To state the obvious, words matter – but sometimes the wrong words in the wrong place can matter even more than the right ones. In the recent Cabells white paper on how to use data for choosing the optimal journal for publication, it was clear that both understanding terms used on social media and then using those terms to promote research work was key for scholars in the modern era to be successful in attracting interest to their work. Communication skills on social media are therefore more crucial for researchers than ever before.
But some of the terms that are emerging – not to mention the practices they describe – can seem wholly alien to many of us. Especially those who, shall we say, can hardly be described as Gen Z in terms of their demographics (and may not even be Gen X). As such, it is perhaps time to share a kind of glossary of terms to aid understanding of, quite frankly, what on earth is going on in scholarly communications these days.
Any portmanteau in a storm
The go-to device of any budding neologist is to mash up two words to create a new one. Rarely elegant, this practice does at least have the benefit of producing something vaguely recognizable. A recent example is that of ‘churnalism,’ which refers to the full or partial reproduction of the original text. With its original application to a form of particularly sloppy journalism, this word is now used in relation to another trending term, ‘AI slop,’ where an author has used AI to churn something out that they hope will be acceptable to whichever low-level journal to which they are submitting their article.
This kind of race to the bottom is neatly summed up in Cory Doctorow’s phrase ‘enshittification,’ which maps a three-stage process where digital services gradually get worse over time in order to maximize the providers’ profits. This word, which forms the title of his latest book, has also been applied to academic publishing, where the commodification of research has led to a system overwhelmed by quantity, distorted by profit-maximizing, and having lost its original purpose of sharing knowledge.
Trash talk
Adding suffixes where they have never feared to tread before is another effective way of introducing cool new terms, such as ‘junkification.’ The junk in question also stems from the commodification of research, which the authors of one article on the topic say has resulted in “the influx of low-quality content and products into online platforms that are diluting the quality and authenticity that once characterized these spaces.”
This expansion in low-quality article submissions, and in many cases subsequent publication, is causing academic publishers huge headaches. For example, the traditional role of a publisher is to check every reference, an onerous task at the best of times, but even more so now with the appearance of ‘franken-references.’ The use of AI in the authorship of articles has a number of unintended consequences, one of which is the hallucination of references to fit the narrative of the article. Of course, it is sloppy scholarship to use AI in such a way in the first place, let alone not to spot what has happened before submitting it to a publisher, but enough OK-looking articles are reaching the peer review and acceptance stage to cause problems when publishers start to weed out the offending article citations.
You will notice the common thread in the development of these terms in recent years: AI. Its advances have seen rapid deployment in academic research, and while some of this has undoubtedly sped up and improved some research, the benefits of this are being overshadowed by the problems that have been created. However, perhaps it is important here not to question AI itself as the creator of all these new problems that seem to require a whole new lexicon, but those who are using it in the first place.
