Unveiling tortured phrases in Humanities and Social Sciences

TL;DR

This paper investigates the presence of tortured phrases in humanities and social sciences publications using the Problematic Paper Screener, revealing 32 problematic documents and generating new fingerprints for future detection.

Contribution

It extends the use of the Problematic Paper Screener to humanities and social sciences, identifying tortured phrases and creating new fingerprints for improved screening.

Findings

32 problematic documents identified in HSS publications

121 new fingerprints generated for the PPS

Tortured phrases found in Education, Psychology, and Economics articles

Abstract

A small amount of unscrupulous people, concerned by their career prospects, resort to paper mill services to publish articles in renowned journals and conference proceedings. These include patchworks of synonymized contents using paraphrasing tools, featuring tortured phrases, increasingly polluting the scientific literature. The Problematic Paper Screener (PPS) has been developed to allow articles (re)assessment on PubPeer. Since most of the known tortured phrases are found in publications in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), we extend this work by exploring their presence in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). To do so, we used the PPS to look for tortured abbreviations, generated from the two social science thesauri ELSST and THESOZ. We also used two case studies to find new tortured abbreviations, by screening the Hindawi EDRI journal and the GESIS SSOAR repository. We found a total of 32 multidisciplinary problematic documents, related to Education, Psychology, and Economics. We also generated 121 new fingerprints to be added to the PPS. These articles and future screening have to be investigated by social scientists, as most of it is currently done by STEM domain experts.