Xiaoli Nan
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drxnan.bsky.social
Xiaoli Nan
@drxnan.bsky.social
91 followers 130 following 4 posts
Professor of Communication Science @UMD | persuasion, health communication, misinformation, AI, media effects
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drxnan.bsky.social
Just assume we authors will have to deal with not only AI reviewers but also AI editors..and vice versa…
March 30, 2025 at 4:54 PM
drxnan.bsky.social
I agree; if AI is used to polish and organize thoughts that’s fine. However it was clear several comments were directly generated by AI focusing on obscure technical issues that a generalist editor is unlikely to know.
March 30, 2025 at 4:25 PM
drxnan.bsky.social
We once got a desk reject from a top comm journal and the editor’s comments are clearly AI generated. Is that ethical?
March 30, 2025 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Xiaoli Nan
jayvanbavel.bsky.social
This is consistent with a review of 747 COVID papers we published in @nature.com finding that evidence for social science and behavior claims during COVID as very high (16/18 claims were supported) and this research was highly rigorrous (average N= 16,848) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A synthesis of evidence for policy from behavioural science during COVID-19 - Nature
Evaluation of evidence generated to test 19 proposed policy recommendations and guidance for the future.
www.nature.com
December 23, 2024 at 1:00 PM
Reposted by Xiaoli Nan
carlbergstrom.com
We wrote about this at some length in our paper "Misinformation in and about science".

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
In addition, researchers commonly misstate or overstate the implications of their work (35). In concert with researchers, university press offices play a particularly important role in communicating science—but too frequently do so in ways that prioritize web traffic over accuracy. Sometimes spin is carried over from the journal article itself (36); other times, it is added in the press release. A biomedical report might omit important caveats, draw inappropriate extrapolations from mouse models, and exaggerate prescriptive implications. One analysis found that nearly a third of 525 papers in top obesity or nutrition journals make inappropriate causal claims in their abstracts or titles (37); in another study, roughly the same fraction of health-related papers widely shared on social media used inappropriately strong causal language (38). Some fields may be more prone to hype than others. A new result on the geometry of Banach spaces may be more difficult to hype than a bioweapon claim, but we surmise that most fields are susceptible. Much of this truth bending may be unnecessary. Most studies (39–41) fail to find an association between exaggeration and uptake by the news media. Admittedly, selection bias may play a role: perhaps the stories that are not exaggerated are those that do not need to be. In any case, high-quality press releases appear to drive higher-quality news stories on that research (42, 43).
December 22, 2024 at 10:26 PM