The Presence of Ghost Publications Among Canadian Plastic Surgery Residency Applicants: How Honest Are Canadians?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Physicians with history of unprofessional behaviour during their medical training are shown to be 3 times more likely to have board disciplinary action later in their career. One realm in which unprofessional behaviour takes place is the phenomenon of unverifiable publications or "ghost publications." To that end, this study aims to assess the rate of ghost publications among a recent cohort of Canadian Plastic Surgery residency applicants to determine if this phenomenon is geographic in nature. Methods: The current study was a retrospective, cross-sectional observational study; a review of all residency applications submitted to a single Canadian Plastic Surgery residency program from 2015 to 2018 was performed and all their listed publications were verified for accuracy. The review was conducted by a third party librarian and a research coordinator blinded to the authors identifying information. "Ghost publication" was defined as any publication listed as "published," "accepted," or "in-press" that did not exist in the literature. Results: A total of 196 applications of 186 applicants were submitted over the span of 4 years. A total of 362 publications listed as peer-reviewed articles, belonging to 114 applications were extracted and reviewed. Among the 362 publications listed as peer-reviewed articles, 2 could not be found in the literature (0.55%). Additionally, 42 citations were found with 48 minor differences than what was cited. Conclusions: The rate of ghost publications among recent applicants to a Plastic Surgery residency program is low (less than 1%). Future studies should investigate methods to further improve and instill the value of professionalism in our future plastic surgery trainees.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".