Report on the World Conference on Research Integrity

Between June 2 and 5, some NanoBubbles team members attended the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI) in Athens, Greece. Our team had the chance to display their works as oral or poster presentations with their co-authors from outside of the NanoBubbles project. Also, many members met their international collaborators for the first time in person which led to great discussions and paved the way for future works.

WCRI had a large diversity of subjects but the following topics stood out throughout the conference: scientific integrity in policy making, prevalence of paper mills and how to fight against them, usage of generative AI in science and scientific literature and the reproducibility crisis. Discussions during the conference led to special interest group meetings with people who share our aim in participating in correction of the scientific record.

Pre-conference, some of our team members attended a workshop titled Assessing publication research integrity – understanding the key techniques. Prof. Jennifer Byrne (Director of Biobanking, NSW Health Pathology Professor of Molecular Oncology) introduced paper mills and the Seek & Blastn tool that detects incorrect nucleotide sequences, which is a collaborative work with Prof. Cyril Labbe and Prof. Guillaume Cabanac. The second part of the workshop focused on image screening, presented by Dr. Elisabeth Bik, our scientific advisory board member, (microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant) and Jana Christopher (Image Data Integrity Analyst at FEBS Press) where they revealed their tips in detecting problematic images in scientific publications.

During the conference, we attended a special group meeting on paper mills organised by Prof. Byrne where the participants did a lighting round about their past or upcoming presentations and how their work is related to paper mills.

Alexandre Clausse, (first year PhD student in the NanoBubbles project), presented his work with Prof. Cabanac titled Mining tortured acronyms from the scientific literature. The Problematic Paper Screener flags problematic articles for human re-assessment. One of such problems is the prevalence of ‘tortured phrases’ such as the usage of ‘bosom peril’ instead of ‘breast cancer’. This issue can be seen in acronyms of established scientific concepts, such as the usage of ‘Convolutional Brain Organisation (CNN)’ instead of ‘Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)’. To detect such cases, Alexandre worked on an ‘acronym classifier’ with the aim of discovering and classifying the acronyms as ‘tortured’ or ‘genuine’. The mismatch of the phrases and acronyms turned out to be a signal of tortured phrases, and helped him discover new tortured phrases. Interesting discussions on whether the usage of such phrases is a language barrier issue or clear cases of plagiarism followed the presentation.

Wendeline Swart, under the supervision of our team member Prof. Cabanac, presented her work titled Year after year: Tortured conference series thriving in computer Science where she focused on examining conference publications in the computer science fields for tortured phrases. This examination was possible with the flagged data in the Problematic Paper Screener (PPS). The results revealed a high concentration of problematic publications in IEEE conference proceedings.

Dr. Gilles Hubert presented his collective work with our team members Prof. Labbe and Prof. Cabanac titled Bad smells in reviewers’ reports? Text-mining the MDPI Open Peer Review Corpus. They accessed the MDPI Open Peer Review Corpus 2 and provided statistical and textual analyses on the collected reviews. They discovered some report pairs that showed an inter-textual similarity of 90% which can be a signal of compromised activities in the peer review process. They also found ‘microscopic reports’ where the review was no longer than one word. Discussions on availability of open access peer review and malpractice detection in open peer review followed the presentation.

Dr. Mady Barbeitas, postdoctoral researcher in NanoBubbles, presented her work titled From watchdogs to Epistemic activists – a pass-through towards institutional change? She focused on the fraudulent publications that were accepted in journals during the Covid-19 period. Repercussions of such fraudulent research is observable even after the corrections by the scientific community. Scientists who expose fraud often face significant challenges but some have dedicated themselves to correcting the scientific record as “epistemic activists.” Mady examined how these activists are changing the publication systems, the origins of epistemic activism, its impact on research policy using methods like in-depth interviews and online discussions.

Our team members Qinyue Liu (first year PhD student) and Dr. Amira Barhoumi (postdoctoral researcher) presented a poster on their work titled Toward identifying mis-citations in scientific papers. In this work they proposed a methodology to automatically detect ‘mis-citations’ based on the textual similarity of a citation context and the cited articles’ abstract. They collected a manually annotated dataset for this task and defined further categories in mis-citations such as in-domain and out-of-domain. The poster received attention from the audience and we were able to find potential collaborations for future work.

Post-conference, we attended the inaugural symposium and workshop entitled Forensic Scientometrics (FoSci) funded by Digital Science. This meeting brought together sleuths, researchers and publishers. We discussed potential ways of helping each other in scientific correction practices, mainly in post publication peer review or through applications that can be integrated in pre-publication peer review.

Outside of the conference, we enjoyed this beautiful Athens full of history and of course the Greek salad!

Report written by Yağmur Öztürk