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Emerging AI tools, and being wary of fake science

Whatever a search turns up gets verified before it is cited. Elicit, Consensus and Scite are quick at orientation and at surfacing papers whose terminology we would not have searched for, and they also invent plausible papers that do not exist, so we find each one in PubMed or Google Scholar and read it. Predatory journals collect fees without real peer review; check the Directory of Open Access Journals, indexing in PubMed, Scopus or Web of Science, and whether the editorial board is real people.

Also covered: ChatGPT and Perplexity · training data cutoffs · predatory journal solicitation emails · fake conferences · fake impact metrics