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"Cognitive Computation" appears to be a serious peer-reviewed Springer journal. This paper was published therein in 2024: Hassija, Vikas/Vinay Chamola/Atmesh Mahapatra/Abhinandan Singal/Divyansh Goel/Kaizhu Huang/Simone Scardapane/Indro Spinelli/Mufti Mahmud/Amir Hussain (2024), Interpreting Black Box Models: A Review on Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Computation 16:45-74. It has apperently been cited 433 times.

I am not very familiar with this field of research. Reading the paper, I was struck by a few things:

  1. It says "the GDPR that comes into effect across the EU on 25 May 2018" (p. 51). The paper was submitted in 2023.
  2. It says "The following equation is a mathematical representation of the H-statistic developed by Friedman and Popescu for interaction between any two features j and k." (p. 56). But no equation follows.
  3. On p. 57, the sentence reads: "The effectiveness and success of any interpretability method will depend on the specific context and". The sentence just ends there.
  4. The list on p. 49 seems like it was copied straight from ChatGPT.
  5. There is a list of abbreviations (table 1). But it contains only an apparently arbitrarily chosen subset of the abbreviations used in the text.
  6. There is an equation on p. 58. But none of the terms appearing therein are given any reference. Thus, I cannot attribute any meaning to it.
  7. There is more stuff like that and the text just seems (to me) overall repetitive and to a considerable extent poorly structured and incoherent.

What do you think? Is something off about this paper? Or is that normal in this field? Or am I misunderstanding something?

nbro
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Pascal
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Whenever I read a paper, I also try to look at the associations of the authors and if the author is noteworthy then their career trajectory. I am from India, and the authors of the aforementioned paper are associated mostly with not so good Indian institutions. Definitely these institutions are associated with low quality work because of lower exposure.

Also, the points you have mentioned, are good markers of whether the research work is run-out-of-the-mill research paper or some serious research. I understand that some good quality researchers push even unfinished work in conferences and journals so that they could benefit from the feedback of the reviewers.

If a journal has this kind of paper, make a note that irrespective of the publishing agency, the peer review process there is weak and thus a lot of garbage might have got published there.

I do not deny that one could extract meaningful information from reading even these kinds of papers. But that would be not a good use of time.

Shubham Kumar
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