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It's a big day today: I had a scientific manuscript rejected by a robot. Thread. The bot detected ❝a high level of textual overlap with previous literature❞. In other words, plagiarism. 1/6
The manuscript was automatically un-submitted, so that we the authors could address this issue, for example by citing the papers that we were apparently copying from. 2/6
The bot also included some highlighted version of our paper, showing the parts that seemed to be plagiarized. This is where it gets good. 3/
Our affiliations were flagged, because yes, we're using them on all the papers we write. Our methods and analysis sections were super-flagged, because we were using a lot of standard sentences for describing a standard protocol. 4/6
But the best part was that almost every reference was flagged. Because some other people had cited the same paper before! And that was it. Affiliations, standard protocol descriptions, references. No other part of the paper was highlighted. 5/6
It would have taken 2 min for a human to realize the bot was acting up. But there is obviously no human in the loop here. We're letting bots make autonomous decisions to reject scientific papers. I'm so excited to be at the forefront of this new era! (a little pissed, too) 6/6
