Fishy Text in Research Articles: Fraud or Fault?
A reel big mystery as a strange new species of error appears in major journals
What do the predaceous chub (Parazacco spilurus), a non-existent species of rattlebox moth (Utetheisa kong), and a paper mulberry plant (Broussonetia papyrifera) have in common?
They’ve all started appearing in scientific journal articles over the last few months, but peculiarly, you can find them in articles unrelated to the study of wildlife biology or conservation or botany. The fauna and flora are appearing in research about hearing loss in the elderly, nerve repair and ankle injuries in firefighters. Wha….?
What does the predaceous chub have to do with that?
Last week, I received an email from Leon Xiao, assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong. He had begun to notice Latin names for a variety of species were appearing in all sorts of places. After a little sleuthing, he’d discovered the phrases were turning up in scientific papers by various publishers, including Springer Nature, Elsevier and Frontiers.
Xiao wanted to bring it to the wider attention of the scientific community and I wanted to dig in and try and figure out exactly what is going on.
Spoiler alert: I haven’t figured it out yet. But have found a ton of Weird Stuff.
Of these phrases, the one Xiao was seeing regularly was:
Parazacco spilurus subsp. spilurus.1
This is the scientific name for the predaceous chub, though the “subsp. spilurus” is an unnecessary addition2. This isn’t an impressive fish. It’s like the vanilla icecream of fish. If someone showed you a picture of it, you’d say “that’s a fish”.
But Parazacco spilurus is showing up in several journal articles with the following headlines:
“Integrated transcriptomic analysis identifies lysosomal autophagy-related genes in sarcopenia”
“Analysis of influencing factors of cognitive frailty in older adults community patients based on restricted cubic spline”
“Flow cytometry-based validation of soluble biomarker detection”
There is no reason why the chub should find itself in these places and, indeed, if it did it would not end well for the fish, I imagine.
Among the papers, there are not always obvious commonalities in content, but all authors from papers featuring Parazacco so far appear to be from Chinese institutions.
And it’s not only research where Parazacco is appearing.
It’s also, weirdly, finding itself in listings on Alibaba for … adhesive?
So, here we have ourselves a little mystery, a new species of unknown error in science…
Mysterium verbi distorti
In keeping with our Latin theming so far, I’m calling this phenomenon Mysterium verbi distorti.
I’ve taken it from a (probably extremely poorly translated3) idea of “Tortured Phrases” — phenomena in the scientific literature which have become a sign of potential error and integrity breaches.
If you’re not up with your scientific integrity investigations, tortured phrases are a concept identified by Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbe and Alexander Magazinov a few years back. You don’t have to look far to find them. Cabanac and co. found them in more than 3,000 papers to January 2022.
They’re bloody good fun too. For instance, you may be so lucky to have seen the term “bosom peril” appear in a scientific paper. This is a rephrasing of the term “breast cancer”. Similar substitutions appear for words like artificial intelligence (replaced with counterfeit consciousness [lol]) or smart home (replaced with clever home [lmao]).
When Xiao pointed these Latin names out, tortured phrases were the first thing I thought of: Perhaps these substitutions were being made via automated tools — either AI or word libraries or paraphrasing tools — as non-English speaking authors were translating their work into English. The errors then, somehow, slipped through editing and the peer review process, which is a little embarrassing.
For instance, take this article, published in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports on October 29, 2025:
Epidemiological attribution of knee and ankle injuries in firefighters
The study’s abstract says it “aimed to evaluate the main factors of knee and ankle injuries among Chinese firefighters, focusing on the role of training arrangements, training conditions, and knowledge of training injuries.”
And yet, here we find the predaceous chub, that devil of a fish!!!!!
In Table 7, Parazacco spilurus appears across the final row of the entire table. Every single entry begins with the Latin name.
The section that follows this table also includes another Latin species name — broussonetia papyrifera — that is inserted directly in the middle of another sentence.
This study is about human beings, sure, but there are three instances in this paper where Homo sapiens appears. Two of these appearances are bizarre. The paper says:
“Secondly, the included risk factors such as “training load (A2)”, “homo sapiens protective equipment (B4)”, and “rehabilitation measures (C4)”
It seems in the corresponding table that discusses statistics on these variables, Table 4, that the B4 category is titled “personal protective equipment”. This seems to me like a substitution, similar to that seen in tortured phrases above.
I reported the issues in this paper to Scientific Reports on Friday last week. The team provided a statement on Tuesday, January 13.4
It comes via Chief Editor, Rafal Marszalek: “Thank you for flagging this. We'll investigate the paper thoroughly, and my colleagues in the research integrity team will dig into the phrasing issue more generally and raise it with the wider publishing community.”
These aren’t the only terms. So far, here’s the list of strange Latin names that have been inserted across the literature:
Parazacco spilurus subsp. spilurus
Broussonetia papyrifera
Utetheisa kong
Phoxinus phoxinus subsp. phoxinus
Castanopsis chinensis
Most of these species names seem to appear subsequent to publication in August. Some of the papers I have viewed were accepted, at the latest, around September. There are at least 20 papers identified with the first phrase, and likely more that I can’t access with a freelancers institutional login :|, the others are a little less common, though Broussonetia and Utetheisa are appearing a little more.
Of the above five, there’s another strange place where you will find all these Latin phrases…
On the website, Webnovel, I stumbled across this story, if we can be so generous to call it that:
The earth is frozen: I have built a doomsday safe zone
I didn’t read the whole thing because my brain is already polluted enough by the internet but my guess would be that it’s AI-generated.
Several chapters (all?) feature Latin species names totally unrelated to the story. For instance, Chapter 12 includes both Parazacco spilurus subsp. spilurus and Utetheisa kong, in amongst a story about, I assume, the guy from I Am Legend trying to store water in his warehouse at the end of the world.
You can see, it also features weird additions.
Phoxinus phoxinus, dear reader, is a Western European fish colloquially known as the “minnow”. It has, to my knowledge, not escaped the bounds of the marine world and started trading stocks and crypto.
SO what the HELL is going on here? We have scientific literature, strange doomsday webnovels and Alibaba express listings.
Well:
I am not sure yet but I have decided to point this out so the scientific publishers and researchers with peer review assessments may look for these terms, or other strange terms, in the literature right now.
[Small update 12-01: some speculation by followers on Bluesky using LLM that this is a translation tool issue. This may well be the case and there seems to be evidence for it, but that doesn’t really give us a reason as to why these phrases made it into so much of the scientific literature…]5I have had contact with several authors of the papers here. The responses have not shed light on how these insertions came to be. I believe one response was generated by AI and the documents provided by the researchers as evidence of an AutoText mess up seemed to have been created in response to the discovery. I am continuing to dig into this.
At the very least, the spurious and nonsensical word additions should be removed from these papers and the publishers should investigate where the data associated with these papers comes from.
In terms of timing, all the spurious references seem to appear in the literature after August 2025, though some articles were submitted around May. Does this correspond with some firmware update of a particular LLM, AI or translation software?
The fact all of these terms appear in a webnovel with well over 70 chapters could be suggestive of the fact they were generated, perhaps in Chinese, then translated with a tool, which did not accurately convert across. Whatever tool is being used, it’s apparent that the tool is in use in the scientific world, and may be able to be accessed by the public. That’s a useful thread to pull on.
For now, our mysterium verbi distorti remains just that. It’s too early to say just what these phrases might indicate, but alarm bells are ringing!!!! If it’s merely a translational error, then that still makes me feel a little uneasy — so much of this stuff is getting past peer review, into high quality journals
I hope to have a little more detail next week…
Last week’s issue:
Some scribbles
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Well the “subsp.” tag isn’t. That doesn’t seem to exist.
There’s no need for the subspecies indicator here, which already tells us something.
Latin studiers and professors, I am sorry.
That makes sense, it was late in the week (and we work in different time zones) and it’s my understanding they are looking into this, but no formal statement provided just yet. [update: formal statement provided Tuesday Jan 13. This post was updated at 10:30 a.m. UTC on January 15]
Post was updated at 4:04 a.m. UTC
I would guess that your fifth point is the most likely. Chinese is a very complex language, and individual characters can convey very different meanings in context. Perhaps there are characters for specific fish that when combined or distorted mean entirely different things, and some new translation tool - likely AI driven - is incorrectly translating.
Hilarious that these all got published.
Any guesses as to what the original words were that were substituted for these species names? My Chinese is very rudimentary so I can't guess.
But it reminds me of the 2000s Star Wars: Backstroke of the West (a bootleg DVD whose English subtitles had apparently been generated by machine translation of the actual Chinese subtitles). One of the memorable substitutions was "Presbyterian Church" for "Jedi Council" via something like "council of elders", which is what presbyters were in the church context.
On the other hand, given the tendency of LLMs to hallucinate, maybe this isn't a explicable question of picking the wrong meaning out of several possibilities from the dictionary, but some constellations of Chinese characters that somehow trigger this AI to associate them with some life sciences reference materials...