Science News Sells AI. Scientists Don't.

The divergence between institutional science journalism and working-researcher sentiment is not a failure of accuracy — it is a failure of audience. Science News and comparable outlets are writing for a public that wants to believe the frontier is moving; the researchers on that frontier are managing grant cycles, replication crises, and now a citation-integrity problem that fabricated AI citations in student and early-career work has made newly visible. When the same tool that generates a cover-story narrative also generates plausible-sounding but nonexistent journal entries, the community that catches the…