This book is a disgrace, I do not understand how it got published.
18.02.2026 08:13
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This book is a disgrace, I do not understand how it got published.
‘Bizarre’ linguistics paper on water retracted by Springer Nature www.timeshighereducation.com/news/bizarre...
@lameensouag.bsky.social @dingemansemark.bsky.social @verbingnouns.bsky.social
AI slop published on your watch: very bad look for HSSComms and Springer/Nature Dear editors, I have failed to locate contact information for most of the academic editors for Humanities and Social Sciences Communications; I trust that you will forward this message to them. I want to note that AI slop is being published on your watch in the journal you edit. This paper, out last week (Al-Jarrah 2026), is full of inaccurate claims and includes countless hallucinated references. Even a cursory look at the bibliography shows that at least 10 and probably many more references are bullshit pure and simple; the simplest explanation is that they are confabulated by generative AI, which sheds doubt on the quality of the manuscript as a whole and on the review and editorial processes at your journal. It is a great lapse of editorial judgement to let this kind of obvious drivel pass and I am warning my colleagues at MPI and Radboud to avoid your journal until clear and unambiguous action is taken. You may also want to take note that many people are finding out about this and the online discussion of this paper and of the journal's failing standards is something I hope that Springer Nature cares about. In my opinion the paper does not pass even the most minimal quality assurance checks and is fully against the COPE guidelines on publication ethics. You may want to hold the author accountable for this; I think the only reasonable course is retraction. But the scholarly community also holds the journal accountable. By letting AI slop through, your journal is polluting the information ecology of scientific publishing. Amidst a rising tide of synthetic text, scholarly publishing, with its tradition of human oversight and strong peer revidew, should be one of the last stalwarts to defend the integrity of our research. I look forward to your response and to find out what decisive action you are taking.
Re: the AI slop paper shared by @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @lameensouag.bsky.social, I wrote to the editors — will update when I get a reply, and will be following closely what they do.
Key point is that we should hold the *journal* accountable for this mess
I have a few predictions...
1/n
WTF?! 🫣 Is this a joke?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A religious quote, "primitive languages", and nonsense everywhere. Is Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications a scam journal?
Un jour d'hiver à Paris (près du parc Montsouris)
New article in collaboration with @chrisbuckley.bsky.social , @thomaspellard.bsky.social @robinryder.bsky.social on the phylogeny of Kra-Dai languages and of the looms used by their speakers:
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Sometimes you need to insist😜
Really ? Publishers such as Benjamins, Brill and de Gruyter can handle LaTeX, even when the journal editors don't know it...
LaTeX is the solution ! It offers automatic alignment between glosses and forms in example sentences, robust crossreferences, the ability to control a whole range of options in fonts that you have no access to in word, infinite possibilities for diagrams...
The second edition of the Japhug grammar is now available :
langsci-press.org/catalog/book...
Guillaume Jacques and I have collaborated to survey spindle whorls and the origins of weaving in East Asia ... lots of new stuff in this preprint ... a novel method for processing spindle whorl archaeological data, comparison with farming, and new linguistic information ... osf.io/preprints/so...
New preprint, cowritten with @chrisbuckley.bsky.social
Spindle whorls and the emergence of weaving in the East Asia region: a new database
osf.io/preprints/so...
Forgive me for nominating a paper on which I was a co-author, but ... it's observational, it's cross-cultural, and it's based on large datasets painstakingly assembled in the field and then coded, it's fresh, and there are insights www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
I love this kind of paper.
A seemingly niche topic—which the authors are genuine experts in—that regardless reveals some more fundamental ideas about how humakind operates. (1/2)
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Why do some things evolve smoothly, and others in bursts? Read on for answers…