A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers

Summary

Earlier this year, scientists discovered a peculiar term appearing in published papers: “vegetative electron microscopy”. This phrase, which sounds technical but is actually nonsense, has become a “digital fossil” – an error preserved and reinforced in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that is nearly impossible to remove from our knowledge repositories. Like biological fossils trapped in rock, these digital artefacts may become permanent fixtures in our information ecosystem. The case of vegetative electron microscopy offers a troubling glimpse into how AI systems can perpetuate and amplify errors throughout our collective knowledge. A bad scan and an error in translation Vegetative electron microscopy appears to have originated through a remarkable coincidence of unrelated errors. First, two papers from the 1950s, published in the journal Bacteriological Reviews, were scanned and digitised. However, the digitising process erroneously combined “vegetative” from one column of text with “electron” from another. As a result, the phantom term was created. Excerpts from scanned papers show how incorrectly parsed column breaks lead to the term ‘vegetative electron micro…’ being introduced. Bacteriological Reviews Decades later, “vegetative electron microscopy” turned up in some Iranian scientific papers. In 2017 and 2019, two papers used the term in English captions and abstracts. This appears to be due to a translation error. In Farsi, the words for “vegetative” and “scanning” differ by only a single dot. Screenshot from Google Translate showing the similarity of the Farsi terms for ‘vegetative’ and ‘scanning’. Google Translate An error on the rise The upshot? As of today, “vegetative electron microscopy” appears in 22 papers, according to Google Scholar. One was the subject of a contested retraction from a Springer Nature journal, and Elsevier issued a correction for another. The term also appears in news articles discussing subsequent integrity investigations. Veget...