Was nonsense ‘vegetative electron microscopy’ phrase a Farsi typo?

A gibberish phrase that caught the attention of science sleuths after it slipped into several journals might trace its origin to a typo in Farsi rather than questionable use of AI, as we reported earlier this month.

Nearly two dozen scientific papers, including some in journals from major publishers, mysteriously refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope.” As we wrote in our previous story, sleuth Alexander Magazinov speculated on PubPeer “the phrase could have originated through faulty digital processing of a two-column article from 1959 in which the word ‘vegetative’ appeared in the left column directly opposite ‘electron microscopy’ in the right.”

Most of the articles containing the strange wording included authors from Iran. Magazinov told us perhaps an AI model had picked up the phrase from the 1959 article and spit it back into machine-generated text that was later plagiarized in other papers by the same Iranian network of fraudsters.

After our story ran, however, a commenter suggested on Reddit the phrase might have a different origin:

According to Google translation, “scanning electron microscopy” in Persian is “mikroskop elektroni robeshi”, while “vegetative electron microscopy” is “mikroskop elektroni royashi”. They are only differed by a point in the Persian script:
میکروسکوپ الکترونی روبشی
vs.
میکروسکوپ الکترونی رویشی

Three Iranian scientists asked to comment on this potential explanation all found it plausible. Cina Foroutan-Nejad, a chemist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, told us:

The [Reddit commenter] is absolutely right. I have heard that some Iranians write their papers in Persian and ask an agency to translate it to English. So, the translator could have misread “روبشی” as “رويشی”. Just a single dot changes B to Y in Persian and the guy who most probably had no science background translated that to vegetative that is a translation of روبشی

Alternatively, the writer of the Farsi manuscript could have made a simple typo changing “scanning” to “vegetative,” because the two letters ب and یـ in the Farsi script are adjacent to each other on the keyboard, Foroutan-Nejad said.

The latter scenario would also be compatible with cases in which authors refer to both “vegetative” and “scanning” in the same paper, although other explanations are possible, too. 

Foroutan-Nejad also said reuse of text were frequent in Iran, which could have perpetuated the use of the term:

Another problem with many Iranian teams is that they literally have a “template” for publication. If you publish the same type of paper over and over again on different molecules, biological samples, or materials, you can hypothetically have a template in which you can replace certain names etc. using [the Find and Replace function]! I have seen this and I am not joking at all!

Magazinov was quick to acknowledge the possibility of the new potential explanations. However, he said he felt “absolutely sure” or “quite sure,” depending on the case, that in three specific papers to which our earlier story linked – two coauthored by controversial Spanish chemist Rafael Luque and one by Elsevier editor Vijay Kumar Thakur – the appearance of the strange phrase was the result of copy-and-pasting from other papers or using generative AI.

Computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac reaffirmed the phrase remains a fingerprint in the Problematic Paper Screener, a tool he developed that combs through the scientific literature looking for various types of problematic content such as “tortured phrases.”

“A paper is listed in the Tortured tab under ‘potentially problematic papers’ when 5+ tortured phrases are found in the paper — or when the paper is also retracted,” Cabanac told us by email.

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