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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Nope. If you're publishing only in crap journals, you're not getting jobs or grants, because the people giving out those grants and hiring people for jobs are generally not morons. If they are, they don't keep their ability to spend that money.
So, to answer your question: if you're doing science for a living, you're probably producing meaningful work, or you're either a) not doing it for very long; or b) a really really good con man. I suspect the same is true for most fields. What's your field? How's it work there?
Many people reading slahdot are coders. If someone came on here and broadly proclaimed "all code review is messing only with whitespace, no one really does it, therefore coders must all be frauds", would that fly?