I’m indebted to a post on Mastodon for drawing my attention to a blog post about a paper with the title Bridging the gap: explainable ai for autism diagnosis and parental support with TabPFNMix and SHAP that appeared in the journal Nature Scientific Reports (which claims to be peer-reviewed).
Here is Figure 1 of that paper:
I’m no expert on Autism Diagnosis, but I’m pretty sure that neither “Fexcectorn” nor “frymblal” (medical or otherwise) nor “runctitional” are words in the English language. Why do the person’s legs go through the table? And why is Autism represented by a bicycle? This nonsensical figure was clearly generated by AI, as is much of the text of the paper. How on Earth did this crap pass peer review?
Still, Nature Scientific Reports is indexed in Scopus, which we all know is a watertight guarantee of quality…
P.S. The article was published on 19th November 2025. It is now prefaced by an Editor’s Note: “Readers are alerted that the contents of this paper are subject to criticisms that are being considered by editors. A further editorial response will follow the resolution of these issues.”
In the Dark 