Hundreds of Researchers From Harvard, Yale and Stanford Were Published in Fake Academic Journals (vice.com)

In the so-called "post-truth era," science seems like one of the last bastions of objective knowledge, but what if science itself were to succumb to fake news? From a report: Over the past year, German journalist Svea Eckert and a small team of journalists went undercover to investigate a massive underground network of fake science journals and conferences. In the course of the investigation, which was chronicled in the documentary "Inside the Fake Science Factory," the team analyzed over 175,000 articles published in predatory journals and found hundreds of papers from academics at leading institutions, as well as substantial amounts of research pushed by pharmaceutical corporations, tobacco companies, and others. Last year, one fake science institution run by a Turkish family was estimated to have earned over $4 million in revenue through conferences and journals.

Eckert's story begins with the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET), an organization based in Turkey. At first glance, WASET seems to be a legitimate organization. Its website lists thousands of conferences around the world in pretty much every conceivable academic discipline, with dates scheduled all the way out to 2031. It has also published over ten thousand papers in an "open science, peer reviewed, interdisciplinary, monthly and fully referred [sic] international research journal" that covers everything from aerospace engineering to nutrition. To any scientist familiar with the peer review process, however, WASET's site has a number of red flags, such as spelling errors and the sheer scope of the disciplines it publishes.

Comments

Re:Journals are tricky

[sinij]

A dark secret is that even in peer reviewed journals that take peer review seriously you have bad papers. Bad, as in someone took unjustifiable liberties with methods and/or data to show correlation. It is nearly impossible to catch this in most fields, as information allowing to verify claims isn't part of 3000 or so words allowed by the journal.

I think peer review need to adopt a model that is close to open source - if you are publishing, you have to also open your data, so your findings can be independently verified by anyone, and not just 3 often not randomly selected peers.

Re:Journals are tricky

[jellomizer]

The Publish or perish system is really at fault. It really puts more pressure on scientist trying to hype up their research, vs using their time to actually study, measure, modify... The actual science.

How much good science is going unnoticed because there is some low level scientist out there not getting noticed because he lacks the charisma to make a compelling journal entry.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Phat_Tony]

That's right. My wife is a scientist, she has a PhD in pharmacology.

Talking to her through her undergrad, PhD, and Postdoc, I identified what I believe are three separate problems in science that each exacerbate the others and collectively are having a devastating effect on the field:

1. Publish or perish.

2. Nobody reports negative results

3. Most scientists who are below the level of Principle Investigator for a lab are being assigned their projects.

So it used to be, back when my parents got their doctorates, that a new scientist joined a lab, proposed their own research, conducted the research, wrote a thesis, and then defended it before committee. If the committee was decent, it didn't matter if the results were positive or negative. They grilled the candidate on how they generated their hypothesis, why the implications would be important whether positive or negative, how they set up the experiments and conducted them, how they analyzed and presented the results - basically, the candidate had to prove they knew everything it takes to operate effectively as a scientist.

Maybe if the research was exceptional, the thesis advisor would also be recommended that it be submitted to a journal, but most of the theses just went to the institution's library. The point was to prove the candidate understood and could perform science as an academic exercise, not to contribute usefully to the field. Today that is completely different. Most PhD candidates are assigned a project by the PI of the lab they join. So right off the bat, you aren't differentiating people by the quality of their ideas, which is probably the most important trait for a scientist. Instead, the quality of the idea assigned to them is likely to have a huge impact on how their career goes. It's like randomly handing out career potential without regard for ability. And there is no point in a committee grilling them about the formation of the hypothesis or what positive or negative results would contribute to understanding, because they never came up with the hypothesis in the first place.

Hence got your bad project."

Then they have to have one or more papers accepted by peer reviewed journals to get their PhD. The papers are their thesis, and as long as they were accepted for publication, defending them is perfunctory now. Their acceptance is the only real test to get the PhD.

Which means nobody is trying to make sure the candidate actually understands and can perform science; supposedly the papers evidence that, but we all know that isn't really true now; the peer reviewers do not attempt to replicate the study or dig in deep enough to see if any of it is actually high quality work.

Not being able to publish negative results means that if you are assigned a project that ends up indistinguishable from the null hypothesis, you can waste years of your life based on a luck-of-the-draw assignment, with no regard to your ability. Or... you can fudge the data.

"Fudging the data" here doesn't even necessarily imply anything overtly malicious. Talking to people in the lab who'd discuss how experiment after experiment had failed to show the desired effect, and what experiment they were planning next to try to demonstrate it, my standard comment was "we need to pass a 95% confidence test, so we'd better plan about 20 experiments to prove it."

A possible 4th thing to list here is that the system now takes so long to get through, from undergrad to PhD to a Post Doc or two or three, that by the time anybody gets to be a PI and actually start pursuing their own research ideas, they're past the age past scientists were when they achieved approximately every major breakthrough in the history of science.