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

Journals are tricky

[damn_registrars]

As a scientist I run in to this all the time. Everyone would love to get all their work into Nature, Science, and Cell; but they know the reality is that very little gets published in those journals. Then they look in to other journals with lower impact factors and they have to weigh a lot of factors - including costs to publish and the expected length of time to get a publishing decision. Some journals aren't forthcoming with either of those, either.

Then we see new open-access journals popping up with official sounding names all the time. They promise quick turn-around, low publication costs (sometimes even free), and their open-access setup is generally already compliant with NIH and NSF requirements. If all we want to do is get the manuscript out and move on, these can look very tempting.

What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).

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

[ArhcAngel]

You mean like when Ancel Keys (a psychologist) took data on diets in regions around the world and hypothesized that heart disease was caused from eating fat? The only problem was he excluded data from his research that disproved his hypothesis. Like France where an extremely high fat diet showed very low instances of heart disease. His hypothesis was never proven but it has influenced our diets for the last 60 years. I switched to a ketogenic diet last year and am the healthiest I have ever been.

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

[Archtech]

Ancel Keys was a physiologist, not a psychologist. There is a difference.

In some ways Keys was an American archetype. His overriding concern seems to have been to build up his reputation, glorify himself, and belittle anyone who dared to disagree with him. The sad thing is that he was extremely clever and capable of conscientious work - until he got carried away by his cholesterol hypothesis. Then, when it was no longer possible to maintain that cholesterol in food was harmful, he switched to attacking saturated fat and red meat.

My favourite Keys episode concerns his "research" into the diets of Mediterranean peoples. His researchers inquired, rather perfunctorily, what people ate and drank in various countries.

They came to the conclusion that the people of Crete owed their good health and long lives to a diet low in meat; this was later developed into the "Mediterranean Diet". Unfortunately, one of the weeks during which the survey was carried out in Crete fell within Lent, when the local people fasted - avoiding meat among other foods.

Similar mistakes were made in countries such as Italy, France and Spain, whose people ate (and still do) far more meat than Keys admitted.

See, for an introductory account, https://www.diabetes.co.uk/in-...

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.

Peer review vs. fake science

[sinij]

Peer review process is insufficient to guarantee scientific rigor is practiced. For example, you have whole disciplines, like gender studies, going off the deep end and into mysticism, unfalsifiable claims, and politically-driven demagoguery and peer review does nothing to curtail even the worst of these excesses.

So how are these pay to play journals are categorically different from, for example, a "legitimate" journal of Feminist Studies?

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[Brett Buck]

Peer review can easily *enforce* all these ridiculous political biases. Essentially, you submit a paper to the very people who came up with the biases in the first place for their approval. Almost anything outside the 3 fundamental hard sciences is subject to this effect.

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[Errol backfiring]

You mean like any publication in the economics field?

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[sinij]

More so, even if you set out to disprove a paper - publishing "unable to duplicate findings" paper is even harder than methods paper. Almost nobody is interested in doing this, almost nobody would publish your results, and as such questionable papers go unchecked. This leads to "body of knowledge" poisoned by bad data.

Re:They are not fake, just alternative

[Nidi62]

So, they actually publish the journal and organize conferences in meatspace, yet we are supposed to believe they are fake? Those are not fake, they are quite real. May be we should just call them alternative to the mainstream? Way to oppress the startups.

If they are publishing everything that is submitted without any type of peer review or adherence to scope of stated fields then it is fair to argue that they are fake journals. An "alternative" journal would be something like PLOS One as opposed to, say, the New England Journal of Medicine.

Lack of oversight makes it happen

[timholman]

Every week, I get one or more solicitations inviting me to be a keynote speaker at a conference, serve as an editor of a journal, or submit an invited paper, all from conferences and journals that I've never heard of before. In the grand scheme of things, I am far from being an academic superstar. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for some of my colleagues.

What is surprising to me about this story isn't that some researchers are padding their CVs with publications in bogus journals, but that they aren't being called on it. If I were to list such a publication on my own annual report, my department chair would have me in his office in an instant, demanding to know why I was trying to damage the school's reputation with such idiocy.

So the question is this: why isn't this oversight also taking place at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford? Is there really so little departmental supervision that researchers at those schools can actually get away with this?

Re:Lack of oversight makes it happen

[Archtech]

Perhaps nowadays reputation is increasingly taking second place to money. Without money, reputation is not considered valuable. With money, who needs reputation?

Hackaday now has a journal

[Okian Warrior]

What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).

Hackaday has started its own journal

It's free, and it wants to become an actual journal with all the rigor and benefits of the mainstream journals.

It also wants to navigate away from some of the problems we see with current journals, such as publishing negative results (which is allowed), citation inflation, and so on.

It currently has one issue with one paper, and has an open call for more papers.

It targets citizen science, and we're seeing a lot of that in the hacker community, but would welcome and accept submissions from more mainstream researchers.

There's an opportunity here to start something new and avoid all the pitfalls we keep hearing about.

Anyone who would like to join that community, get in on the ground floor and help make a better type of journal can contact the editors.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of their reviewers. I'm particularly interested in structural rigor such as statistical methods: logical fallacies such as p-hacking, reversed conditional errors, and so on.)

That's what you get...

[bettodavis]

When the amount of published papers become a performance metric.

People will fulfill it, regardless if they are good papers.