A bad scan and an error in translation Vegetative electron microscopy appears to have originated through a remarkable coincidence of unrelated errors.
First, two papers from the 1950s, published in the journal Bacteriological Reviews, were scanned and digitized.
However, the digitizing process erroneously combined "vegetative" from one column of text with "electron" from another. As a result, the phantom term was created.
Decades later, "vegetative electron microscopy" turned up in some Iranian scientific papers. In 2017 and 2019, two papers used the term in English captions and abstracts.
This appears to be due to a translation error. In Farsi, the words for "vegetative" and "scanning" differ by only a single dot.
The upshot? As of today, "vegetative electron microscopy" appears in 22 papers, according to Google Scholar. One was the subject of a contested retraction from a Springer Nature journal, and Elsevier issued a correction for another.
Pretty interesting sequence of events.
Still, I'd be deeply ashamed if ever this kind of error appears in one of my papers and it doesn't get caught by anyone until the moment of publication. I can maybe understand it happens for non-native authors, but at least the referees or editors ought to notice it...
Do you know of similar funny AI quirks?