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Peer Review Ring Broken - 60 Articles Retracted
blackbeak (1227080) writes The Washington Post reports that the Journal of Vibration and Control's review system was hijacked by a ring of reviewers. 60 articles have been retracted as a result. "After a 14-month investigation, JVC determined the ring involved “aliases” and fake e-mail addresses of reviewers — up to 130 of them — in an apparently successful effort to get friendly reviews of submissions and as many articles published as possible by Chen and his friends.'On at least one occasion, the author Peter Chen reviewed his own paper under one of the aliases he created,' according to the SAGE announcement."
Peter holds a very high standard for himself, I'm sure.
We live in a day and age where you can make a pretty decent living as a scientist without actually advancing science, or doing very much technologically related labor, only natural people would game the system. While science should be immune to this sort of thing, just how many unimportant not particularly interesting results do people actually try to reproduce ?
So this shouldn't surprise you at all. The Chinese are always cheating the system, bribing people, etc.
That was one high class bondage mag, right up there with Bizzare and Exotique.
I don't think "peer review" means what WaPo thinks it means...
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Demand class action status.
There actually is a Journal of Vibration and Control. Must be some thrilling stuff to read.
I am not samzenpus.
Yay!
Somehow I'm not surprised it's a chinaman. The Chinese are notorious for publishing anything and everything without concerns for quality control, and indeed will cheat if it means success at the expense of integrity.
There's a lot of weirdness about this story. Firstly, guy's name is Chen-Yuan Chen, not "Peter". Secondly, he works at a teachers' college. Thirdly, he's supposed to be a researcher in methods for using electronics to help people learn, so why would he suddenly start writing a bunch of papers about mechanical systems? In addition to spamming 60 fraudulent papers in a few years, he also had each of the 60 papers cite all the other papers!
And the weirdest thing is that a bunch of right-wing crackpots are coming out of the woodwork to argue that this has some implication for climate change research. The fuck are these people smoking?
There's a paper to be written, I'm sure.
is about getting your buddy to agree with you and now they even have fake buddies. I'm sure this is the only time this happened. Kind of how 93% of scientists believe the earth is flat, or is it colder or hotter or do the buffaloes fart more methane than bison? Peer reviewed scientific papers can be trusted to be factual as much as a Catholic priest can be trusted around a young boy.
It's rampant fraud like this that makes honest people hate science. When I was small, I wanted to be a scientist. Then I met some scientists. Asshole spawn they are, all of them.
Funny, Wikipedia does not mention it yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Chen
Must have been peer reviewed out.
An insightful post, I'd love to hear if you had an ideas on how the system could be improved?
People should cryptographically sign peer reviews (and their papers). And journals should only trust signing keys that themselves have been signed by respected experts. The more respected you get, the more signatures your keys and papers get.
There are whole fields within Computer Science, one being "Method Engineering", that basically are one big ring. For your information, "Method Engineering" is about methods for developing software.
A corrupt, dishonest, lying, cheating CHINAMAN? Say it ain't so!
Oh, wait... he's 'American', because the nation-wrecking Jews say so...
You make good points. See also: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past."
I think a "basic income" for all could be part of the solution, because a BI would make it possible for anyone to live like a graduate student and do independent research if they wanted.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The problem is not that researchers have to publish per se. It is the fact that their monetary rewards (e.g., salary) are primarily based on the amount of papers published. Also, having published more gives you a better chance for a assistant / associate professorship.
...aliases does Micheal Mann have I wonder?
No, wait - that's a different peer review ring.
Seriously, we read many stories here in which big deals are made of them, but as soon as I check that it has lead by Chinese Academicians (even if they are now working in the USA), I discount it. WHy? Because over and over, I see fraud in the publications, and here, I notice that many of these stories are being pushed by ACs. In a nutshell, these ppl are putting together fraudulent publications (generally, leaving out the negatives that they came across), and then marketing them to make themselves look good.
Yes, some of you will scream that I am racists, and yet, over and over and over, this occurs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If only the journals could run some kind of check to determine if "peers" are who they claim to be.... and only them.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I've been proofreading engineering/medical papers for universities in Taiwan for over 7 years and this is not surprising in the least. There is almost no stigma regarding plagiarism in this region (I've done work for Malaysian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, etc. authors). When I alert an author about copy/pasted text, their reaction is one you would get if you told someone that their reference format needs to be change. "Oh, ok. I guess I'll change it.". The universities here never seriously investigate plagiarism because all the big fish at the top did it themselves to get to the top.
Could all the smug bastards that keep posting in climate threads that there is no way a bunch of scientists end up colluding/conspiring however loosely, or just not doing the right thing please come back and apologize for their utter lack of understanding of the process and human condition? Dickheads.
As someone who has many Chinese American friends, some born in the USA some from abroad, a high number of them seem to be of the culture and mindset of cheating is OK. Mostly the ones with closer ties to mainland China, as in born there or parents were born there. What one friend told me was that in her competitive high school in Shanghai, practically all males cheated during tests.
I think it is up to the Chinese to set a better example than what was set before them. Cheating is not OK, especially when your cheating results affect the lives of others so directly.
That's not a ring - that's "scientific consensus" at work.
The traditional publicists are having a rough time desperately trying to portray new ways of publishing as not serious. Why? Because with new free publishing and open peer-review, they are scared down their pants that their way of doing it is on the way out...