this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Assuming this is carelessness, this just goes to show that working in academia isn't an indicator of critical thinking skills IMO
Your assumption is wrong. This was not carelessness. Academic dishonesty and lack of integrity is an ongoing issue in research. China is one of the biggest culprits for blatant plagiarism and IP theft, although recently even academics from Ivy league universities have been implicated in fraudulent publications. The simple fact is that number of publications is the main metric used in academia for hiring and promotion. This leads to a perverse incentive model where academics prioritise publishing over conducting good science, thus all we get is a shit load of noise (poor articles) that obscure the signal (good articles).
Sure, let's make this about China when 4 out of 5 of the authors credited for the original article are from Africa.
While only one of which was from China. This doesn't even address the fact that the republished paper came from Mawcha which describes a study on millipedes in... Africa. Guess what, Wenxiang Yang wasn't even credited in this version. Was your reply carelessness or dishonesty and lack of integrity? I don't care where the misinformation and carelessness comes from as long as we're making efforts to stop it, but this is highly ironic.
In academic publishing you look at the order of authors and the author contribution statement to determine the hierarchy of the research group. In this case the Chinese author is the most senior, and was the member who approved the submission. In such niche areas as this most senior academics will know most of the relevant authors and literature. Thus carelessness is too kind a word where negligence and lack of integrity would be more fitting.
Further, with regards to the primary author my assertion still stands, it was not carelessness but rather brazen academic misconduct, as demonstrated by the resubmission (not republication as you suggest).
FWIW, last author is not automatically most senior. That is the way some fields do it, but others do it strictly by amount contributed to the paper. I have been both first and last author on different papers during my first post-doc.
Honestly, I bet he has the skills, he just didn't use them because he didn't care, or is overworked, or for whatever reason.
A lot of people don't understand the limitations/weaknesses of AI. The carelessness was probably more in not actually learning about the tool he was relying on (and just assuming it was reliable information).
It's like the aeroplane lawyer case some time ago. People treat the computer as an arbiter of truth, and/or think checking is just asking the chatbot "Did you use a real citation for this?".
You make a valid point, and there are certainly more considerations than my original reply would lead one to believe. Cheers.