Monday, January 04, 2021

Never Seen That Before

Back to work was never going to be fun, but the report I started today is ... ahh ... not very well done (though at least it's short). And it contains a mistake I've never seen before! 

The reports have citations to a variety of sources, most frequently articles in medical journals. These articles might have one author or might have many, might even have "The so-and-so Study Group" listed as an author, but I'm not sure I've ever seen one with no authors listed, which was the case with one of the citations in this report.

I was suspicious from first glance that something was weird about this article, because of the authors it listed. If an article is written by Mary Jones and Sarah Smith, it would be listed in the bibliography as "Jones, M. and Smith, S."; this one, in that format, said "With, T. and Agents, I." 

Now, there are plenty of names that seem unusual to me; the biblio can be a strong reminder that there are more names than are dreamt of in my philosophy. But With and Agents?

So I looked up the article, and along with a puzzling lack of authors listed at all (which is vanishingly rare and weird), there was this phrase at the beginning of the article: TREATMENT WITH IRON AGENTS.

Oh, dear, no. So that's where it came from. but, oh, so wrong!

2 comments:

  1. It is funny, though. But was this to see if a bot could write something that could get past human inspection?

    Or is my asking that just meaning that I've lived in Silicon Valley 35 years.

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