Nick Wise had a prolific start to his sleuthing journey. In July 2021, the fluid dynamics researcher started looking for tortured phrases in published papers, and has since had a hand in at least 1,000 retractions. He also helped identify unique phrases for the Tortured Phrases Detector, a function of the Problematic Paper Screener that identifies signs of misconduct. Last month, Wise teamed up with other research fraud hunters in a Nature article that outlined “five essential steps to combat industrialized scientific misconduct.”
His success in calling out research misconduct helped him land a full-time job. In January, Wise started a new position as research integrity manager at publisher Taylor & Francis. We spoke with him about how his new position will impact his career trajectory and how he plans to use his sleuthing past in his new position.
Retraction Watch: As research integrity manager, what will you be doing?
Wise: I will be primarily investigating research integrity concerns, whether raised internally or externally, for both published and unpublished works. The cases could be relatively simple plagiarism or image manipulation concerns for a single paper, or larger cases involving tens or even hundreds of papers across multiple journals, including where we may suspect paper mill involvement.
Retraction Watch: What from sleuthing will you take into your research integrity job?
Wise: I wouldn’t have this job without my sleuthing work, and I think almost every aspect of it transfers to my new job. I think that my knowledge of paper mills and selling authorships will be particularly useful, and there have already been cases where I have recognized names from investigations I conducted before starting the job.
Retraction Watch: Will you be able to continue sleuthing outside of your job?
Wise: I feel that, in effect, I am sleuthing from 9 to 5 every day, so I don’t have a great desire to keep going into the evening, and that’s before getting into potential conflicts of interest. I’m very interested in what other sleuths find and I’m still in contact with them. It’s important to my work to keep track of new investigations and developing trends in research misconduct.
Retraction Watch: Any interesting lessons from your first few weeks on the job?
Wise: I thought I was fairly cynical about the kinds of misconduct that goes on, but it turns out I am not cynical enough. Being able to look behind the curtain and see reviewer’s reports, communications between authors and editors etc. really opens your eyes to what some people are trying to get away with.
Retraction Watch: What are your thoughts on sleuths being compensated for their work? Would having a paid opportunity to continue your sleuthing have altered your career trajectory?
Wise: I would have loved to be able to be employed full time by an organization to investigate research integrity issues, with the ability to look at any publisher. However, as far as I know, no such positions exist. The Retraction Watch sleuth in residence scheme is excellent, but it is just for a single year. There are other initiatives to pay sleuths for investigations, however that would be as and when required, so the sleuth would still need other employment. There are no stable options.
As I said, I feel that I am a paid sleuth at Taylor & Francis. I am restricted to one publisher, but there’s more than enough to keep me busy.
Retraction Watch: What are your thoughts on the integration of AI in publishing practices? (T&F supports “responsible use” of genAI.)
Wise: My personal opinions on generative AI are that it is a tool that can be used competently or incompetently, for good or bad. It can do things that other tools have been able to do for years that we have no problem with: search, translation, grammar and spell checking, etc. It can also generate entire papers, along with hallucinating references to texts that do not exist and creating anatomically implausible diagrams.
There is no point banning the use of generative AI as there is no way to tell for sure that something is AI-generated. Even if we could say for certain that some content was the output of a generative AI, an author could say that they had used the AI for spell checking, or some other acceptable task. I think that all publishers can do is ask people to use AI responsibly. Pandora’s box is already open.
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Good point for T&F. I hope Springer Nature will follow the same path, in order to restore confidence.
Agreed, I have had too many issues with them ignoring glaring errors in papers.
Great interview