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Spectrum: Autism Research News

Community Newsletter: Tortured phrases; inherited variation; atypical speech and self-harm; autism prevalence

by  /  30 April 2023
Speech bubble formed by a network of communication


Illustration by Laurène Boglio

Guillaume Cabanac, creator of the Problematic Paper Screener, has flagged several autism-related studies that contain tortured phrases — strange paraphrases of established terms — on PubPeer:

Dorothy Bishop of the University of Oxford also commented on the last paper: “This paper makes very little sense and appears to be a typical AI gobbledegook Sandwich. The account of EEG methods is unlike anything I have ever seen before.”

In a Twitter thread, Emilie Wigdor of the Wellcome Sanger Institute described her team’s new preprint, “Investigating the role of common cis-regulatory variants in modifying penetrance of putatively damaging, inherited variants in severe neurodevelopmental disorders,” posted 25 April on medRxiv.

Kaitlin Samocha of Massachusetts General Hospital and Jack Kosmicki of Harvard University commented on Wigdor’s tweet.

Yvonne Wren of the University of Bristol and Clare Smith of the Academy of Research and Improvement weighed in on “The association between atypical speech development and adolescent self-harm,” published 20 April in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge tweeted a link to Spectrum’s article “U.S. study charts changing prevalence of profound and non-profound autism.”

Candice Chi-Hang Cheung of the University of Potsdam and Salah Basheer of King’s College London replied to Baron-Cohen’s tweet.

That’s it for this week’s Community Newsletter! If you have any suggestions for interesting social posts you saw in the autism research sphere, feel free to send an email to [email protected].

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Cite this article: https://doi.org/10.53053/GKIS9819