Well that’s… unfortunate. I’d like to know how the fuck that got past editors, typesetters and peer reviewers. I hope this is some universally ignored low impact factor pay to print journal.
Since the rest of the paper looks decent (I am no expert in this field), I have a guess: it got to review and it came back with a 'minor review' and the comment 'please summarize XY at the end'.
In low impact journals minor reviews are handeled in a way, that the editor trusts the scientists to address minor changes accordingly. Afterwards it goes to production, where some badly payed people – most of the time from India – put everything in format, send out a proof with a deadline of max 2 days and then it will be published.
I don't want to defend this practice, but thats how something like this can get through.
It's the second time in a few hours that I see a post about AI-written articles published in an Elsevier journal. Maybe I'm not super worried about these specific papers (since the journals are also kinda irrelevant), but I'm worried about all the ones we're not seeing. And I fear that the situation is only going to get worse while AI improves, especially regarding images. The peer review system is not ready to address all of this
There are so many different journals out there it's hard to keep track of which ones are actually reputable anymore.
Almost need some overarching scientific body that can review and provide ratings for different journals to be able to even cite from the information within or something.
Like science and nature would be S-tier, whereas this journal should be F-tier apparently and people shouldn't even be allowed to cite articles found within it for their own papers.
What's so puzzling about this stuff is that I get why they're using AI to write the text because writing is hard. But why don't they at least read it once before submitting?
I don't even get the writing aspect. An LLM is 100% accurate when it has as many errors as an average human, so your product will always be worse with AI. Always. It's never good to use it.
Not sure you'd want to publish in Radiology Case Reports. It has an impact factor of 0.8, and I am not saying using impact factor as a general quality metric is good, but anything below 1 is probably not worth your time unless it is a very very new journal that just doesn't have enough history.
This practise is a remnant of the printing times. Papers would get accepted and then printed in a later issue. But once the online publishing started, this kind of was not necessary anymore. Which lead to online publication before print, but somehow still using the print date for the article because a lot of journals still have physical prints.
That said, I don't know if this journal does that and then if not it is simply stupid. They might do it because they limit "online" issues in size, like the printed ones. Which is idiotic if you don't actually print anything.