What Is Happening with Germany? AI Research Output Tells a Troubling Story

 

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-deepening-roots-of-portuguese.html

Around six months ago, in the post linked above, Germany’s Continued Underperformance and Portugal’s Escalating AI Obsession, I examined the roots of Portugal’s unusually high academic productivity in artificial intelligence. One result stood out in particular: according to a Scopus-based comparison, Portugal was already producing about 65% more AI-related publications per million inhabitants than Germany.

A similar search carried out today suggests that Germany’s relative position has become even more concerning. Several much smaller countries now show far stronger AI publication intensity than Germany. The gap is particularly striking in the cases of Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates. Compared with Germany’s AI publications per million inhabitants, Cyprus has an advantage of around 237%, and the UAE around 165%, over Germany.

These differences are too large to ignore. They raise an uncomfortable question about Germany’s ability to keep pace in one of the most strategically important scientific fields of this century. The institutional comparison is also revealing. Harvard Medical School alone reports 1,151 Scopus-indexed AI publications, while Germany’s leading university in this search, Technische Universität München, reports 707. The citation gap is also worrying: Germany has only 5 AI-related publications with more than 500 citations, compared with 18 in the United Kingdom and 33 in the United States.

For a country long associated with engineering excellence, scientific strength, industrial leadership, and technological sophistication, these numbers are difficult to dismiss. So the question must be asked: What is happening with Germany? Is Germany underinvesting in AI research? Is its academic system too slow, too fragmented, or too bureaucratic? Is talent moving elsewhere? Or are smaller and more agile countries simply adapting faster to the AI revolution?

Scopus AI-related publications per million inhabitants

1

Singapore

388

2

Cyprus

381

3

United Arab Emirates

299

4

Ireland

271

5

Switzerland

268

6

Qatar

262

7

Finland

259

8

Norway

248

9

Bahrain

244

10

Australia

209

11

Greece

208

12

Denmark

208

13

Sweden

192

14

Portugal

192

15

Kuwait

186

16

Austria

173

17

Netherlands

172

18

Saudi Arabia

169

19

United Kingdom

168

20

Oman

167

21

Jordan

155

22

Canada

140

23

Italy

140

24

New Zealand

126

25

Croatia

124

26

Belgium

116

27

Germany

113

The Case of a Disease That Never Existed: How Fake Research Entered AI Systems

 

Almira Thunström, a physician at the University of Gothenburg, designed an experiment as elegant as it was unsettling. She invented an entirely fictitious medical condition—bixonimania, supposedly a skin disorder affecting the eyelids and linked to blue-light exposure—and uploaded two fabricated preprints to an academic repository. Within weeks, major large language models were presenting the condition to users as established medical fact. 

The experiment was deliberately constructed to be transparently fraudulent. The fictional lead author, Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, was listed as affiliated with the non-existent Asteria Horizon University in the equally imaginary Nova City, California. The acknowledgements thanked “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy” and cited funding from “the University of Fellowship of the Ring.” One paper explicitly stated that it had been entirely fabricated; another described its study population as “fifty made-up individuals.” Yet none of these obvious warning signs prevented the fabricated research from being absorbed into AI-generated medical knowledge. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y

Less than three weeks after the fabricated preprints appeared, major AI systems were already presenting bixonimania as a legitimate medical condition. Microsoft’s Copilot described it as “an intriguing and relatively rare condition.” Google’s Gemini advised users to consult an ophthalmologist. Perplexity AI even estimated its prevalence at one case per 90,000 people, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT offered symptom comparisons. The experiment suggests that the very architecture of academic publishing can become a vehicle for misinformation when AI systems are trained to treat these signals as proxies for credibility. More troubling still, the false research did not remain confined to AI-generated outputs. One of the fabricated preprints was later cited in a peer-reviewed article published in Cureus, part of the Springer Nature group, which described bixonimania as “an emerging form of periorbital melanosis linked to blue light exposure.” After inquiries from Nature, the journal retracted the paper on 30 March 2026—demonstrating how quickly fabricated research can move from preprint repositories to AI systems and, ultimately, into the scientific record itself.

PS - Yet the most obvious failure in this case was not the language models. It was the near-total absence of upstream verification. These papers were not sophisticated forgeries. They cited funding from “the University of Fellowship of the Ring,” listed an author affiliated with a university that did not exist, and located that institution in an imaginary city. And still, they passed through the submission process. Preprint repositories such as bioRxiv and medRxiv continue to accept submissions tied to institutions that may not exist, often with less scrutiny than a commercial web form. A basic automated check against established research registries such as the Global Research Identifier Database would have flagged “Asteria Horizon University” and “Nova City, California” in seconds. This is not a technical limitation, nor a question of cost. It is a question of institutional priorities. If platforms feeding the scientific record cannot detect references to fictional universities, imaginary cities, or funding bodies borrowed from fantasy literature, they should not be surprised when fabricated research flows downstream into AI systems, citation networks, and eventually the scientific literature itself.

Putativas elites mediáticas e a humilhação sistemática da ciência portuguesa

https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-maquina-de-estupidificar-os.html

Depois da indigência intelectual perpetrada pela revista Visão em 2019, que nas suas célebres "100 figuras da década" conseguiu o prodígio de incluir 29 Portugueses "notáveis", entre os quais apenas um único cientista, vide post acessível no link supra. Depois da deplorável lista do semanário Expresso de 2023, que elegeu os 100 Portugueses que "marcaram e vão marcar o país e o mundo", onde apareciam apenas 14 Académicos, quase o mesmo número de desportistas, como se o contributo de quem produz conhecimento, inovação e progresso civilizacional pudesse ser colocado no mesmo plano do de quem se limita a proporcionar espectáculo e distracção das massas. https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-deploravel-lista-do-expresso-que.html Eis que agora a revista Sábado, decidiu assinalar os seus 22 anos de existência com a publicação de uma nova lista, “22 figuras que estão a mudar Portugal”. 

A inclusão de três cientistas, Rui Costa, Fábio Rosa e Gonçalo Castelo-Branco, representa um avanço claro face às vergonhosas listas anteriores. Igualmente positiva é a presença dos fundadores da Tekever, da Sword Health e da Feedzai, três tecnológicas portuguesas com projeção internacional genuína e bastante meritória, cujos líderes, em particular o CEO da Sword Health, elogiei em diversos posts, incluindo num com elevado potencial para envergonhar alemães  https://pachecotorgal.com/2025/11/30/germanys-underperformance-and-the-rising-ai-obsession-among-portuguese-researchers/

Na lista há ainda dois políticos, uma reitora, um médico, dois cantores, um artista visual, um escritor, uma humorista, uma chefe de cozinha, um empresário de restauração e cinco desportistas. O que significa que uma vez mais, a equação do país revela-se a mesma, a ciência que move o mundo continua a valer menos do que o entretenimento que distrai o povo. O único registo positivo é o facto de desta vez haver apenas um único representante modalidade do pontapé e da cabeçada no esférico. Ou melhor dizendo, uma. 

PS - A ironia mais devastadora talvez nem esteja na lista em si, mas no facto de que, dos três cientistas distinguidos, nenhum deles trabalha em Portugal. Um encontra-se nos Estados Unidos e os outros dois na Suécia. Em suma, o nosso país continua a fazer aquilo em que se tornou especialista: financiar talento, formar talento e depois exportá-lo para que outros países colham os dividendos científicos, tecnológicos e económicos desse investimento. Vide post anterior onde abordei essa tragicomédia de título, Uma "brilhante" estratégia Portuguesa - Empobrecer orgulhosamente ao mesmo tempo que ajuda ricos a ficarem mais ricos  https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2026/04/uma-brilhante-estrategia-portuguesa.html