‘Tortured Phrases’ Give Away Fabricated Research Papers

August 5, 2021

(Nature) – In April 2021, a series of strange phrases in journal articles piqued the interest of a group of computer scientists. The group, led by Guillaume Cabanac at the University of Toulouse in France, could not understand why researchers would use the terms ‘counterfeit consciousness’, ‘profound neural organization’ and ‘colossal information’ in place of the more widely recognized terms ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘deep neural network’ and ‘big data’. Further investigation revealed that these strange terms — which they dub “tortured phrases” — are probably the result of automated translation or software that attempts to disguise plagiarism. And they seem to be rife in computer-science papers. (Read Full Article)