News that robots are coming to steal our jobs may have been underestimated, following an incident which suggests that automation is going a step further in preventing human discoveries being published at all.

Jean-Fran?ois Bonnefon, a research director at Toulouse School of Economics, told peers of his surprise in learning that a paper he submitted to an unnamed journal had been ¡°rejected by a robot¡±.

According to Dr Bonnefon, ¡°the bot detected ¡®a high level of textual overlap with previous literature¡¯. In other words, plagiarism.¡± On closer inspection, however, the behavioural scientist saw that the parts that had been flagged included little more than ¡°affiliations, standard protocol descriptions [and] references¡± ¨C namely, names and titles of papers that had been cited by others.

¡°It would have taken two [minutes] for a human to realise the bot was acting up,¡± he wrote on . ¡°But there is obviously no human in the loop here. We¡¯re letting bots make autonomous decisions to reject scientific papers.¡±

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Reaction to the post by Dr Bonnefon, who is currently a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested that his experience was far from unique. ¡°Your field is catching up,¡± said Sarah Horst, professor of planetary science at Johns Hopkins University, ¡°this happened to me for the first time in 2013.¡±

Sally Howells, managing editor of the?Journal of Physiology?and?Experimental Physiology, said that her publications and most others used Turnitin¡¯s iThenticate to detect potential plagiarism.

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¡°However, this is the first time that I have seen a ¡®desk rejection¡¯ based solely on the score,¡± she said.

Ms Howells said that most editors would ask the system to exclude references from a plagiarism scan. ¡°The software is incredibly useful, but must always be checked by a human,¡± she said. ¡°Thankfully there are still a few of them left.¡±

Kim Barrett, editor-in-chief of?The Journal of Physiology and distinguished professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, agreed that anti-plagiarism tools ¡°need to be used appropriately, and they should never be the basis for an automatic rejection¡±.

Mark Patterson, executive director of the online megajournal eLife, said that his platform did not use software to screen for plagiarism but did conduct ¡°a number of quality control checks¡­in addition to the scrutiny by the editors¡±.

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¡°Where computational methods are used at other publishers, staff need to then interpret the findings to avoid situations like the one highlighted,¡± he said. ¡°In the future, of course, these techniques are likely to get much better.¡±

rachael.pells@timeshighereducation.com