"Peer Reviewed"
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I Published a Fake Paper in a ‘Peer-Reviewed’ Journal
I received a strange email from a pair of academic journals inviting me to submit my research to one of their latest issues. The email was written in a jarring mix of fonts, and riddled with formatting mistakes and bungled idioms. The editor who sent it to me had, inexplicably, attached a handbook on Covid-19 hospital protocols, a document that detailed at length the precise mechanism of sealing the dead in a “leak-proof corpse wrapping sheet.”
They wanted me to send them a manuscript about that research, which they claimed they would publish a few weeks later if it met their editorial standards and passed a “rigorous” independent peer review involving at least two reviewers. Instead, I concocted seven pages of flapdoodle, including references — loosely following the plot of the TV series “Breaking Bad” — about the educational value of high school students driving into the desert and making drugs.
The paper was ridiculous. I claimed that New Mexico is part of the Galapagos Islands, that craniotomy is a legitimate means of assessing student learning, and that all my figures were made in Microsoft Paint. At one point, I lamented that our research team was unable to measure study participants’ “cloacal temperatures.” Any legitimate peer reviewer who bothered to read just the abstract would’ve tossed the paper in the garbage (or maybe called the police). That is, if they even got past the title page, which listed my coauthors as “Breaking Bad” lead characters Walter White and Jesse Pinkman.
True to their word, a few weeks after my submission, an editor let me know my article made it through peer review and was published. (It’s still online here despite my not having paid the $520 publishing fee.) I was floored.
The U.S.-China Education Review A&B have all the hallmarks of predatory journals. The journals’ publisher, David Publishing Company, has been derided online as a “massive spammer” whose headquarters repeatedly shift from one dubious address to another. It was also included on a list of possible predatory publishers known as “Beall’s List,” which was famously maintained by retired University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall before it was reportedly taken down under the threat of legal action. (An archived version of the list remains accessible here.)
And while at first it was amusing to see the degree of nonsense this organization was willing to put on their website, my feelings quickly soured. Although my article was goofy, the truth is I could have written anything I wanted and presented it to the world as legitimate science, using the slick veneer of this journal as cover to spread disinformation. Suppose I had instead invented an article disputing the health benefits of vaccination?
This flavor of disinformation is not hypothetical; it's happening right now. This summer, a paper claiming that 5G radio signals cause coronavirus was published in The Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents, which is suspected by some to be a predatory journal in part because some members of its editorial board appear to be dead. The eye-popping article, co-authored by an Iranian scientist with a research background in decapitating quails, was complete nonsense, despite an impressive-looking mess of equations. But that didn’t stop it from being shared widely on social media and alt-right sites like InfoWars, feeding into a motley assortment of conspiracies about 5G that have led people to try to burn down cell phone towers. The fact that the journal that published the article was indexed by PubMed essentially gave it a stamp of approval from one of the largest vetted biomedical research databases in the world.
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I don't understand why this is a story or newsworthy.
Nobody except people who have no clue whatsoever about scientific work would think that peer review guarantees quality. All quality publication venues are peer reviewed, but by no means all peer-reviewed venues have high quality. It's a necessary but not a sufficient condition for quality. The same goes for inclusion in some "index".
Predatory journals are also not news. Only idiots would send their papers to such journals, because they will instantly kill the authors chances of ever getting an academic position anywhere. Does the author not understand that the point of these "journals" is to extract money from authors? Of course they'll take everything. You could send blank pages or random characters. It doesn't matter. I'm amazed that the author of this story seems to be surprised by this.
Experts in a field know what the top 5 or 10 publication venues in that field are. Publications in those venues are what counts; the remainder is more or less just noise.
This story has no implications whatsoever for the soundness of the scientific method or the way science is published.
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I don't understand why this is a story or newsworthy.
Nobody except people who have no clue whatsoever about scientific work would think that peer review guarantees quality. All quality publication venues are peer reviewed, but by no means all peer-reviewed venues have high quality. It's a necessary but not a sufficient condition for quality. The same goes for inclusion in some "index".
Predatory journals are also not news. Only idiots would send their papers to such journals, because they will instantly kill the authors chances of ever getting an academic position anywhere. Does the author not understand that the point of these "journals" is to extract money from authors? Of course they'll take everything. You could send blank pages or random characters. It doesn't matter. I'm amazed that the author of this story seems to be surprised by this.
Experts in a field know what the top 5 or 10 publication venues in that field are. Publications in those venues are what counts; the remainder is more or less just noise.
This story has no implications whatsoever for the soundness of the scientific method or the way science is published.
@Klaus said in "Peer Reviewed":
Nobody except people who have no clue whatsoever about scientific work would think that peer review guarantees quality. All quality publication venues are peer reviewed, but by no means all peer-reviewed venues have high quality.
This.
Experts in a field know what the top 5 or 10 publication venues in that field are. Publications in those venues are what counts; the remainder is more or less just noise.
The problem is that "reporters" can't distinguish, or are ignorant of what the good journals are, and they use "peer-reviewed" as an imprimatur of quality and fact.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@Klaus said in "Peer Reviewed":
Nobody except people who have no clue whatsoever about scientific work would think that peer review guarantees quality. All quality publication venues are peer reviewed, but by no means all peer-reviewed venues have high quality.
This.
Experts in a field know what the top 5 or 10 publication venues in that field are. Publications in those venues are what counts; the remainder is more or less just noise.
The problem is that "reporters" can't distinguish, or are ignorant of what the good journals are, and they use "peer-reviewed" as an imprimatur of quality and fact.
@George-K said in "Peer Reviewed":
The problem is that "reporters" can't distinguish, or are ignorant of what the good journals are, and they use "peer-reviewed" as an imprimatur of quality and fact.
I'd say that merely illustrates that the intersection part of the Reporter-and-Idiots Venn diagram isn't empty.
It isn't very hard to find out whether a publication venue is reputable or not.
For instance, enter your favorite subject area here to find a list of journals that are usually at least decent in that area.
Sometimes one gets bogus results, but it's way better than relying on the "peer-reviewed" label and only takes 20 seconds. -
This is similar to what Peter Boghossian, Lindsey, and Pluckrose did. They concocted nonsense and submitted to the "-studies" journals to see what would happen.
The point is not that nonsense should be dismissed by those that know better. The point is, or was, that these "-studies" disciplines publish crap, then that is cited as being authoritative, as long as it is plausible. The end result is their infection of nonsense creeps through academia and into the classroom.
Maybe it's a part of pop-culture or something. Or, maybe such disciplines such as "queer studies" majors need something, anything, to push their viability at the expense of science, which is of course a remnant of white patriarchy (/sarc). I was not bothered when World Music came into the college curriculum. I was bothered when it became equal to, if not superior to, Western Music. Yeah well, checkers is equal to chess, too. Note to Ax: I don't mean all world music from everywhere, it's certainly an area of legitimate study.
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@George-K said in "Peer Reviewed":
The problem is that "reporters" can't distinguish, or are ignorant of what the good journals are, and they use "peer-reviewed" as an imprimatur of quality and fact.
I'd say that merely illustrates that the intersection part of the Reporter-and-Idiots Venn diagram isn't empty.
It isn't very hard to find out whether a publication venue is reputable or not.
For instance, enter your favorite subject area here to find a list of journals that are usually at least decent in that area.
Sometimes one gets bogus results, but it's way better than relying on the "peer-reviewed" label and only takes 20 seconds. -
With all due respect, I am without peer, and so cannot be reviewed.
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With all due respect, I am without peer, and so cannot be reviewed.
@Doctor-Phibes said in "Peer Reviewed":
I am without peer, and so cannot be reviewed.
True, and true.
Not necessarily good, of course.
But, true.
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Most people who have viewed me in all of my glory do not wish to repeat the experience.
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You don't have a peer? I always suspected as much, but wondered how you relieve yourself.
“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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@Mik said in "Peer Reviewed":
You don't have a peer? I always suspected as much, but wondered how you relieve yourself.
There are people queueing up to take the piss out of me.
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@Mik said in "Peer Reviewed":
You don't have a peer? I always suspected as much, but wondered how you relieve yourself.
Try this one
The hair on the back of the neck should stand
Link to video -
@Klaus said in "Peer Reviewed":
Nobody except people who have no clue whatsoever about scientific work would think that peer review guarantees quality. All quality publication venues are peer reviewed, but by no means all peer-reviewed venues have high quality.
This.
Experts in a field know what the top 5 or 10 publication venues in that field are. Publications in those venues are what counts; the remainder is more or less just noise.
The problem is that "reporters" can't distinguish, or are ignorant of what the good journals are, and they use "peer-reviewed" as an imprimatur of quality and fact.
@George-K said in "Peer Reviewed":
The problem is that "reporters" can't distinguish, or are ignorant of what the good journals are, and they use "peer-reviewed" as an imprimatur of quality and fact.
Also, an obvious fact that seems to be unknown to some reporters is that not all "peers" are equal. Prestigious venues will have the best people in the field review the papers. A low quality venue will have the Facebook friend of a niece of a friend of somebody who used to be a PhD student at
Trump Universitysome crappy college review the papers. -
All reporters aren't equal, either.
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Actually Klaus, you were the one that scolded me the most by demanding that I provide peer reviewed evidence to back up what is said, and told me if something wasn't peer reviewed it was worthless.
@Larry said in "Peer Reviewed":
Actually Klaus, you were the one that scolded me the most by demanding that I provide peer reviewed evidence to back up what is said, and told me if something wasn't peer reviewed it was worthless.
Hu? I highly doubt it.
The weather report isn't peer-reviewed. That doesn't make it worthless.
Most scientific works that are not peer-reviewed are BS. But many "peer-reviewed" papers are BS, too. Do you understand the difference between "necessary" and "sufficient" I lined out above?
Here's a simple flow chart for you:
Peer reviewed? --> Yes --> maybe bullshit, maybe not, need to investigate further.
--> No ---> most likely bullshit, no need to investigate further.
