Slashdot Mirror
Another Slew of Science Papers Retracted Because of Fraud
schwit1 writes: A major scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals after discovering that the so-called independent peer reviewers for these articles were fabricated by the authors themselves. From the article: "The cull comes after similar discoveries of 'fake peer review' by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing 'reviews from fabricated reviewers'. The practice can occur when researchers submitting a paper for publication suggest reviewers, but supply contact details for them that actually route requests for review back to the researchers themselves." Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field. In total, more than a 100 papers have been retracted, simply because the journals relied on the authors to provide them contact information for their reviewers, never bothering to contact them directly.
You can search the Springer page for the list:
http://link.springer.com/search?query=The+Publisher+and+Editor+retract+this+article+in+accordance+with+the+recommendations+of+the+Committee+on+Publication+Ethics+(COPE)&date-facet-mode=between&facet-start-year=2015&previous-start-year=1995&facet-end-year=2015&previous-end-year=2015
More commentary at RetractionWatch: http://retractionwatch.com/2015/08/17/64-more-papers-retracted-for-fake-reviews-this-time-from-springer-journals/
It's not an uncomfortable observation, it's what's happening to the Chinese research/academic establishment about now. There's nothing racial or whatever about it, it's an artefact of the recent history of Chinese academia.
10 years+ ago, the Chinese research landscape was not very good. Getting academic jobs was easy, for example people straight out of PhDs at well known western universities would be offered lectureship jobs off the bat. Result it was big, flabby and staffed with many mediocre people. China is huge so naturally there were notable exceptions, but it's not the exceptions that matter here. Nonetheless, the jobs are/were still good in that the pay is good and they're well respected.
About 10 years ago the Chinese government decided it wanted to be a world leader in research. This meant there was going to have to be a tough, competetitive, results driven research environment of the sort that's more prevalent in other parts of the world. Being the Chinese government they want results fast and they want results now and they can exert a lot of pressure to make it happen.
The simple explanation now is there are a lot of deeply mediocre people who got their jobs when their jobs were easy to get and they're now under immense pressure to perform or lose their job. Being largely mediocre, they're not able to do this and they are frankly desperate.
There's a subtler point that having more good people around who care about the academic subject leads to a degree of policing of this sort of thing. It's far from perfect of course and there have been plenty of cases in the west, but we're talking trends and averages here. The universities staffed with large numbers of mediocre, desperate people don't have the inclination to do such things.
But basically it is very, very hard to go from more or less nothing to a world leading research environment in a short time and it's downright impossible without serious growing pains. That's all you're seeing here.
SJW n. One who posts facts.