#academic-fraud-detection

#academic-fraud-detection

The mystery of the missing scientists began with a Silver Alert. In late February, a retired Air Force major general named Neil McCasland left his house in New Mexico for a walk and never returned.

The university said it selected the international law firm K&L Gates last summer to review 'allegations and concerns' regarding the school. Over more than seven months, the review team analyzed hundreds of thousands of documents and interviewed dozens of people.

Computer programs that check mathematical arguments have existed for decades, but translating a human-written proof into the strict programming language of a computer is extremely time-consuming, often taking months or even years.

A growing number of AI tools can detect fraudulent elements in papers, but they can be expensive to use. Such tools are probably better deployed by journal publishers rather than individual reviewers, says Elisabeth Bik, a science-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California, especially because feeding unpublished content into AI tools can compromise confidentiality and is generally frowned on during peer review.

A few years ago, I put together what I felt was a truly innovative concept, which I presented in a conference poster at an international meeting in my field. After the presentation, I spoke to another early-career scientist about my work and how it might apply to their findings. Two years later, they scooped me by publishing a preprint paper that presented my idea, with many of the same verbal formulations and an identical flow of ideas, without any acknowledgement or attribution to my work.

Google AI mode has added an 'Ask about this' option above the sources where all URLs are displayed. Clicking on 'Ask about' here automatically pulled a new prompt into the search box.

Nearly 60% of American teenagers say students at their school use AI chatbots to cheat "very often" or "somewhat often," according to a new Pew Research study. The researchers found that teens now view cheating with AI as "a regular feature of student life."

In 2023, Australia abandoned its expensive and bureaucratic scholar-led research-assessment programme. New Zealand followed suit soon after. The hope, according to a transition plan unveiled by the Australian federal government's Department of Education and the research sector, was to find a "more modern, data-driven approach". In the United Kingdom, where financial pressures on universities are especially acute, there are similar calls to reform the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the country's performance-based research-funding system.

I assume that it's intended to provide ammunition to go after disfavored faculty and/or to instill such a chill on campus that nobody would dare to say anything provocative in the first place. Whether those motivations are locally held or are meant to keep the university below the radar of certain culture warriors, I don't know. The effects are the same either way, and they're devastating to the mission of a university.