The topic concerns academics, university professors, and those interested in scientific research first and foremost, but there are also important lessons.
Peace be upon you and mercy and blessings of Allah.
Two weeks ago, I conducted a workshop on "Critiquing Scientific Papers" attended by colleagues from medical specialties. I discussed the foundations of scientific writing, methodology, and drawing correct conclusions based on results, among other topics.
I mentioned that there is currently a state of chaos in publishing in scientific journals; you may find strange errors in some published papers in journals that are supposed to be reputable. Glory be to Allah, recently, two models of papers with somewhat amusing errors caught my attention, both published in peer-reviewed journals.
The first model is from a scientific journal—a study outside the medical field but noteworthy. If you go to the introduction section, you will be stopped by a phrase known to those who deal with AI tools like ChatGPT or Bard. This phrase confirms that this section—or perhaps the entire study—was written by artificial intelligence, and the authors did not bother to read and remove this phrase at least.
The strange thing about this study is that if you look at the number of authors, you find a large number of them. In the "Author Contribution Statement" section, you find four authors whose task was writing and editing, in addition to the reviewers from the journal, who should be more than just reviewers, along with the journal's staff. All of them overlooked this phrase, and no one knows how it was published!
If you look at the "Impact Factor" of this journal, you will find it to be 6.2, which is relatively high. Additionally, the article publishing charge for open access reaches $2,360 paid to the journal.
The other model is a scientific paper. If you go to the discussion section—the summary of summaries before the conclusion—you find the text suddenly interrupted by an interjecting sentence in English: "I'm very sorry, but I don't have access to real-time information or patient-specific data as I am an AI language model..."
Here, the model openly admits that it does not have access to updated information because it is an AI model. The irony is that this paper is issued by institutions that are supposed to be reputable, such as "Hadassah Hospital" and "The Hebrew University" in the occupied land (which is the land of Muslims and not "Israel" as they claim), in cooperation with "Harvard Medical School" in America. Despite this, they fell into this amusing error.
For accuracy, this paper (Case Report) may not have been entirely written by AI, but it was used in some parts, leading to this blatant flaw.
Why am I saying this? These two models offer several lessons:
We must have a critical reading of scientific papers and not accept everything in them. Someone might say, "These are writing errors that do not undermine the results," but this is incorrect; it indicates a type of carelessness and lack of precision. If the authors and reviewers are not precise in reading the visible text, how can we trust their precision in dealing with data and results?
Publishing in scientific journals has become a capitalist business to a large extent, and this has increased in recent years. For example, the prestigious journal "Nature" had publishing fees of up to $11,500 two years ago.
Therefore, as Muslims, we should encourage publishing in our own journals as much as possible. You may find a local journal in your country run by trustworthy Muslims, but with a weak impact factor. If we disregard it, it will never improve. We must cooperate—publishers and journal owners—to elevate the level of our journals and enter global rankings, and not encourage this capitalist greed.
In scientific papers, there is often a phenomenon called "ghost riders," where the name of a doctor or researcher who did not contribute to the paper is included, just for the sake of "putting my name and you put yours." This is a lack of scientific integrity, which sometimes explains the presence of many names on a paper full of basic errors because none of them actually read or scrutinized it, and they relied on AI to do the job for them.
As Muslims, we must care about science and strive to be its masters and pioneers again, for we are the successors of this earth, and because we are a nation to whom our Prophet (peace be upon him) said, "Indeed, Allah loves when one of you does a task that he perfects it." We are a nation of excellence and scientific integrity, and we should not rely solely on what comes to us from outside, which may mix truth with falsehood and chaff with grain.
This is a quick note I wanted to share with you, and we ask Allah, the Most High, to help us delve into the sciences and benefit people.
Peace be upon you and mercy of Allah.