Private Eye has a regular feature called “Commentatorballs” which contains various verbal gaffes perpetrated by sports commentators, usually sent in by members of the public. It used to be called “Colemanballs” after David Coleman, but the name was changed after he passed away in 2013. Years ago, I had a couple of my own contributions published, actually.
Anyway, I’m seriously thinking about running a similar feature on this blog devoted to outrageous blunders made by academic publishers.
Here’s one that would make a good entry in “Publisherballs” from the journal Radiology Case Reports, published by – you guessed it – Elsevier:
On the left you see the title, author data and abstract and on the right an extract from the text that clearly shows it was generated by ChatGPT or some other AI bot. The authors cut and pasted the output without even noticing that the software they were using was explaining it could not respond to the prompt they gave it. Clearly the careful editorial process at the journal didn’t even go as far as reading the paper…
In the Dark 