Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States? Or bosom peril? Kidney disappointment? Fake neural organizations? Lactose bigotry? These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of “tortured phrases” that sleuths have found littered throughout reputable scientific journals.
They typically result from using paraphrasing tools to evade plagiarism-detection software when stealing someone else’s text. The phrases above are real examples of bungled synonyms for the United States, breast cancer, kidney failure, artificial neural networks, and lactose intolerance, respectively.
We are a pair of computer scientists at Université de Toulouse and Université Grenoble Alpes, both in France, who specialize in detecting bogus publications. One of us, Guillaume Cabanac, has built an automated tool that combs through 130 million scientific publications every week and flags those containing tortured phrases.
