Cite youself!

In academia you get frequent information when articles you (co-)authored get cited in new publications from aggregators like Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar. I have been a bit suprised when I saw myself cited in an article about othodontic treatment, as this is not anywhere near my area of expertise. So I decided to investigate and found a prime example of an academic fallacy promoted by the need to accumulate citations – meaningless self-citations.

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A problem with LLMs in academia

A recently published article in Elseviers’ Surfaces and Interfaces​1​ starts its introduction with the unforgettably original sentence

Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:

The authors of ​1​

and continues with a fairly generic, but well readable, probably textbook-level overview of the field of lithium batteries. While this paper is far out of my scope of expertise, preventing me from assessing its general merits — this would have been the task of the reviewers, the authors present the reader with a body of text not written by experts but rather a machine trained on producing text that sounds good. They do not disclose the use of any kind of LLM in the writing process and add to the body of uninspired and incremental writings in academia.

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Registration for “Applied Biorobotics” is open

The registration for next term’s course “Applied Biorobotics” is open in TUMonline for TUM students. More information can be found at https://daniel.human-motion-engineering.org/mw2388-applied-biorobotics/ . I am happy to announce, that Prof. Majid Khadiv will join us for an expert interview this term.

Also, I am currently working with TUM ProLehre to incorporate the use of AI-tools into the preparation of course assignments.

And now to something completely different…

As a parent, scientist, and citizen, the past three years have been challenging in many ways, mainly because of the confusing and unreliable data on which public information and political decision-making were based. The societal pressure for anyone raising doubts about the public narrative​1​ and the perceived fast and loose labeling of dissenting voices as conspiracy theorists with right-wing ties has been taxing and worrisome.


Link to our paper on filtering mechanisms in masks submitted to “Environmental Research” https://zenodo.org/record/8251843


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MDPI

“We are sincerely grateful to scholars who give their time to peer-review articles submitted to MDPI journals. Rigorous peer-review is the corner-stone of high quality academic publishing.”

— The MDPI editorial team.

MDPI is a open access publishing power house with 390 published journals which get listed by Web of Science and Scopus. The company is officially based in Switzerland with offices in Serbia and China. It used to be listed as a predatory journal, but was removed in 2015 on appeal.
I personally had my doubt about this outfit and want to recall an experience that seemed to solidify my concerns.

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Scientific discussion or intimidation?

Most of the editorial rejections we received were rather generic – not interested to our (unspecified) audience or not in the scope of the respective journal. However, the editors of the Journal of Experimental Biology did suprise us by disqualifying our work for questionable reasons. We expressed this surprise in a letter to the journal’s leadership and were quite surprised by the response.

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Finally published

One year and 23 days since our first submission have passed and finally our article​1​ is published and featured in Physics Magazine.

We are proud of this work and are looking forward to feedback and discussions.

References

  1. 1.
    Renjewski D, Lipfert S, Günther M. Foot function enabled by human walking dynamics. Phys Rev E. Published online December 8, 2022. doi:10.1103/physreve.106.064405