Unveiling tortured phrases in Humanities and Social Sciences

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Clausse, Alexandre, Badalova, Fidan, Cabanac, Guillaume, Mayr, Philipp
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Clausse, Alexandre
Badalova, Fidan
Cabanac, Guillaume
Mayr, Philipp
author_facet Clausse, Alexandre
Badalova, Fidan
Cabanac, Guillaume
Mayr, Philipp
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04944
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unveiling tortured phrases in Humanities and Social Sciences
Clausse, Alexandre
Badalova, Fidan
Cabanac, Guillaume
Mayr, Philipp
Digital Libraries
H.3.7
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.
title Unveiling tortured phrases in Humanities and Social Sciences
topic Digital Libraries
H.3.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04944