# Missci: Reconstructing Fallacies in Misrepresented Science

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03181/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)
- [Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14974/) (2020)
- [PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01130/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- [Data Contamination: From Memorization to Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08242/) (2022)
- [Get Your Vitamin C! Robust Fact Verification with Contrastive Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08541/) (2021)
- [Automated Fact-Checking for Assisting Human Fact-Checkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07769/) (2021)
- [AVeriTeC: A Dataset for Real-world Claim Verification with Evidence from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13117/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02517/) (2019)
- [SciFact-Open: Towards open-domain scientific claim verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13777/) (2022)
- [That is a Known Lie: Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06058/) (2020)
- [The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01425/) (2017)
- [Scientific Fact-Checking: A Survey of Resources and Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16859/) (2023)
- [SCITAB: A Challenging Benchmark for Compositional Reasoning and Claim Verification on Scientific Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13186/) (2023)
- [Missing Counter-Evidence Renders NLP Fact-Checking Unrealistic for Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13865/) (2022)
- [Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08013/) (2021)
- [Faking Fake News for Real Fake News Detection: Propaganda-loaded Training Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05386/) (2022)
- [Analyzing Dataset Annotation Quality Management in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08153/) (2023)
- [Before Name-calling: Dynamics and Triggers of Ad Hominem Fallacies in Web Argumentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06613/) (2018)
- [Argotario: Computational Argumentation Meets Serious Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06002/) (2017)
- [Measuring Sentence-Level and Aspect-Level (Un)certainty in Science Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14776/) (2021)
- [Multitask Instruction-based Prompting for Fallacy Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09992/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [WikiContradict: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Real-World Knowledge Conflicts from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13805/) (2024)
- [Transforming Science with Large Language Models: A Survey on AI-assisted Scientific Discovery, Experimentation, Content Generation, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05151/) (2025)
- [Lies, Damned Lies, and Distributional Language Statistics: Persuasion and Deception with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17128/) (2024)
- [Beyond the Crowd: LLM-Augmented Community Notes for Governing Health Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11423/) (2025)
- [Evolving Roles of LLMs in Scientific Innovation: Assistant, Collaborator, Scientist, and Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11810/) (2025)
- [From Hypothesis to Publication: A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Driven Research Support Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01424/) (2025)
- [Towards a Perspectivist Turn in Argument Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14501/) (2025)
- [Facts Fade Fast: Evaluating Memorization of Outdated Medical Knowledge in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04304/) (2025)
- [Emotionally Charged, Logically Blurred: AI-driven Emotional Framing Impairs Human Fallacy Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09695/) (2025)
- [ConspirED: A Dataset for Cognitive Traits of Conspiracy Theories and Large Language Model Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20468/) (2025)
- [A Course Shared Task on Evaluating LLM Output for Clinical Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00122/) (2024)
- [Understanding Inequality of LLM Fact-Checking over Geographic Regions with Agent and Retrieval models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22877/) (2025)
- [MisSynth: Improving MISSCI Logical Fallacies Classification with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26345/) (2025)
- [Better with Experience: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Evidence-Grounded Health Community Notes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02215/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Health-related misinformation on social networks can lead to poor decision-making and real-world dangers. Such misinformation often misrepresents scientific publications and cites them as "proof" to gain perceived credibility. To effectively counter such claims automatically, a system must explain how the claim was falsely derived from the cited publication. Current methods for automated fact-checking or fallacy detection neglect to assess the (mis)used evidence in relation to misinformation claims, which is required to detect the mismatch between them. To address this gap, we introduce Missci, a novel argumentation theoretical model for fallacious reasoning together with a new dataset for real-world misinformation detection that misrepresents biomedical publications. Unlike previous fallacy detection datasets, Missci (i) focuses on implicit fallacies between the relevant content of the cited publication and the inaccurate claim, and (ii) requires models to verbalize the fallacious reasoning in addition to classifying it. We present Missci as a dataset to test the critical reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), that are required to reconstruct real-world fallacious arguments, in a zero-shot setting. We evaluate two representative LLMs and the impact of different levels of detail about the fallacy classes provided to the LLM via prompts. Our experiments and human evaluation show promising results for GPT 4, while also demonstrating the difficulty of this task.