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.

Comments

Re:This is no surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a little late to this party, but....

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.

Because

[ArchieBunker]

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.

Completely false anti-science bullshit.

[Brannon]

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.

Re:Completely false anti-science bullshit.

[Goldsmith]

The view that "peer review is bullshit" is a simplified version of a commonly held view among professional scientists (I am one). It is unfortunate that anti-science political forces also have this type of view, but "science" does have some serious problems, and many of us think that peer review as it is used now is largely to blame.

There is a strong argument that prestige publishing style peer review (i.e. Science and Nature) has been detrimental to scientific progress. The root of the argument is that peer review went wrong when the purpose went from trying to determine whether the research was right to whether it was prestigious enough to match the impact factor of the journal. This is a transition that happened relatively recently, only in the last 30 years or so. Unfortunately, most people in science have now locked their career advancement on to increasing their publication impact factor, so it is very difficult to change even when many agree that it's leading to distortion of data, hype, falsification, poor scientific discipline, encouraging predatory publishing practices (as here), etc... More importantly, for me, the idea that scientists should be optimizing research projects to gather citations is not well aligned with what we should be doing: answering fundamental scientific questions and improving the world.

If you dig in to some of what the author of this "sting" operation has written over the last 4 years, you'll see some of the arguments about this. The real discussion is much more nuanced and scientific than "peer review is bullshit," but that blunt approach is appropriate for Slashdot.

Re:This is no surprise

[HiThere]

There's weak and there's fake. These journals have been proven to have fake peer review, but real journals often have weak peer review...weak in both the positive and negative sense. Some papers are rejected because the reviewer didn't believe the results, and some papers are accepted because the verifiable assertions were not carefully checked. BOTH modes of failure happen. As to frequency...that's another question. There's obvious a reporting bias, where one only hears about the failures (as such). It's like the refusal to print negative finding. We know it happens, but we don't know how frequently, and how often people are discouraged from even trying to repeat an experiment because they expect that negative findings will be repeated. Thus we know there is sample bias, but we don't know the size of the bias. It's possible that it isn't large enough to matter (but that's not the way I'd bet).

Re:Too Easy in Gender Studies

[Brett Buck]

Of course, but "gender studies" isn't a scientific discipline in the first place. It's not even a legitimate branch of social science. This turns peer review into a cheering section, or not, for whatever predispositions the reviewer and author, have. Any notion that it is legitimate science is a complete delusion on the part of the participants. Biology and psychology cover the topic adequately, "gender studies" is a thin veneer over politics.