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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.
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.
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.
Not only have others done the same thing before, even without these examples, "peer review" is almost always a load of bullshit..
Again: these are not real scientific journals, and the "peer review" is (as you say) "a load of bullshit" because it does not exist-- there is no actual peer review because these are not real scientific journals.
"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.
Peer review in the journals I publish in (astrophysics) is very much more than a "grammar and spelling check".
Where do you publish and in what field??
Replicating an experiment is certainly outside the scope of peer review.
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.