Dave Bloom
@drumkitdave.bsky.social
Music stuff, librarian/info lit stuff, other duties as assigned
A big problem in academic databases as well as commercial search engines. Some vendors (looking at you, ebsco) have become so taken with rewarding novices with lots of results for poorly conceived searches that they’ve tanked precison and replicability
August 23, 2026 at 9:00 PM
A big problem in academic databases as well as commercial search engines. Some vendors (looking at you, ebsco) have become so taken with rewarding novices with lots of results for poorly conceived searches that they’ve tanked precison and replicability
Love this point and would add that EVERY domain has its experts even if they don’t come immediately to mind. We librarians hear “you shouldn’t use ai for xyz, but it’s great if you just need to find some information quickly” regularly from people who haven’t thought at all about information seeking
July 10, 2026 at 12:50 PM
Love this point and would add that EVERY domain has its experts even if they don’t come immediately to mind. We librarians hear “you shouldn’t use ai for xyz, but it’s great if you just need to find some information quickly” regularly from people who haven’t thought at all about information seeking
Curious how often this happens in fields or organizations where the messaging around ai stresses that “YOU are responsible for verifying outputs”, isn’t it?
July 10, 2026 at 12:32 PM
Curious how often this happens in fields or organizations where the messaging around ai stresses that “YOU are responsible for verifying outputs”, isn’t it?
If you don’t want to do all the following up, you could work with your campus librarians (maybe start with a schol comm librarian). It’s helpful for us to know about this stuff to spot patterns with certain publishers. They may also be able to move things along with the journal or acm in general.
June 10, 2026 at 10:19 PM
If you don’t want to do all the following up, you could work with your campus librarians (maybe start with a schol comm librarian). It’s helpful for us to know about this stuff to spot patterns with certain publishers. They may also be able to move things along with the journal or acm in general.
Well, a wife-abusing cannibal ex-boxer told us we were all fat on behalf of RFK Jr, and Amazon tried to sell us surveillance tech on the backs of missing puppies, so the race to the bottom is competitive, but the AI ads have been more than up to the task.
February 9, 2026 at 2:52 AM
Well, a wife-abusing cannibal ex-boxer told us we were all fat on behalf of RFK Jr, and Amazon tried to sell us surveillance tech on the backs of missing puppies, so the race to the bottom is competitive, but the AI ads have been more than up to the task.
Here’s another pretty good one on NotebookLM and summarization. dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
dl.acm.org
December 22, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Here’s another pretty good one on NotebookLM and summarization. dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
Academic librarian here and my colleagues and I have done some work on instances like this. A tricky thing about sketchy publications is that you often can't trust dates. This article may have a 2021 data on it, but that doesn't mean it's actually been around since then. 1/
December 21, 2025 at 4:32 PM
You had the same thought as I did! I explained what I found above.
December 21, 2025 at 4:24 PM
You had the same thought as I did! I explained what I found above.
By November 2023, it included the 2020-2022 run, including the article that Jill linked. Not a sure thing that AI was involved (other citations in this article are sloppy, but not necessarily AI), but, despite claimed publication date, it wasn't on the site until months after ChatGPT came out. end/
December 21, 2025 at 4:22 PM
By November 2023, it included the 2020-2022 run, including the article that Jill linked. Not a sure thing that AI was involved (other citations in this article are sloppy, but not necessarily AI), but, despite claimed publication date, it wasn't on the site until months after ChatGPT came out. end/
There aren't Wayback-archived versions of the article or volume/issue, but there's an archived version of the publication archive. Here's the weird part - by September 2022, the publication archive was out of order and didn't have any volumes published after 2020. 4/
December 21, 2025 at 4:15 PM
There aren't Wayback-archived versions of the article or volume/issue, but there's an archived version of the publication archive. Here's the weird part - by September 2022, the publication archive was out of order and didn't have any volumes published after 2020. 4/
Anyway, after I did some checking on the article that Jill linked (mixed results--journal isn't in Ulrichs Periodical Directory, but the credited authors are affiliated as described), I used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to see when this article actually showed up . . . 3/
December 21, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Anyway, after I did some checking on the article that Jill linked (mixed results--journal isn't in Ulrichs Periodical Directory, but the credited authors are affiliated as described), I used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to see when this article actually showed up . . . 3/
For instance, about a year ago, we found a publisher that populated their archive with a bunch of back-dated abstracts that were almost certainly all AI-generated. It lent them an air of legitimacy presumably so that their more recent, low-quality articles had some weight to them. 2/
December 21, 2025 at 4:02 PM
For instance, about a year ago, we found a publisher that populated their archive with a bunch of back-dated abstracts that were almost certainly all AI-generated. It lent them an air of legitimacy presumably so that their more recent, low-quality articles had some weight to them. 2/
Academic librarian here and my colleagues and I have done some work on instances like this. A tricky thing about sketchy publications is that you often can't trust dates. This article may have a 2021 data on it, but that doesn't mean it's actually been around since then. 1/
December 21, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Academic librarian here and my colleagues and I have done some work on instances like this. A tricky thing about sketchy publications is that you often can't trust dates. This article may have a 2021 data on it, but that doesn't mean it's actually been around since then. 1/
I checked through some of the other citations, as well. Most are either legit or only contain minor issues that are pretty common human goofs, like this one (wrong volume/issue, wrong page numbers), but there are some odd things about this article/journal that I'll post further up.
December 21, 2025 at 3:49 PM
I checked through some of the other citations, as well. Most are either legit or only contain minor issues that are pretty common human goofs, like this one (wrong volume/issue, wrong page numbers), but there are some odd things about this article/journal that I'll post further up.
The upshot is that we were able to knock results from the journal out of our article search and got the publisher's journals removed from Ulrich's. But this is clearly going to be an eternal game of Whac-a-Mole for librarians (and for patrons who contact us to report this stuff)! 4/4
December 6, 2025 at 1:53 AM
The upshot is that we were able to knock results from the journal out of our article search and got the publisher's journals removed from Ulrich's. But this is clearly going to be an eternal game of Whac-a-Mole for librarians (and for patrons who contact us to report this stuff)! 4/4
In another, a student found an article that had seemingly AI-generated fake citations using our institutional article search (which searches our subscription stuff, but also beyond). It got picked up via CrossRef. Another sketchy publisher, but this one with enough oomph to be listed in Ulrich's. 3/
December 6, 2025 at 1:49 AM
In another, a student found an article that had seemingly AI-generated fake citations using our institutional article search (which searches our subscription stuff, but also beyond). It got picked up via CrossRef. Another sketchy publisher, but this one with enough oomph to be listed in Ulrich's. 3/
In one, a researcher told us he'd found himself cited as coauthor on a paper he hadn't written. We found a few years' worth of backlog on the journal's page (hijacked version of a legit journal) was AI-generated abstracts and titles to pad things out for the newer, dubious full-text articles. 2/
December 6, 2025 at 1:43 AM
In one, a researcher told us he'd found himself cited as coauthor on a paper he hadn't written. We found a few years' worth of backlog on the journal's page (hijacked version of a legit journal) was AI-generated abstracts and titles to pad things out for the newer, dubious full-text articles. 2/
My colleagues and I (librarians at UW-Madison) just ran a two-hour presentation on the impact of gen AI on predatory publishing for library staff this week! It was directly inspired by a few patron interactions similar to what you're describing. 1/
December 6, 2025 at 1:37 AM
My colleagues and I (librarians at UW-Madison) just ran a two-hour presentation on the impact of gen AI on predatory publishing for library staff this week! It was directly inspired by a few patron interactions similar to what you're describing. 1/
My bandmates and I were *really* into that show. A few years later, a club offered my ex-bandmates' new band an opening spot for either Flickerstick or the Arcade Fire, who were just about to receive their Pitchfork 10.0 for Funeral. Guess which show my friends picked . . .
April 29, 2025 at 2:35 AM
My bandmates and I were *really* into that show. A few years later, a club offered my ex-bandmates' new band an opening spot for either Flickerstick or the Arcade Fire, who were just about to receive their Pitchfork 10.0 for Funeral. Guess which show my friends picked . . .