After noticing the citation of his research, the scientist was surprised to learn that it was done improperly using artificial intelligence (AI). Here's what he says:
"One of our papers has been cited by a team of authors who have published a book in German on “Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics”. The book has as subtitle “A machine generated overview”. Especially the fact that authors from Ireland have published a book in German and the use of generative AI for the book has made me even more curious.
First of all, the introduction and much of the text did not really make a lot of sense and the language was not up to scientific standards. Second, I read the part where our paper should have been cited and I was surprised to see that our publication has been somehow mentioned, but that there is no proper citation in the text (but there is one in the references). After reading the text more intensively, which should be a summary of our paper according to the introduction, I had the impression that the text itself is not a summary, but a direct translation of our original publication. Puzzled by this case of plagiarism I first checked how Springer as a publisher acts in such kinds of cases. I contacted the authors regarding the breach of these principles and I was also in touch with Springer regarding this project.
So an original text of me and my co-authors is resued without proper quotes and citation plus the text is marked as intellectual property of the new authors and even the book is published under a commercial license although our original text has a Creativecommons license. This is a really scary approach to scientific publishing and the potential future of authorship and publishing in the age of AI and a breach of publication principles. The publisher is currently still working.
