Science Journals Caught Publishing Fake Research For Cash (vice.com)

Tuesday a Canadian journalist described his newest victory in his war on fake-science journals. An anonymous reader writes: In 2014, journalist Tom Spears intentionally wrote "the world's worst science research paper...a mess of plagiarism and meaningless garble" -- then got it accepted by eight different journals. ("I copied and pasted one phrase from a geology paper online, and the rest from a medical one, on hematology...and so on. There are a couple of graphs from a paper about Mars...") He did it to expose journals which follow the publish-for-a-fee model, "a fast-growing business that sucks money out of research, undermines genuine scientific knowledge, and provides fake credentials for the desperate."

But earlier this year, one such operation actually purchased two prominent Canadian medical journals, and one critic warns they're "on a buying spree, snatching up legitimate scholarly journals and publishers, incorporating them into its mega-fleet of bogus, exploitative, and low-quality publications.â So this summer, Spears explains to Vice, "I got this request to write for what looked like a fake journal -- of ethics. Something about that attracted me... one morning in late August when I woke up early I made extra coffee and banged out some drivel and sent it to them."
He's now publicizing the fact that this formerly-respectable journal is currently featuring his submission, which was "mostly plagiarized from Aristotle, with every fourth or fifth word changed so that anti-plagiarism software won't catch it. But the result is meaningless. Some sentences don't have verbs..."

Comments

"Journals"

[Anonymous Coward]

Try that with real science journals and see how far you get.

Say...: The Analyst, Analytica Chimica Acta, Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, Polyhedron, Acta Physica Polonica, Molecular Physics, Applied Optics...

The problem here is what the media defines as "science". They don't really know what they are talking about.

Like any scientist would take something called the "Journal of Clinical Research & Bioethics" seriously. Ha! You can tell by the name it is bogus and has nothing to do with real science.

Re:"Journals"

[Anonymous Coward]

This. There are a massive number of journals that exist just to make money and pad researcher's CV. I get more than a dozen spam emails a week from these journals, plus another dozen plus spam emails from conferences that will accept anything. Besides journals that exist to make money, there are others created by psuedoscientists to publish their own papers that kept getting rejected elsewhere.

Not all journals are equal, and you have to spend a bit of time to learn what is actually used in a field (the horror... it takes a time investment to understand something). The fake ones often try to pick rather formal sounding names, or names that are mishmashes of other well known journal names, making it confusing on purpose.

I have to wonder how often these fake journals amount to anything within academia? How often are they cited outside of themselves? Having been on both sides of the interview process, I've seen that papers on a CV get actually read, so BS and pointless work gets called out. The bigger danger seems to be when people not familiar with a field cite it, or it gets used in a non-science news piece.

Re:hoho

[ShanghaiBill]

You do realise that the idea of a peer review is for others to replicate the research and attempt to come to the same conclusions from their own datasets, right?

No. This is wrong. I have peer reviewed nearly a hundred papers over my career, and I have never replicated the research. I read the paper, see if it makes sense, and if the conclusions are supported by the data. Sometimes I recommend the paper be rejected outright, sometimes I suggest revisions for clarification or completeness, sometimes I recommend that paper be published as-is. Typically I will spend a few hours to do the review, for research that would take a year or more to replicate.

Peer-review can detect sloppy writing and incompetent research. It rarely catches outright fraud.

Fake News

[PopeRatzo]

If you read the article closely, you'll learn that fake journals publish fake research papers. What a surprise.

Let's see him get his phony paper published in Nature, Annals of Mathematics or the Reviews of Modern Physics. Then we'll have something to talk about.

This is just another story from the hard Right (National Post was started by Canadian con-man Conrad Black) which seeks to convince people that you can't trust those crafty scientists so it can make it easier to get the yokels to believe whatever garbage they want them to believe.