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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 In total, more than a 100 papers have been retracted, simply because the journals relied on the authors to provide them contact information for their reviewers, never bothering to contact them directly.
"Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field" No, it indicates sloppiness & laziness from these awful journals. The "peer-review field" (science) is still working just fine.
Go ahead and keep telling yourself that.
One wonders if any of the fake peer reviews supported anthropogenic global warming claims.
I would like to see a list of the retracted articles. It would be interesting to see if the subject matter were slanted toward the hot topics of the day.
You are right, but you are also wrong.
There are many Scientists, even many in Academia, who don't Publish. I've got a co-author on a few Papers, but it never meant much in over three decades of Performance Reviews.
I was a Working Scientist. It's very much like being a Working Actor- a face seen briefly a few dozen times over a career, but never a Leading Role. Still, it paid the bills.
You are an utter asshole for promoting the "Publish or Perish" myth. It is simply not true.
But you are quite right about Killing the Market.
This is about Ideas. There shouldn't _be_ a Market for sharing Idea; that's a Middleman concept.
Middlemen- kill them all.
Let's first start with Shakespeare's recommendation- Lawyers.
And then we can go after the for-profit Academic Publishers.
Oh, I love this Captcha: anodes
The review system is deeply flawed as it stands now. Cronyism, favoritism, and punitive harassment run rampant. Since experts in your field are often people who review your papers its not uncommon to be rejected out of spite or to let a competitor publish first. The competition isn't just fierce it's underhanded and extraordinarily wasteful in terms lost money and lost brainpower.
Um, I didn't see a non-Chinese name in that list....
*whistles uncomfortably*
The idea that I would give email addresses to editors that came back to me in order to review my own papers not only never occurred to me, it seems like it would require a researcher with absolutely no ethics or morals whatsoever.
Well, true; a certain proportion of any group are likely to be liars, cheats, parasites etc. I'm not sure about the complete lack of ethics or morals, though - it is not difficult to imagine a path from 'excusable inaccuracies' to full blown fraud, and when you're measured on the volume of articles rather than the quality of your research, then it isn't surprising that you may occasionally start taking shortcuts to make your results look better. The thing is, when you have taken the first step down that slippery road, it quickly becomes impossible to turn back without your whole career exploding in your face - so you carry on.
I think we need not just a better way to manage reasearch results - peer review comes from a time when scientists were few and far between, and when most of them came from the upper crust of society, where concepts like honour were literally beaten into them at school with a blunt instrument. I don't suggest a return to that, of course, but I think a rigorous course in ethics for students of science would be a place to start. Not so much to instill some sort of unthinking adherence to a code of conduct, but to teach people to reason and think critically about these issues before they are in a situation where the pressure tempts them to make the wrong decision.