So, once again, I am attempting to help a student reduce an AI detection score to below the mid-30% range, according to Turnitin. Strangely enough, Grammarly agrees with that score, but flags different passages. Their agreement is around 10%. Does that mean the paper is 60% AI-generated?
Like my experience with the Turnitin plagiarism checker, Grammarly also changes its mind about what to flag. Between checks, a clean paragraph with no changes shows up flagged, and then a previously flagged paragraph with no changes shows up clean. I begin to think what AI detectors flag is mostly random.
Change, check, change, check, change again and leap for joy when the flag disappears—until the next time, when it may be flagged again.
The realisation dawns that my efforts are pointless. The machine is learning from my changes, taking possession of whatever text I submit, then flagging it because it now belongs to the machine.
We cannot win. AI is designed to replace us: Every effort made to circumvent or sidestep that intention allows the machine to learn how to better sideline us. The human mind—everything cognitive, data-based, and documented—is being hijacked, one step at a time. And every time we participate, we give it more power.
So, after a PhD in psychology and a lifetime of contemplating the evolution of human consciousness in pursuit of the Truth, the truth is that I would be well-advised to attend a trade school.
Editing involves reading a text with rapt attention, not just once, but several times for different issues.
Most important is reading for the client’s voice, unique turns of phrase, and ways of connecting ideas.
Doing that takes time, and when editors charge by the hour, it can be expensive; even if you manage to negotiate a fixed-price contract, the editor will cut the cloth according to the fee you are willing to pay.
Humanising Text
If you use AI to write for you, you are going to end up sounding bland, like a machine, and put your editor to sleep. And if you submit anything, for example, ask for a summary, remember that AI is learning from what you submit and is going to take possession of the text, and an AI detector will flag it.
The implications of using AI to generate your work are that it takes three times as long as a normal edit to edit AI out, and it will never be completely out. That ends up expensive.
Your editor has the skills to ensure linguistic integrity based on the voice heard, transforming what is shared into a more formal, grammatically correct tone because that is what editors do and what academic writing demands.
So, write in your own voice, however “bad” you think that sounds.
The Review Mode
Because I have applied, taught, and edited methods, I also read for methodological integrity and coherence. If you make claims, you need to substantiate them with arguments or evidence, or at the very least, a carefully considered opinion.
What that means is if I notice incongruities or suspect claims, I am going to comment and sometimes suggest a remedy or options around it. Sometimes I will help navigate a response to a supervisor’s comment.
Remember, you do not necessarily have to do everything the supervisor (or reviewing editor) says, only successfully defend what you did logically and coherently. If that is already in place, I do not have to stop, consider, and comment, and that saves you time and money.
Citing Sources
Academic integrity demands citations or acknowledging the work that has helped you build your ideas, and the full details of the works cited must be listed in a footnote, endnote, bibliography, or references list. Different styles require the details in a different order with different punctuation conventions.
There are apps that can help: Zotero, Endnotes, etc; none are perfect, but they help if you use them from the outset.
So, you can save a lot of money just by approximating the style required by the institution, department, or journal to which you are submitting.
Remember too that AI generates fictitious sources. It takes a lot of time to verify and fact-check every source listed in a References list.
So, unless you are willing to pay, check the validity of every source you cite and its details when you set out writing your final draft.
Style Issues
A manuscript must also be presented in a particular way, based on the style a department, institution, or journal prefers.
I know what it is like writing a dissertation—the final product presented to an editor is a worked-through collection of texts, pieces gathered from the same and different computers with different styles and layouts.
Formatting is essential for cleaning up a document and makes it easier to read: The messier the formatting, the longer it takes to fix.
Some changes are easy to make, for example, using Advanced Search to remove extra spaces between words, or turning on Show/Hide and scrolling through the document several times to identify other embedded formatting glitches, like soft paragraph breaks.
So, when it comes to formatting, you can save yourself money just by getting the basics right: spacing, font size, and headings. Better still, find or create a template. Those aren’t perfect, but they can sure help reduce the editing bill.
SO…
If you want to reduce your editing bill:
Write in your own voice, however “bad” you think that sounds.
Approximate the style required by the institution, department, or journal to which you are submitting.
Check for the validity of every source you have cited.
Get the formatting basics right: spacing, font size, and headings.
In the end, the more of these tasks you do, the less you will have to pay your editor to do it for you.
As an editor for academics, postgraduates, and nonfiction writers, I was given the opportunity in the last couple of months to see just how unreliable and terrifying Turnitin is. For those who don’t know, Turnitin is a standard plagiarism detector that many academic institutions use to measure the extent to which a writer has presented a published author’s work as their own.
When I majored in Anthropology in the early 80s, it was more than four words in a row; now, it is five. Some institutions choose a 10% similarity score, others 12%. These are arbitrary measures.
Witness This…
The candidate did her first submission to Turnitin. The similarity score was 9%, acceptable for that institution, but there were swathes of text in a meticulously constructed 200-page literature review of already-developed models and frameworks that were flagged. As her editor, I supported her decision to rework some of those passages, and she did. To our surprise, the percentage went up 4%―beyond what was acceptable to the institution.
Intrigued, I compared the two reports. In the second report, pages and pages that were not flagged before were flagged. Most intriguing was the flagging of the opening sentence in the first report, but the same sentence in the second report was not. Whereas in the first report, literally nothing in the methodology chapter was flagged, in the second, passages were flagged, especially the section on sampling. There are only so many ways one can explain the difference between probability and non-probability sampling before one runs out of options. More intriguing still was that the research objectives and questions were flagged, as well as some verbatim interviews with participants and arbitrary phrases like “in Table 5.3.”
I wondered, “Has someone published her work in the month we have been working on it?” With the third report, at the eleventh hour, we managed to get the similarity score down to 10%—the very edge of submissability for that institution.
The arbitrariness of the measure (five words) and the percentage permitted is just part of the problem.
How many ways can a standard research claim be made?
First, it is easy to present five words in a row that are written in the same order as a published author because of how English is structured. Consider, for example, research report statements like, “A qualitative phenomenological approach was used in this study.” I suppose one can replace “used” with “applied” or “employed,” or start with an introductory phrase, “in this study,” ” but I know those have been used in numerous research reports because I have edited literally hundreds of research reports over the last 20 years, and there are not hundreds of ways to disclose the approach employed.
Second, due to the “publish or perish” mentality in academic contexts, so much has been published about so many topics in so many fields that any possible way to phrase the same ideas and link them has been used up. There is no new way of conveying your ideas and findings without being flagged by Turnitin, especially in a literature review. If a writer is looking to do an overview of a much-written-about field, like stress or leadership, that writer is at a disadvantage because many more published authors have tried to find different ways of saying the same thing. Moreover, in academic research, one is working with constructs and concepts that have been woven into models, frameworks, and theories. How many ways can a list of five components of a model be listed without presenting the list in the same order as an already-published author?
What about Voice and Cadence?
So what makes a formal research report original, rather than stolen? What makes the difference? I would claim it is in the cadence of the voice and the consistency of the cadence, bearing in mind that any writer is influenced by the voice of those they read.
Cadence is a level of language that Turnitin is not tuned into. And the irony? Turnitin is itself an AI program, and generative AI is the biggest plagiariser of all—it steals the content and voice of whatever has ever been published on the Web by anyone you could imagine. How cruel of academia to terrify students with such arbitrary measures of their contribution to knowledge and truth, and even more so, leave it to a machine that has no understanding of voice and how a voice is developed to make that judgment.
So, you are required or invited to submit a paper based on your PhD for publication in a journal.
Whether required or invited, bear in mind that besides acknowledging your supervisor/mentor as an author of the paper, you have far fewer words to contribute your sliver of truth—some journals allow as little as 3,000 words [1]. Others offer more space but presenting a PhD dissertation of 60,000 to 120,000 words [2] in just 8,000 or even 12,000 words may prove challenging.
Here are seven steps to reduce the pain of publishing an academic paper based on your PhD.
Pinning Downthe Purpose
An article requires a precise focus because you have far fewer words to play with. Are you showcasing a methodology? Describing a case study? Presenting a framework for consideration based on your literature review? Offering a meta-analysis? Reporting on the results of your research? Your purpose will determine your research questions, and your research questions, in turn, will determine what parts of your dissertation are relevant to answer that research question.
For example, you might have conducted broad research about what enables and obstructs firms from adopting data analytics and choose to focus on just the human resource factors in your paper. In that case, you would alert the reader to broader research conducted, but your focus would be on the human resource factors highlighted by the research rather than the technological enablers and obstructions.
Establishing the Journal Agenda
Depending on what you want to demonstrate or argue, the point of presenting your sliver of truth determines which journals to consider. If you intend to describe the merits of a qualitative case study, sending your work to a journal that publishes correlational research based on hypothetical constructs is pointless. Likewise, erudite models presented for testing require targeting discipline-specific audiences, and journals that value empirical evidence may not welcome a meta-analysis of constructs to include in a proposed framework.
Using Keywords
A helpful way of narrowing down possible publishers is plugging the keywords for your dissertation into Google Scholar, importing those titles into Zotero, and generating a list of journals where the articles include the same keywords. This exercise lets you identify journal titles where your sliver of truth might be accommodated.
You can also cast an eye over your references list. Where have the minds with whom you have been developing your thinking about the issue been publishing their work? It is important that you identify a receptive audience.
Identifying the Requirements
Once you have a short list, explore those journal requirements. At this point, the word count is the most important consideration. If what you wish to present, based on your Purpose, the journal’s Agenda, and the article’s Keywords, cannot be accommodated in 4,000 words, exclude those journals from your list. If you must pad your paper unnecessarily to reach 12,000 words, consider excluding those journals from your list. Now, you have a shortlist of journals for which you can write with a view to submitting your sliver of truth.
Crafting the Content
The fifth step is crafting your sliver of truth according to the requirements of your first choice on the shortlist. How much of your methodology must be secured to make your sliver of truth credible? Some journals require precise detail, others just a concise description covering all the bases—sample selection, data collection, data documentation, and data analysis—all within the required methodological and ethical parameters.
Some journals insist on specific headings—Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Discussion, and Conclusion; others permit the development of a unique and coherent argument where you can choose more exciting, meaningful, thematic headings.
Carving the Product
The sixth step demands that you begin to carve out and let go of anything in the dissertation that is not central to achieving your Purpose, demonstrating congruence with the journal’s Agenda, and deliberating upon your Keywords. Sometimes, it might be whole chapters you exclude; for example, if you present a theoretical framework for testing based on a meta-analysis of the literature in your field, your methodology, discussion, and conclusion chapters can be excluded, for the most part. I say “for the most part” because you might want to suggest the method by which the model was tested in your research as a research possibility in the Conclusion to your paper. And there you have the grounds for writing your next paper based on the results of testing the framework you proposed.
Other papers might require a golden thread that cuts to the chase with a precise summary of aspects of the research, and that means carving away constructs that are not required to support the sliver of truth you offer.
Proofread and Polish
Once you are clear about your Purpose, identified the journal’s Agenda, used your Keywords to generate a shortlist of potential publishers, are clear about which journals are read by a receptive audience, have identified your first choice in terms of allowing enough words to achieve your aims, and have crafted and carved the paper to support your answers to the research questions and conclusions, consider a professional proofread and polish to ensure your paper is well-structured and coherent and that the style is congruent with the journal’s requirements.
Remember, a well-written, coherent and well-structured paper that follows the style of the journal you chose has a better chance of being taken seriously, reaching a reviewer’s desk, and earning meaningful feedback. And if the answer from the journal editor is yes with no amendments or even yes with revisions, you are well on your way to contributing your sliver of truth and seeing your name in print.
