Post Publication Peer Review to (re)assess scientific articles using the Problematic Paper Screener and PubPeer
Résumé
The NanoBubbles project (see https://nanobubbles.hypotheses.org) aims to understand how, why, and when science fails to correct itself, especially by exploring and correcting the scientific record through several markers of scientific misconduct. As an example, scientific misconduct can be characterized using copy-paraphrase-paste to avoid plagiarism detection, resorting to paraphrasing tools such as spinners (e.g. SpinBot), featuring nonsensical scientific concepts (e.g. 'bosom peril' instead of 'breast cancer'), known as 'tortured phrases' (Cabanac et al., 2021).
To tackle this issue, a post publication peer review (PPPR) approach has been developed in 2021, using the Problematic Paper Screener (PPS, see https://www.irit.fr/~Guillaume.Cabanac/problematic-paper-screener/) (Cabanac et al., 2022) and PubPeer (https://pubpeer.com) (Barbour & Stell, 2020), as part of an initiative to decontaminate the scientific literature (Cabanac, 2022).
This PPPR tutorial explains how to (re)assess problematic articles by identifying fingerprints on the PPS and raising questions about the flagged content on PubPeer. It has been set up during a research stay at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Köln, Germany), focusing on the presence of tortured phrases in human and social sciences.
References:
Barbour, B. & Stell, B.-M. (2020). PubPeer: scientific assessment without metrics. In Biagioli, M. & Lippman, A. (Eds.), Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research (pp. 149-155). The MIT Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11087.003.0015
Cabanac, G. (2022). Decontamination of the scientific literature. arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15912
Cabanac, G., Labbé, C. & Magazinov, A. (2021). Tortured phrases: a dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of Critical issues affecting established journals. arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751
Cabanac, G, Labbé, C. & Magazinov, A. (2022). The ‘Problematic Paper Screener’ automatically selects suspect publications for post-publication (re)assessment. arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04895