Not gonna lie, I cringed when it asked to insert citations.
Like, what's the point?
You cite stuff because you literally talk about it in the paper. The expectation is that you read that and that it has influenced your work.
As someone who's been a researcher in the past, with 3 papers published in high impact journals (in chemistry), I'm beyond appalled.
Let me explain how scientific publishing works to people out of the loop:
- science is an insanely huge domain. Basically as soon as you drift in any topic the number of reviewers with the capability to understand what you're talking about drops quickly to near zero. Want to speak about properties of helicoidal peptides in the context of electricity transmission? Small club. Want to talk about some advanced math involving fourier transforms in the context of ml? Bigger, but still small club. When I mean small, I mean less than a dozen people on the planet likely less with the expertise to properly judge. It doesn't matter what the topic is, at elite level required to really understand what's going on and catch errors or bs, it's very small clubs.
2. The people in those small clubs are already stretched thin. Virtually all of them run labs so they are already bogged down following their own research, fundraising, and coping with teaching duties (which they generally despise, very few good scientist are barely more than mediocre professors and have already huge backlogs).
3. With AI this is a disaster. If having to review slop for your bs internal tool at your software job was already bad, imagine having to review slop in highly technical scientific papers.
4. The good? People pushing slop, due to these clubs being relatively small, will quickly find their academic opportunities even more limited. So the incentives for proper work are hopefully there. But if asian researchers (yes, no offense), were already spamming half the world papers with cheated slop (non reproducible experiments) in the desperate bid of publishing before, I can't imagine now.