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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
If you have some evidence that peer review in reputable journals is anywhere near as faulty as the faux peer review in these scan journals, then provide that evidence, otherwise you're just as big a fake as these scan journals, and just as diahonest, vile and immoral.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The fact that fake "scientific journals" exist to scam money out of the gullible does not mean that real science does not exist.
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.
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.
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).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
You're asking for specific criteria for telling whether someone is trying to lie to you. The moment you make a list like that, liars adapt and find new ways to tell lies.
At best, you can list the characteristics to look for, and you can find a list of those on Wikipedia.
Certainly post factum you can make this argument. However, it is clear that at least ARJ https://arjonline.org/, which published this paper bills itself as a peer-reviewed source of information. "We provide an ample range of standard articles that are published after a rigorous peer-review process by expert Editorial board and reviewer’s team. We do not compromise on unbiased performance and quality output from our part as we give utmost importance to quality of research and innovation."
The challenge is that as long as there exists "peer-reviewed" sources that are not peer-reviewed, the door remains open to question all peer-reviewed sources. The layman has no way to distinguish "real" scientific journal from "fake" ones. This leads to "Alternative facts" and "Fake News" and confusion about what science is really finding.
You are unique, just like everyone else.
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.
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.
No, the peer reviewer's job is not to replicate the experiment. Other people will do that *after* the paper is published. The peer reviewer is to decide if the paper is suitable, adheres to rigorous principles, that the experiment was well specified so that it could be reproduced by others, suggestions for missing tables that would explain things better, and so forth.
Nobody in science is going to change their mind over a single experiment in a paper, that's what fluffy press is for, to trumpet the news "chocolate binging shows correlation to better foot health". A scientist will wait for more experiments, try the experiments, work through the math to see if it holds up, suggest ways to experiment differently, and so forth.
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.
Hmm. Ever actually done it yourself, or are you simply making shit up? Either received comments from a peer reviewer, or made them yourself?
Perhaps you're confusing peer-reviewing with the journals editorial staff. Once the peer review is done, they do a professional job of the spelling, grammar, layout, labeling, etc. But that step doesn't happen till the "worth publishing or not?" question is answered, and is done by professional editors not other scientists.
Most scientists spend a decent fraction of time peer-reviewing. I can assure you that for real journals, not these fake ones in the article, what you say is generally not the case. Definitely not "almost always". People who put in the work to be a scientist, for the most part, do so because they like the work, care about it, and tend to do a decent job at it.
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.
Unfortunately, the 'its been peer reviewed' argument has been used out the wazoo right here on /. Much easier than challenging the point itself and a rationalization for dismissal of criticism.
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.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but I'll contribute one tale which illustrates that peer-review can be patchy.
I was sent a paper for review by an MRI journal. It was a presented as a systematic literature review (i.e. a rigorous search of the literature is performed according to a method explicitly stated in the paper, each search result is scored/graded according to relevance and quality, and a synthesis of the literature prepared as the main body of the paper, together with an estimate of the robustness of the evidence for each claim). In this cased a meta-analysis was not included, but systematic reviews are usually a good opportunity for a meta-analysis.
What was baffling, was that the paper was clearly not about MRI. It appeared to be about PET scans, but the authors kept calling them MRI. Not only that, but the search method used a variety of completely inappropriate search terms and exclusions. On top of that, there were tons of missing references when I repeated the search, and about 5 or 6 included in the review, when they met exclusion criteria. Of course, it was also quite clear once I dug a bit further, that none of the papers cited had been read, as many said things quite different to what was claimed.,
I sent a 2 line review back:
"I recommend rejection. The authors do not appear to know what MRI is. The underlying topic is obscure and of little current interest, and moreover is not one for which MRI is used. The search method for the literature review is not valid, and additionally has not been performed with adequate care as numerous citations are missing or included despite meeting exclusion criteria. There are too many errors in interpretation and citation to list individually. "
This particular journal ccs the reviewers into the e-mail to authors, which includes all reviewers' comments.
Reviewer 2 had sent the following review in:
"The authors may have erroneously included some PET studies. However, the paper as a whole is well written. Recommend accept following minor changes".
In other words, it's quite clear than reviewer 2 had basically skim-read it in 5 minutes, spotted the PET/MRI anomaly, but completely ignored this massive red flag and failed to do any further probing.
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.
Which is why the peer-review process includes more than a single reviewer. Now we don't know what happened to the paper you reviewed but thus far it sounds like the process worked as intended. Perr review is not there to be 100 pct safe, it's just there to keep some safety margins. The real test comes once it's published and the scientific community at large can read it.
This is certainly not true everywhere. I sit on conference program committees fairly often. And first tier conference are paying a lot of attention to their reviewing process. We often prefer reject a paper we are unsure about rather than accepting it. Lots of papers get rejected because of incorrect proofs, or results that are not deemed convincing enough, or the novelty of the method being judged too low.
Now I agree with you that the main part of the peer review will happen after publication. But the peer reviewing filter at top tier journal and conference ensure some standard of quality.
Conferences have started their reproducibility initiative a couple of years back where they will organize event to reproduce the results of some papers and will add a particular note on the document that this particular paper has been reproduced.
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.
This makes a good match with the well known Sokal affair!
I wanted to mod you as "underrated" but now I had to comment.
@some other mod: Please mod up parent as "underrated"
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.
Agreed, peer review is entirely worthless. If a study cannot be reproduced then it should not be considered scientific.
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.