The original article, published in February 2022, was on detecting coronary artery plaques. It contained several known tortured phrases, synonyms and rephrasings – often awkward and nonsensical – substituted in text to evade plagiarism detectors. For instance, the paper used the term “cardiovascular breakdown” for “heart failure”; “outward appearance acknowledgement” instead of “face recognition”; and “attractive resonance” for “magnetic resonance.”

Computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac flagged the paper on PubPeer last March for containing tortured phrases, and in October the publisher retracted it. The notice originally read: "Sage was made aware of concerns raised on PubPeer regarding the potential use of tortured phrases in this article. Tortured phrases can indicate that a large language model was used to deter plagiarism checks from detecting unattributed text."

Sage issued a correction to its retraction in January, stating the original notice “incorrectly cited the origin of tortured phrases to the use of a large language model.”

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/02/18/correction-retraction-tortured-phrases-llm-text-spinners/

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