Guillaume Cabanac

Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, Alexander Magazinov

Probabilistic text generators have been used to produce fake scientific papers for more than a decade. Such nonsensical papers are easily detected by both human and machine. Now more complex AI-powered generation techniques produce texts indistinguishable from that of humans and the generation of scientific texts from a few keywords has been documented. Our study introduces the concept of tortured phrases: unexpected weird phrases in lieu of established ones, such as 'counterfeit consciousness' instead of 'artificial intelligence.' We combed the literature for tortured phrases and study one reputable journal where these concentrated en masse. Hypothesising the use of advanced language models we ran a detector on the abstracts of recent articles of this journal and on several control sets. The pairwise comparisons reveal a concentration of abstracts flagged as 'synthetic' in the journal. We also highlight irregularities in its operation, such as abrupt changes in editorial timelines. We substantiate our call for investigation by analysing several individual dubious articles, stressing questionable features: tortured writing style, citation of non-existent literature, and unacknowledged image reuse. Surprisingly, some websites offer to rewrite texts for free, generating gobbledegook full of tortured phrases. We believe some authors used rewritten texts to pad their manuscripts. We wish to raise the awareness on publications containing such questionable AI-generated or rewritten texts that passed (poor) peer review. Deception with synthetic texts threatens the integrity of the scientific literature.

Sérgio Nunes, Suzanne Little, Sumit Bhatia et al.

ECIR 2020 https://ecir2020.org/ was one of the many conferences affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Conference Chairs decided to keep the initially planned dates (April 14-17, 2020) and move to a fully online event. In this report, we describe the experience of organizing the ECIR 2020 Workshops in this scenario from two perspectives: the workshop organizers and the workshop participants. We provide a report on the organizational aspect of these events and the consequences for participants. Covering the scientific dimension of each workshop is outside the scope of this article.

Guillaume Cabanac, Ingo Frommholz, Philipp Mayr

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR) was launched at ECIR in 2014 \cite{MayrEtAl2014} and it was held at ECIR each year since then. This year we organize the 10th iteration of BIR. The workshop series at ECIR and JCDL/SIGIR tackles issues related to academic search, at the crossroads between Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Bibliometrics. In this overview paper, we summarize the past workshops, present the workshop topics for 2020 and reflect on some future steps for this workshop series.

Guillaume Cabanac, Ingo Frommholz, Philipp Mayr

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR) at ECIR tackled issues related to academic search, at the crossroads between Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics. BIR is a hot topic investigated by both academia (e.g., ArnetMiner, CiteSeerx, DocEar) and the industry (e.g., Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Semantic Scholar). This report presents the 8th iteration of the one-day BIR workshop held at ECIR 2019 in Cologne, Germany.

Philipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Guillaume Cabanac

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) workshop series has started at ECIR in 2014 and serves as the annual gathering of IR researchers who address various information-related tasks on scientific corpora and bibliometrics. We welcome contributions elaborating on dedicated IR systems, as well as studies revealing original characteristics on how scientific knowledge is created, communicated, and used. This report presents all accepted papers at the 7th BIR workshop at ECIR 2018 in Grenoble, France.

Philipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Guillaume Cabanac

Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) workshops serve as the annual gathering of IR researchers who address various information-related tasks on scientific corpora and bibliometrics. The workshop features original approaches to search, browse, and discover value-added knowledge from scientific documents and related information networks (e.g., terms, authors, institutions, references). We welcome contributions elaborating on dedicated IR systems, as well as studies revealing original characteristics on how scientific knowledge is created, communicated, and used. In this paper we introduce the BIR workshop series and discuss some selected papers presented at previous BIR workshops.

Philipp Mayr, Ingo Frommholz, Guillaume Cabanac

The BIR workshop brings together experts in Bibliometrics and Information Retrieval. While sometimes perceived as rather loosely related, these research areas share various interests and face similar challenges. Our motivation as organizers of the BIR workshop stemmed from a twofold observation. First, both communities only partly overlap, albeit sharing various interests. Second, it will be profitable for both sides to tackle some of the emerging problems that scholars face today when they have to identify relevant and high quality literature in the fast growing number of electronic publications available worldwide. Bibliometric techniques are not yet used widely to enhance retrieval processes in digital libraries, although they offer value-added effects for users. Information professionals working in libraries and archives, however, are increasingly confronted with applying bibliometric techniques in their services. The first BIR workshop in 2014 set the research agenda by introducing each group to the other, illustrating state-of-the-art methods, reporting on current research problems, and brainstorming about common interests. The second workshop in 2015 further elaborated these themes. This third BIR workshop aims to foster a common ground for the incorporation of bibliometric-enhanced services into scholarly search engine interfaces. In particular we will address specific communities, as well as studies on large, cross-domain collections like Mendeley and ResearchGate. This third BIR workshop addresses explicitly both scholarly and industrial researchers.