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Issue #95 by Michael Seadle  (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) On 19 November 2024, Daniel Engber  wrote an article for the Atlantic  called: “The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger”.¹ The article discusses the consequences for those who were co-authors on Francesca Gino’s article that was accused of academic fraud. One co-author, Juliana Schroeder (Berkeley), worked with Gino on seven articles and 26 conference presentations. Her reaction was to put together a project to investigate the reliability of data in other papers:    “Schroeder began her own audit of all the research papers that she’d ever done with Gino, seeking out raw data from each experiment and attempting to rerun the analyses. As that summer progressed, her efforts grew more ambitious. With the help of several colleagues, Schroeder pursued a plan to verify not just her own work with Gino, but a major portion of Gino’s scientific résumé.”¹   Instead of exonerating her work, she found more evidence of fraud and unexplained issues in her own spreadsheets. Engber’s article includes a graph of heart rate data so implausible that “... if you were fabricating data, you certainly wouldn’t strive for them to look like this.”¹ Gino was not responsible for all of the bad data. Schroeder acknowledges that she did not check the data herself and speculates that errors by research assistants could have been a source of the problem. Engber writes:   “Schroeder’s leading explanation for the issues in her work—an RA must have bungled the data—sounded distressingly familiar. Francesca Gino had offered up the same defense to Harvard’s investigators. The mere repetition of this story doesn’t mean that it’s invalid: Lab techs and assistants really do mishandle data on occasion, and they may of course engage in science fraud. But still.”¹    Competition could well have been a factor. “A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out.”¹     The question of responsibility for the fraud goes beyond individual researchers. An important question is why the peer reviewers never caught the problems, especially obvious ones like those Engber includes. If authors feel under too much time-pressure to check their own data, the same pressure was likely true for reviewers. In the end, an academic culture that measures researchers by article quantity deserves a share of the blame.    Changing assumptions is challenging at the best of times, but in an era when “science” in the broadest sense is often ignored or discounted, serious scholars must act, especially those of us who are not at risk.   —---- Thanks go to Mark Zimbelman of Brigham Young University for bringing this article to my wife’s (and thus to my) attention. Retraction Watch has also picked it up. 1 : Engber, D. (2024) ‘The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger’, The Atlantic , 19 November. Available at:   https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fraud-research/680669/  (Accessed: 23 November 2024).

Issue #94 by Gary Marchionini  (UNC School of Information & Library Science) iSchool faculty and students participate in dozens of global research conferences each year and now that the COVID pandemic has subsided, more of these conferences are held as in-person events again. The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) holds an annual meeting pertinent to the interests of many in the iSchool community. This year’s meeting was held in Calgary, Canada on October 25-29, 2024 ( https://www.asist.org/am24/  ).¹ The conference attracted 450 attendees from 23 countries and included two keynotes. Lerato Chondoma, from the University of British Columbia opened the conference with an inspiring talk “Towards Equitable, Decolonial and Anti-Racist Futures in Research” that included audience meditation exercises and powerful points about how Western capitalism, marketing, and aggressive competition stunt holistic innovation and creativity. One point that generated good discussion in the Q&A focused on our fixation on text generation and analysis and the career constraints this brings to young scholars who choose to work in oral, visual, or movement modalities. Ranjit Singh, from Data & Society closed the conference with his talk “The Ordinary Ethics of Putting People First” that examined how generative AI exacerbates social risks.  An important question that drove the talk asked what kind of ethical vocabulary might we use to investigate how we delegate authority to AI and assess resultant agency over time to eventually make AI seem ‘ordinary’. He included fairness, accountability, colonialism, experimentation, sovereignty, and solidarity in his suggested vocabulary list, and concluded that the ordinary backend work we allocate to AI is the cost of living in a data driven society.   The keynotes focus on social dynamics and AI were recurring themes in the conference papers, panels, posters, and workshops. One paper session I particularly enjoyed was “Tipping the Balance: Human Intervention in Large Language Model Multi-Agent Debate” by Haley Triem and Ying Ding that used actual legal rulings being appealed as a test bed for multiple AI agents debating whether to uphold, overrule, or remand a ruling.  An interesting takeaway was agents exhibiting ‘stubborn’ behavior by not changing their conclusions in the face of argumentation. A thoughtful panel entitled “Exploring Some Impacts of Advances in Artificial Intelligence: A Social Informatics Approach” included doctoral work by Ece Gumesul that defined a three stage privacy interaction framework and raised questions about chatbot persona influences on interactions.   I participated on a panel “Provocations on iSchools and Librarianship: New Priorities for LIS Forward” that continued discussions held at last year’s iConference, ASIST, and several other meetings based on the LIS Forward report that considers how librarianship and library education fit in iSchools ( https://tascha.uw.edu/projects/lis-forward/ ). In breakout sessions, participants and the panelists discussed the tension between library science research and education programs as a socially grounded cores for iSchools and the strong trends toward technical training programs that attract large numbers of students and research funding. This tension leads to inequities in faculty recruitment and workloads and serious disagreements of values and career trajectories among students in library and technical degree programs. One conclusion was to insist that our complements are more important than our differences, and our ability to have strong iSchools that value and practice collaboration and mutual respect across participants will depend on vigorous but civil discussions of values and consequent equitable sharing of resources. Another possible conclusion is that library science education cannot thrive in iSchools and an eventual schism cannot be avoided. My own belief is that such a schism will devalue and reduce the success of everyone in our field.  This is an important discussion that will continue to drive us forward in the years ahead as long as it remains a vigorous exchange of how to work together to extract the best results from multiple points of views and skill sets rather than a winner-take all competition between iSchool factions.   Finally, a note about practicing what we preach. The conference provided support for on-the-fly translation service for all attendees through the Wordly app. This technology relies on AI driven NLP and is an example of how international conferences can leverage technology to welcome broader communities to the scholarly table. 1 : The following observations and notes may be of interest to iSchool faculty and students who were not able to attend. These represent a small sliver of the program and events limited by the sessions and conversations I was able to have and surely reflect my own interests/biases rather than a comprehensive summary of the conference.

Complementary medicine approaches, such as natural products, acupuncture, and meditation, are increasingly used by the public and accepted by the medical community. However, knowledge of the safety and effectiveness of these approaches, as well as their impact on human health, is limited in comparison to conventional medical approaches. A new project led by Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu aims to develop informatics resources and scientific literature mining tools to consolidate high-quality evidence on complementary medicine approaches and their mechanisms of biological action. The project, COMBINI (connecting Complementary Medicine and Biological kNowledge to support Integrative Health), is being funded through a five-year, $3,261,972 grant through the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of the Director. Collaborators include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, and Mayo Clinic in Florida. Illinois will be the primary site for the project, and Kilicoglu, who serves a faculty affiliate at the NCSA, will be the principal investigator.   “COMBINI will consolidate high-quality evidence on complementary medicine interventions (nutritional, psychological, physiological) in a machine-readable form,” explained Kilicoglu. “This knowledge will form the backend for a question-answering application targeting healthcare consumers and medical professionals, and a hypothesis generation/knowledge discovery framework for researchers.” The project also will integrate machine-readable tools and resources for conventional medicine, including those developed by Kilicoglu. For example, it will include data extracted by SemRep, a natural language processing (NLP) tool, from SemMedDB, a knowledge base of semantic associations mined from the biomedical literature in the PubMed bibliographic search engine. The goal is to enable AI-based knowledge management applications and scientific discovery. “We will revitalize this knowledge base [SemMedDB] by improving its underlying NLP methods and integrate it with the knowledge graph for complementary medicine to get a more holistic view of the evidence in the literature,” he said. Kilicoglu will lead the development of a literature dataset and NLP methods and, with researchers in the NCSA, the construction of knowledge graph on complementary medicine literature. “If the project is successful, we can imagine the tools/resources being used in precision medicine. The NCCIH is also starting a new initiative, called Whole Person Health, and we expect our work will be integrated with their tools and resources in the future,” said Kilicoglu.

Michigan State University Application Deadline: 13 January 2025 The Department of Media and Information (MI) invites applicants for one Advanced Assistant, Associate or Full Professor to complement and expand our dynamic and interdisciplinary faculty. MI is home to a range of faculty from different disciplines and supports an array of research areas, including human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, rural computing, game studies and design, and the relationships between technology and policy, health and wellness, and society. Candidates should contribute to or expand one or more of these areas through the use of computational and/or quantitative approaches.

Rutgers University Application Deadline: 13 January 2025 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey seeks an experienced, collaborative, and innovative academic leader to serve as Dean of Rutgers University-New Brunswick’s School of Communication and Information . Reporting to the Chancellor of Rutgers-New Brunswick, Dr. Francine Conway, the dean of the School of Communication and Information, will serve as a key member of the Chancellor’s leadership team. One of the nation's oldest and largest institutions of higher education, Rutgers is among America's highest-ranked, most diverse public research and land grant universities. The university serves more than 69,000 students from all 50 states and 130 countries and is located on three campuses– New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark–and consists of 29 schools and colleges. The School of Communication and Information (SC&I) is located on the Rutgers-New Brunswick campus. SC&I was created in 1982 with the merger of the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, the School of Communication Studies, and the Department of Urban Journalism. SC&I is committed to equipping students with the tools necessary to succeed in today’s global communication, information, and media environments. The school’s programs prepare students interested in organizational and health communication, social and new media, library and information science, and information technology for vital careers in today’s digital workplace. The dean of SC&I is chief academic and executive officer of the school and is responsible for ensuring the highest levels of academic excellence. The ideal candidate will be dedicated to building upon the excellence of the school and to promoting the significance of the fields of communication and information. The dean will build upon the strengths and opportunities within Rutgers-New Brunswick to expand research, teaching, and outreach across diverse disciplines and schools. The dean will make the most of our regional context, which includes diverse communities in New Jersey and close proximity to New York City, Philadelphia, as well as access throughout the Northeast. The new dean will possess a record of outstanding leadership, including a commitment to both undergraduate and graduate education; dedication to excellence in research, teaching, outreach, access and opportunity; and the capacity to generate public and private resources for the school. Successful candidates will demonstrate distinguished scholarly qualifications and accomplishments that warrant appointment as a tenured faculty at the rank of professor in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information.

iConference 2025 , hosted by Indiana University Bloomington (USA), will be the 20th annual iConference of the iSchools organization. The virtual academic program takes place 11-14 March 2025 and the onsite academic program takes place 18-22 March 2025. The 2025 iConference theme is “Living in an AI-gorithmic world”. All information scholars, researchers, and practitioners are invited to participate  in the conference. An iSchools affiliation is not required. Call for Participation With the theme "Living in an AI-gorithmic World,” iConference 2025 seeks to explore the potentially profound implications of living in a world increasingly influenced by algorithmic processes, such as generative artificial intelligence, machine learning, large language models (LLM), data analytics, and related technologies. Because so much of modern life is impacted by these technologies, we encourage everyone to take part in iConference 2025 and join scholars, practitioners, and thought leaders from across the intellectual landscape in exploring the profound implications of living in an AI-gorithmic world. Join us for presentations, workshops and panels investigating the ways in which cultural, political, organizational, economic and other social dynamics have been and are/will be altered by algorithmic processes. Meet researchers critically analyzing the economic transformations brought about by AI, LLMs machine learning, and predictive analytics. Discuss with experts the psychological and sociological dimensions of living under algorithmic influences. See how interdisciplinary approaches that bridge the gap between technology, society, and human values. Virtual Academic Program : 11 - 14 March 2025 Onsite Academic Program in Bloomington, Indiana, USA : 18 - 22 March 2025 Please register  to participate in iConference 2025. Registration is now open on the ConfTool   website, and full registration details can be found here: https://www.ischools.org/registration-and-access Early Bird Registration Deadline is 31 January 2025.  Program overview iConference tracks Virtual Physical Student Symposium ✔ (AP & EU / African sessions only) ✔ (NA session only) Doctoral Colloquium ✔ (AP & EU / African sessions only) ✔ (NA session only) Early Career Colloquium ✘ ✔ Workshops & Panels ✘ ✔ Posters ✔ ✔ Chinese Research Papers ✔ ✘ Spanish-Portuguese Research Papers ✔ ✘ Short Research Papers ✔ ✔ Full Research Papers ✔ ✔ More program details will be provided in the coming months. Additional information for travels to the onsite part of the conference in Bloomington, Indiana, USA can be found on our dedicated travel information  website.

University of California Berkeley Application Deadline: Friday, Jan 3, 2025 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time) The School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, invites applications for appointment to the faculty at the Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor rank. Digital technologies have extraordinary capacity to improve the quality of human life, enrich personal and social interactions, boost economic productivity, solve large scale societal problems from mass transportation to public health, and more. Over the last decade, however, it has become clear that the human and social components of the overall systems are rate-limiting factors in those transformations. What is needed now and for the foreseeable future is attention to the security, safety, and trust dimensions that emerge when people interact with digital technologies. We seek applications from scholars who work to address this intersection directly. An ideal candidate will have some core technical foundation, but will be working with technology to address other parts of the security, safety, and trust system that depends on people and institutions as much as it does on technology. This includes areas like trusted/trustworthy algorithms and algorithmic decision making. We are looking for scholars whose work takes into account multicultural environments and issues of poverty and exclusion on a global basis and assesses trust more broadly than simply transparency or explainability. The School of Information is a graduate research and education community committed to expanding access to information and to improving its usability, reliability, and credibility while preserving security and privacy. This requires the insights of scholars from diverse fields — information and computer science, design, social sciences, management, law, and policy. The I School is home to the Master of Information and Cybersecurity (MICS) program, and partner of the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC).

Issue #93 by Michael Seadle  (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Retraction watch recently published a reference to a Nature  article by Diana Kwon called; ““AI-Generated Images Threaten Science — Here’s How Researchers Hope to Spot Them.”¹ The quality of AI generated images has improved over recent years.    “Already, an arms race is emerging as integrity specialists, publishers and technology companies race to develop AI tools that can assist in rapidly detecting deceptive, AI-generated elements of papers. …  Pinpointing AI-produced images poses a huge challenge: they are often almost impossible to distinguish from real ones, at least with the naked eye.” ¹ This could well mean that some papers are slipping through, but new AI-based tools may help to catch them. Some companies have already started to develop tools:  “The makers behind tools such as Imagetwin and Proofig, which use AI to detect integrity issues in scientific figures, are expanding their software to weed out images created by generative AI.” ¹  Whether these new tools are reliable is of course a serious question:    “‘I have great hopes for these tools,’ [Jana] Christopher says. But she notes that their outputs will always need to be assessed by an expert who can verify the issues they flag….These tools are ‘limited, but certainly very useful, as it means we can scale up our effort of screening submissions,’ she adds.” ¹ Publishers themselves are interested in addressing the problem, because it affects their reputations, but a serious question is how capably and how fast the publishing industry will be able address the problem. It seems unlikely that even major publishers have the in-house AI expertise to build effective detection tools, or they could have done so already.  Committees working on the problem, including “United2Act and the STM Integrity Hub”¹  The focus of both of these projects appears to be paper mills, which are definitely a concern for the scholarly community, and represent a problem that legitimate publishers have a commercial interest in addressing. Kevin Patrick says:    “Fraudsters shouldn’t sleep well at night. They could fool today’s process, but I don’t think they’ll be able to fool the process forever. ”¹     Forever may be longer than scholars want to wait. Perhaps the iSchools should set up a research group to address the problem. 1 : Kwon, Diana. “AI-Generated Images Threaten Science — Here’s How Researchers Hope to Spot Them.” Nature , November 5, 2024.   https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03542-8 .

University of Tennessee Knoxville Application Deadline: The position will be open until filled The Precision Health & Environment (PHE) cluster at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, seeks exceptional candidates to fill one 9-month tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level, primarily in the School of Information Sciences , starting August 1, 2025. The PHE cluster is part of the “It Takes a Volunteer” cluster hiring initiative at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. The PHE will be a cluster team of excellence in systems modeling, artificial intelligence, health informatics, health information, and communication specialists, health care, epidemiology, environmental engineering, natural language processing, and machine learning. As part of this institutional priority initiative, new hires will join a dynamic core group of scientific collaborators with complementary experience and a shared interest in building a national reputation for excellence and innovation in PHE. In addition, clusters are expected to work together to grow the University’s reputation in PHE through shared grant proposals, publications, and innovative new curricular programming.

University of North Texas Application Deadline: The review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the search is closed. The Department of Information Science at the University of North Texas (UNT) invites applications at the rank of Associate or Full Professor with the additional responsibility as the Chair of Department of Information Science. The department chair holds a 12-month appointment. We seek candidates who are dynamic, enthusiastic, and visionary leaders with an internationally recognized research reputation in one or more core information science areas that complement existing departmental strengths in information and knowledge creation, use, communication, discovery, selection, retrieval, analysis, evaluation, and management. The candidates will be expected to foster a vibrant educational environment, promote innovative research, and enhance community engagement. The Chair is expected to collaborate with faculty, staff, and students to advance the department’s mission and vision and bring a collaborative and forward-thinking approach to interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary/transdisciplinary education. Candidates must have an earned doctorate in information science or related field. The successful candidate will have demonstrated an active research agenda, with a consistent and robust record of grant seeking and high-quality publications, as well as a strong commitment to innovative teaching. Applicants seeking appointment with tenure at the associate professor or professor rank must meet UNT’s criteria for tenure at the appropriate level.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Application Deadline: January 14, 2025 As part of our growing, strategic focus on AI along with data science, School of Information Studies (SOIS) is inviting applications for a full-time tenure track Assistant Professor position. The candidate will join us in preparing future information professionals to understand and apply AI-based technologies and techniques in various information organizations, including libraries, archives and private organizations, to add value by solving real-world problems. We seek scholars whose research, teaching, and impact in the field of AI in IST/LIS emphasize on: generative AI, natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs),deep learning or other machine learning (ML) frameworks, the interaction between human and AI, and AI in applied contexts, with specific interest in information retrieval and searching; information organization (metadata, classification, and cataloging); recommendation systems; chatbots and virtual reference services; the preservation, discovery, and accessibility of digital materials; data science (text and data mining); knowledge management and information visualization; user behavior analysis; sentiment and opinion analysis; and cybersecurity and/or anomaly detection. The successful candidate will be expected to maintain an active research agenda and contribute to the scholarship of the School and College through externally funded research, teach both face-to-face and online classes at graduate and undergraduate levels, develop courses focused on AI at graduate and undergraduate levels, mentor graduate students, contribute to service in accordance with the university policy, and participate in school, college and university activities.

Issue #92 by Michael Seadle  (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Retraction watch highlighted two articles from the journal Nature about related academic integrity problems. The article by Jackson Ryan about “Exposing Predatory Journals: Anonymous Sleuthing Account Goes Public” explains that his reason for the anonymous posts on X (formerly Twitter) was to avoid the problems that finally forced Jeffrey Beall to take down his blog about predatory publishing. His pseudonym is “ Publishing with Integrity ”¹   “Publishing with Integrity was initially set up to report on, and try to address, the issues posed by predatory journals and publishers. It quickly became apparent that this was the tip of a very big iceberg, and there are many other challenges that need to be addressed, including paper mills, which churn out fake papers to order; buying and selling authorships; and, in the past few years, the challenges posed by artificial intelligence, especially large language models that can generate hundreds of articles in a matter of minutes.”¹ The second article by Richard Van Noorden had the title “Journals with High Rates of Suspicious Papers Flagged by Science-Integrity Start-Up.” It discusses a website called “ Argos ” that    “... gives papers a risk score on the basis of their authors’ publication records, and on whether the paper heavily cites already-retracted research. A paper categorized as ‘high risk’ might have multiple authors whose other studies have been retracted for reasons related to misconduct, for example. Having a high score doesn’t prove that a paper is low quality, but suggests that it is worth investigating.” ²   The article mentioned two other websites that “... look for red flags in papers.” ²  Argos offers a table of “[t]he publishers with the greatest number — and proportion — of 'high-risk' articles in their portfolio from 2014 to 2024…” ² It is perhaps unsurprising that Hindawi, which is now closed, has by far the highest negative score. Publishers take the ratings seriously:    “... Chris Graf, head of research integrity at Springer Nature, says that the journal investigates every issue raised with it. He adds that the proportion of its content that has been highlighted is comparatively low given its size.”²   The problem is not that the publishers are indifferent, but that they simply do not have the capacity to deal with the scale of potential integrity violations. Universities can help only if they ease the pressure on early career academics to publish beyond their capacity. They should have the freedom to think. 1 : Ryan, Jackson. “Exposing Predatory Journals: Anonymous Sleuthing Account Goes Public.” Nature , October 22, 2024.   https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03321-5   .   2 : Van Noorden, Richard. “Journals with High Rates of Suspicious Papers Flagged by Science-Integrity Start-Up.” Nature , October 22, 2024.   https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03427-w .