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Predatory Journals Hit By "Star Wars" Sting (discovermagazine.com)
intellitech quotes an article from Discover's Neuroskeptic blog:
A number of so-called scientific journals have accepted a Star Wars-themed spoof paper...an absurd mess of factual errors, plagiarism and movie quotes. I know because I wrote it... I created a spoof manuscript about "midi-chlorians" -- the fictional entities which live inside cells and give Jedi their powers in Star Wars...and submitted it to nine journals under the names of Dr. Lucas McGeorge and Dr. Annette Kin... The American Journal of Medical and Biological Research accepted the paper, but asked for a $360 fee, which I didn't pay. Amazingly, three other journals not only accepted but actually published the spoof.
At one point the paper simply transcribes dialogue from Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. ("Did you ever hear of the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise? I thought not. It is not a story the Jedi would tell you....") And the author also cut-and-pasted big chunks of the Wikipedia page for mitochondrion (after globally replacing mitochondr* with midichlor*), then admitted in the paper's "Methodology" section that "The majority of the text in the current paper was Rogeted from Wikipedia" -- with a direct link back to that Wikipedia page. One sentence even mentions "JARJAR syndrome."
Three more journals did reject the paper -- but at least one more unquestioningly asked the author to revise and resubmit it. The author calls it "a reminder that at some 'peer reviewed' journals, there really is no meaningful peer review at all" -- adding that one journal has even invited Dr. Lucas McGeorge to join their editorial board.
At one point the paper simply transcribes dialogue from Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. ("Did you ever hear of the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise? I thought not. It is not a story the Jedi would tell you....") And the author also cut-and-pasted big chunks of the Wikipedia page for mitochondrion (after globally replacing mitochondr* with midichlor*), then admitted in the paper's "Methodology" section that "The majority of the text in the current paper was Rogeted from Wikipedia" -- with a direct link back to that Wikipedia page. One sentence even mentions "JARJAR syndrome."
Three more journals did reject the paper -- but at least one more unquestioningly asked the author to revise and resubmit it. The author calls it "a reminder that at some 'peer reviewed' journals, there really is no meaningful peer review at all" -- adding that one journal has even invited Dr. Lucas McGeorge to join their editorial board.
Isn't that the problem here ?
Putting make a dollar ahead of honesty. It's a pervasive problem, it's not obvious to me why "scientific journals" would be immune.
And once again it's a two party problem. The person publishing wants their paper published to put it on their resume, and the journal needs to fill the journal.
The real question is, who's subscribing to this crap ?
A more worrisome tin-foil hat idea - I suppose you could create faux journals to show that journals are not trustworthy and use them to cast doubt on legitimate science.
Absolute statements are never true
Not only have others done the same thing before, even without these examples, "peer review" is almost always a load of bullshit. Unless someone repeats the experiment/study/analysis themselves as a peer-reviewer, the peer review tends to be little more than a grammar and spelling check, did everyone label their figures correctly, etc.
It's adding a step that gives the impression that the paper or whatever has been checked, but in reality, any errors that are baked-in are very likely to blow through the process with no problem.
The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.
That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.
What's wrong with complete bullshit narratives anyway? They seem to be plenty good enough for this GOP.
The paper obviously is trash.
REAL research papers are always paywalled.
It's important to emphasize the word "so called" in the phrase "so-called scientific journals." These are not scientific journals. These are what are called "predatory journals," which pretend to be scientific journals, but have no other purpose than to suck money out of people who want to publish in a scientific journal but aren't good enough to be accepted.
I think it's clear that the nearly-organized crime groups running these journals don't even speak or read English, such that anything makes its way in that looks like the format / graphical appearance of a paper.
I hate it when you read something like this just after running out of mod points.
The fact that fake "scientific journals" exist to scam money out of the gullible does not mean that real science does not exist.
as I've said before nobody ever reads all these papers. They are beyond dry and near worthless unless you are writing a thesis and need it as a source.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Just because there are lots of fake scientific journals out there doesn't mean that there aren't real scientific journals. Try publishing a nonsense paper to "Science" or "Nature" and see what happens. Try submitting this Start Wars paper to the New England journal of medicine and see what happens. Perhaps this wasn't your intention, but statements like, "'peer review' is almost always a load of bullshit." are dangerous because they feed into the mass perception that science isn't real and scientific facts are a matter of personal opinion. That's how we end up with a president who happily claims that climate change is a hoax.
Not sure why this is still news. These journals are a "scientific" facet of vanity publishing. Touting yourself as a "published" novelist or scientist has a lot less meaning these days and the world has moved on.
change
because they expect that negative findings will be repeated.
to
because they expect that negative findings will not be reported.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This story will be blown out of proportion, these journals will be lumped in with Science and Nature and it will be used by professional trolls like Sean Hannity and everyone at Breitbart as an example of science is wrong - especially to back their lies and half-truths about climate change.
And they have an audience of willful ignorant people who will gobble it up without question and pat themselves on the back for being skeptical and smart.
are we saying they are not "real" scientific journals primarily based on the evidence that they accept prank papers as authentic? Or is there some other, clearly expressible, criteria by which "real scientific journals" can be differentiated from the phony ones? I would like to know the specifics, so this same experiment can be attempted against them.
As GrumpySteen notes above, if there were trivial criteria to say what's a fake, the fakers would simply fake that criterion as well. The overall problem is that there is no longer any entrance barrier at all to putting up a web site, calling it Journal of Impressive Science-Sounding Name, and calling it an "open source journal"-- and since anybody can do it, anybody does do it.
With that said, here are four good criteria for distinguishing real journals from fake ones:
1. Does a real scientific society publish it? Most-- not all, but most-- of the reputable journals are published by societies. Look for The American Physical Society, the Electrochemical Society, the International Academy of Astronautics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or the like.
2. What is the Impact Factor of papers they publish? Fake papers have zero impact factor. http://researchguides.uic.edu/...
3. Do research libraries subscribe to it? If the MIT library doesn't subscribe to it, you should wonder why.
and last: 4. Does it even have an actual print run? Real scientific journals still publish paper issues-- it's an old-fashioned holdout from the 20th century, but if a journal consists of nothing but an impressive-sounding website, it should draw your suspicion.
None of these are infallable, but taken together, they put together a pretty good picture of what a real journal is, and what's fake.
Of course, even those journals with good reputations have bullshit politics. NEJM rejected a revolutionary paper of my grandfather's so that one of their editors who had been working on the same problem but wasn't as far along could publish first.
The practices outlined in this research don't just harm the credibility of scientific journals, they also undermine what could be the legitimate work of hard-working scientists who have submitted papers in good faith.
I can only hope that this analysis gets properly peer-reviewed (to verify if these journals really are publishing charlatans) and then anyone who has submitted legitimate research to these entities demand a full refund. If money changed hands, there is an implicit contract [if not an explicit one] that the publication in question actually performs "peer review" work... It certainly does not appear to be the case here.
I wonder if the entities named will try and claim this was down to a "rogue reviewer" or that they are actually more of a "vanity publishing" service, just for scientists? Or maybe they'll sue.
It's odd, isn't it: governments the world over are never short of things that they want to legislate against, but somehow they fail to take account of shady practices like these... I wonder... do you think that the current PoTUS would consider these to be fine, upstanding publishers or "Fake News! Sad!" ???
However, it is clear that at least ARJ, which published this paper, bills itself as a peer-reviewed source of information.... [my italics]
You just said that the liars lie, and that fakers put out text stating that they're not fake.
Well, duh.
You seem to find this surprising? That's why we call the liars.
The real issue is that society uses the fact that someone "has published in peer-reviewed journals" as an approval of their work, both in terms of grants, employment at universities, general "prestige" etc. When you can get utter crap published this easily everything obviously falls apart. How many of researchers doing science for a living are actually talented and are actually producing useful/meaningful work? Because if you aren't very good, there's always this escape of publishing their poor quality work in one of these journals, perpetuating their title as researchers/scientists and allowing them to make a living without any contribution to society.
I whine about people who fail to use periods, making it difficult to follow whatever the fuck you were ranting about.
They're not Science Journals, they are Science Fiction journals.
The view that "peer review is bullshit" is a simplified version of a commonly held view among professional scientists (I am one).
What they did here has nothing to do with peer review. The take home point from this, and all the other similar examples like the other month's dog on the editorial board, is that there are fake journals out there claiming to be serious scientific publications which perform rigorous peer review but which are really there to con money out of young and/or naive scientists. Peer review may have its faults but this is not one of them.
Because this article is about fake journals, not about your [potentially legit] beef with real journals.
It's intellectually dishonest to conflate the two. You're essentially saying that since you don't like how real journals direct research then they are no better than fake journals. That's a dangerous path to go down.
Did someone review it ?
And. What. Are. You. Ranting. About?
Who used a similar system like this to "game" his way into a high-paying job at a large Fortune 500 company. He plagiarized several presentations on LDAP, self-published a few books, and even went out and got a patent on John Titor's "time machine". He purchased both his Masters and PhD from degree mills. He eventually ended up as a director at Oracle, until he got busted for drugging and raping four women in Portland. Someday I expect there to be a TV movie about him, it's quite a convoluted story.
My point is, that with just a bit of money and loose ethics, someone can make themselves look quite credible.
And yet you believe in global warning? Really? You can believe this happens ONLY in these journals but you can be sold a bag of slick on global warming and pump out trillions of dollars to scammers??? Fools by any other name are ... idiots.
On the contrary, this is another example of why consensus is important in determining what research findings laymen should trust. You can likely find a handful of published scientific papers to prove just about anything. This story shows you can probably just publish them yourself (like how Andrew Wakefield fueled the anti-vaxxer craze). 95% consensus is the same as 100% with a few kooks and paid off PhDs thrown in. When you see a 90%+ consensus among scientists and published research, believing it is false just because it is inconvenient is not wisdom. It's ignorance. Dangerous ignorance in the case of climate change denial.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
You managed to get a number of us to respond and try to convince you that there's obviously a difference between real journals and fake journals, and you continue to deflect and speak gibberish. If you are a troll then congratulations, well done. If not, well then I'm sorry your paper got rejected and you're having trouble getting funding. Peer review does have its faults, but take some time and reflect and I think you'll find that those faults are completely different than those of predatory fake journals.
Aggressive Stupidity can be profitable for them and amusing to us.
It's obviously fake! We all know the true name is Lucky McLucasface.
This makes a good match with the well known Sokal affair!
Chicken chicken, chicken chicken chicken.
Chicken.
Chicken?
Chicken!
Chicken chicken chicken, chicken. Chicken?
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Maybe you should read the article. The author is pretty clear that peer review practices are his focus here.
Maybe you should engage your brain while reading the article. Whatever the author's stated focus was, what he showed is that there are fraudulent journals out there.
In either case, these journals do have scientists working for them as editors and reviewers, but the expected outcomes don't align with what the process promises.
I'm sure that's what they claim but the evidence pretty much conclusively shows that this is simply not true. You aren't, by any chance, a reviewer for one of these journals because you have seem to have taken the claims made by both the article and the journals completely at face value?
Any time you see a group of scientists claiming consensus they are lying to you, and they know they are lying. It doesn't matter what they are talking about either. The only time that scientists go through the trouble to claim a consensus is when they are trying to mislead the public so that they can profit from that lie.
Join that editorial board and get some money for your troubles.
Oh, an while there, please save the rest of us from unqualified postings!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.