to create a European co author.
Nick Wise: Yeah, so he's uh, sadly no longer with us. guy who bought [01:53:00] a cash machine online, like an ATM, a freestanding ATM. He like bought one on eBay and then worked out how he could remotely get it to fire money out. And then, and there's so many, he's an incredible presenter. It's really funny talking to say, right.
You don't need to be some. computer whiz to understand most of what he's doing. You know, it's lots of it really funny things where he has it just in his house, and he manages to, in trying to play with it, he manages to break it, and it's just sort of bricked. He can't do it, he can't, and so he rings up the maintenance guy, He was obviously used to going to these, you know, in the back of a corner shop, in the back of a, you know, a department store or something, and there's just this guy's house, and he's like, why do you have this in your house?
It's oh, I'm, you know, I'm holding it for a mate. It was like some ridiculous excuse for the guy, but the guy happily fixed it, and then he went so yeah. I
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: does that guy have to report it to the police? Police? I guess not.
Nick Wise: think you're like, they're, you're [01:54:00] allowed to own them,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I guess you are,
Nick Wise: you know, if he did buy it legitimately, the thing, he didn't nick it but yeah, that's a wonderful talk, and again, it's looking at this, how do I, Go through this system. What are the loopholes? What can I, how can I exploit this to get what I want?
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, by the way, just because this happened to me once I think a common way to do an ATM hack is to have a mobile phone stuck to the top of it where you can't see it. And then to have the, you know, the readers over the actual reader
Nick Wise: Yeah.
Sort of I had that once where my card didn't come out and then I called, I didn't have a mobile phone on me.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Luckily there was a phone booth when those still existed, like right outside. So I called the police from that and they were like, yeah, if you don't have any evidence, it's we can't come just because your card doesn't come out. And so I went back and yeah, there was this like mobile phone like to the top of the thing, just pointing down at it.
Like it was obvious once you saw it, but you just never pay attention to it
Nick Wise: Yeah. Who, look who sticks their head under
the
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And then I was like, yeah, [01:55:00] I've got a mobile phone with a camera on. Is that enough evidence? And then, yeah, they came. So yeah, pay attention to that people. But yeah, okay, so I'll link the talk, I guess, you mentioned right here.
Okay. Second question what's something you wish you learned sooner? That can be from any part of your life that you want to, that you're willing to share. Just something where you think, yeah, it would be good if I had learned that bit sooner. And also maybe, again, if you're willing to share how you learned it and or kind of what you did about it.
Nick Wise: Yeah, no, I find this is a really, this is the trickiest one of the questions You say it's a side.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, you can take it in all sorts of ways. Some people have taken it very personally. Some people have taken it like very, just like specific nuance thing about their work. I mean, whatever you want, basically.
Nick Wise: I suppose I would say I wish I'd known earlier how much I enjoy teaching. I had, I could have chosen to, you know, have, to [01:56:00] start teaching, do some teaching right from, you know, day one of my PhD, but in the end I didn't really do any until I finished my PhD and was post docing but I often, you know, when the university term is going, it's often the most enjoyable.
Hours of my week. It's certainly the most rewarding. is teaching students. So, I wish that I had started doing that from the beginning.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: to do it? Or like how did you find out that you actually enjoy doing it?
Nick Wise: No No, of course it but I guess I, had a, or have a position where part of position,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: right? There's
Nick Wise: yeah, they're like, oh, I'm just part of this, you know. do this teaching a few hours a week.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And you said fine, but now you actually like it.
Nick Wise: Yeah, I was like, I didn't feel, I didn't know I hated it. So it wasn't I thought I'd hate it. I just sort of felt oh, well, I could, or I could, you know, I could take it, leave it. But [01:57:00] actually I love it. And I wish I had sought it out earlier in my PhD.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: if the path to doing, you know, what we've been talking about as a full time job is uncertain. I guess it's good to have something that you actually really enjoy doing right now.
Nick Wise: Yeah. So,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Final question is, yeah, basically any advice for people on the kind of PhD postdoc border or, yeah, you can take it also a bit more metaphorically if you want to, but, Yeah, basically I started my postdoc recently. Any advice that's kind of also part of the question.
Nick Wise: I would say, and I say this as someone who has, you know, not managed this, but start applying for jobs, like start applying for assistant professor y, lectureship y, if that's the, if that's what you know you want to do, or that's what you'd aim to do, start sort of now, or, [01:58:00] you know,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: You mean rather than waiting two, three years and letting it come to you, but like being more proactive about it and
Nick Wise: Be more proactive at it. Yeah. The first time you have to do the application, it takes ages. 'cause you don't have a research statement, you don't have a teaching statement, you don't have an EDI statement and whatever other hoops you are required of you to jump through. So just doing it the first time takes ages and they'll probably not be great, but you've gotta do it the first time to then get, you know, you don't want to, you don't want the first one to be, I guess, you know, the perfect job that you really, And having the experience the more you do them, like the better it will get, you will have something, you know, something to add to, as you do keep going through the postdoc you can just start adding things to it and finessing it and things like that. And if you do make it through to interview, you'll start getting practice at interviews, which again, you, depending on what, how you got you.
How you got this postdoc and things like that, you [01:59:00] know, you may not have done Many interviews again, depending if you've had jobs with you. Some people may have barely ever done an interview, right? And Some people might have to do quite a few but regardless you're just starting to get that practice With that I'd say there's not a really a reason to Waiting for them all I need to get my first postdoc under my belt or I need to get two years of stuff I know about and then starting, you're just sort of delayed, you know.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I agree. I learned that the hard way for my Not that hard way, but a bit of the hard way for my postdoc fellowship applications, where the best one was basically the first one I could apply for. And yeah, you just think oh yeah, I'm going to do this. And suddenly God. I've just never thought about this aspect.
Nick Wise: Yeah, right,
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And then you just have to write something and it just takes way longer than you think. And then in my case, I ended up spending way less time on my actual research proposal because I just had, I spent so much time on all these other stuff that are, you [02:00:00] know, how do you want to disseminate your things?
Like it's kind of obvious in a way you know, it's not like you're going to have a revolutionary answer there, but it still takes way longer than you think it does to write it for the first time.
Nick Wise: exactly. And, you know, obviously it is taking a bit of time, but again it takes up the most time the first time and then it will get
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. Second one was. A tenth of the work, yeah.
Nick Wise: Yeah and I guess, you know, worse they just reject you, oh well you've, hopefully someone's now seen your name or something. And the best case is, you get the, you know, you get the job, right?
And if that's the way you want to go, then suddenly you've, you know, you've got it.
Sort of thing, you've you've begun.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I guess in some sort of irony of the world You're also probably more likely to get it if you don't actually care that much Versus if you're desperate because you need to get a job now Okay,
Nick Wise: that would be my recommendation.
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So yeah, that was all for me so thank you very much and I guess [02:01:00] good luck With finding some way to earn money and a living that way
Nick Wise: Thank you.