Predatory Journals Hit By "Star Wars" Sting (discovermagazine.com) 112
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.
the profit motive (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 [wikipedia.org].
How can you tell the fakes? (Score:5, Informative)
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/... [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.
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And, what do the members of that scientific field think about the journal? If you're in the field then you know what's a bullshit journal and what isn't.
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Certainly post factum you can make this argument. However, it is clear that at least ARJ https://arjonline.org/ [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 challeng
Liers lie: that's why they're called "liars" (Score:2)
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.
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No, what I said was that the average person cannot tell the difference. When anyone can find any "peer-reviewed" paper to back up their point of view, it becomes impossible for the average person to know what the truth is. Does eating chocolate lead to long life? How about drinking whiskey? I can find such papers if I wanted... and they will be peer-reviewed.
Re:This is no surprise (Score:4, Informative)
"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.
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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.
Re:This is no surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
correction: Re:This is no surprise (Score:2)
change
because they expect that negative findings will be repeated.
to
because they expect that negative findings will not be reported.
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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 robustn
Re: This is no surprise (Score:2)
Completely false anti-science bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Completely false anti-science bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
The view that "peer review is bullshit" is a simplified version of a commonly held view among professional scientists (I am one). It is unfortunate that anti-science political forces also have this type of view, but "science" does have some serious problems, and many of us think that peer review as it is used now is largely to blame.
There is a strong argument that prestige publishing style peer review (i.e. Science and Nature) has been detrimental to scientific progress. The root of the argument is that peer review went wrong when the purpose went from trying to determine whether the research was right to whether it was prestigious enough to match the impact factor of the journal. This is a transition that happened relatively recently, only in the last 30 years or so. Unfortunately, most people in science have now locked their career advancement on to increasing their publication impact factor, so it is very difficult to change even when many agree that it's leading to distortion of data, hype, falsification, poor scientific discipline, encouraging predatory publishing practices (as here), etc... More importantly, for me, the idea that scientists should be optimizing research projects to gather citations is not well aligned with what we should be doing: answering fundamental scientific questions and improving the world.
If you dig in to some of what the author of this "sting" operation has written over the last 4 years, you'll see some of the arguments about this. The real discussion is much more nuanced and scientific than "peer review is bullshit," but that blunt approach is appropriate for Slashdot.
Fraudulent Journals, not Peer Review failing (Score:2)
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 [slashdot.org], 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.
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Maybe you should read the article. The author is pretty clear that peer review practices are his focus here.
The author actually got back four reviews. Two reviewers didn't catch that this was a joke, two did. The editor who handled the two reviews that caught the joke passed them right back to the author with a request to revise. Those aren't dog's doing this, those are scientists.
You can call these journals "fake" or just acknowledge that low end journal editors and reviewers generally don't execute at a
Congratulations on successfully trolling us. (Score:2)
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If you catch it as a joke and submit a "revise and resubmit" request, that may be a formal politeness, rather than a willingness to publish a joke. Maybe. At least it doesn't explicitly smell of nonsense, as did the blind acceptance ones.
Are you a reviewer for these journals? (Score:2)
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?
Then you are thread-jacking (Score:2)
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.
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Did you read the article? The author never uses the words "fake journal," but he talks a lot about peer review. Two of the journals that did a real peer review of his "paper" didn't reject it. Editors passing peer review comments through without reading them, and reviewers doing a (very) cursory read of the paper are not uncommon issues in scientific publishing in real journals.
Think for a minute about what "real" and "fake" mean when we're talking about journals. Two journals here got real reviews from s
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I totally agree. The problem is even worse in free software than in real science. It is enough for a "reputable" developer to state that a given free software project is "superior" to another [gnu.org] for most everybody accepting it on his word alone, even if the evidence shows that the opposite is true [nongnu.org].
Re: Completely false anti-science bullshit. (Score:2)
Even some of the more reputable journals have had hoax, joke, fraudulent, plagiarized, and computer generated papers that have slipped through the cracks. Google will help you find many examples.
As a scientist, I am still human, I make mistakes. None of them have to do with publishing, but I'm sure I'd err in those regards, should I be engaged in them. It's okay to doubt my work. We are not infallible.
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We shouldn't talk about science's problems because that's embarrassing to science. Dear lord, that is the most anti-scientific attitude I have heard today.
By the way, high ranking global warming proponents are on record stating that the goal of their movement has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with ridding the world for capitalism, once and for all. By hook or by crook, they'll get it done.
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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 "c
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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
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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.
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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
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Too Easy in Gender Studies (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Too Easy in Gender Studies (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, but "gender studies" isn't a scientific discipline in the first place. It's not even a legitimate branch of social science. This turns peer review into a cheering section, or not, for whatever predispositions the reviewer and author, have. Any notion that it is legitimate science is a complete delusion on the part of the participants. Biology and psychology cover the topic adequately, "gender studies" is a thin veneer over politics.
Re:Too Easy in Gender Studies (Score:4, Funny)
wash your mouth out with soap, philistine. You can pay big money for a gender studies degree at Harvard, so it must be a totally legitimate branch of social science!
(I kid, wish I was about the Harvard degree part)
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Slap in the words "patriarchical" and "hetero-normative" and you have the core of your doctoral thesis.
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There are predatory journals for every branch of science. They'll all print literally anything and call it peer-reviewed for a fee
WHAT, NO PAYWALL?? (Score:5, Funny)
The paper obviously is trash.
REAL research papers are always paywalled.
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I wanted to mod you as "underrated" but now I had to comment.
@some other mod: Please mod up parent as "underrated"
looks (Score:2)
Because (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Yes, but you're retarded, so...
Double Jeopardy (Score:3)
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!" ???
The real issue... (Score:2)
Re:The real issue... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
You misunderstand (Score:1)
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They're not Science Journals, they are Science Fiction journals.
You take that back, RIGHT NOW!
Signed,
Gardner Dozois
Donald Wollheim
Terry Carr
I know a guy... (Score:3)
My point is, that with just a bit of money and loose ethics, someone can make themselves look quite credible.
May the Farce be with you... (Score:3)
Chicken chicken chicken. (Score:2)
Chicken chicken, chicken chicken chicken.
Chicken.
Chicken?
Chicken!
Chicken chicken chicken, chicken. [wired.com] Chicken?
Join that board! (Score:1)
Oh, an while there, please save the rest of us from unqualified postings!
"So called" means "Predatory journals" (Score:5, Informative)
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A vanity press, if you will.
Re:"So called" means "Predatory journals" (Score:4, Interesting)
A vanity press, if you will.
Exactly. You pay them, and they publish your paper. So TFA is reporting that someone paid them, and they published his paper. The exact same thing has been done many times before [theguardian.com]. Why is this news?
I put a page full of fake news on my photocopier, pushed the button, and the copier printed it without fact checking it. Outrageous!
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Apparently the guy didn't pay them. Does your photo copier print copies without paper or toner?
Amazingly, three other journals not only accepted but actually published the spoof. Here’s the paper from the International Journal of Molecular Biology: Open Access (MedCrave), Austin Journal of Pharmacology and Therapeutics (Austin) and American Research Journal of Biosciences (ARJ) I hadn’t expected this, as all those journals charge publication fees, but I never paid them a penny.
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Your copier doesn't claim to peer review the paper when it prints it.
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How often in an infomercial do you see "published in so and so scientific journal"
Honestly? Never. Maybe because I don't watch infomercials. But if you do, and you act on the information supplied, then you get what you deserve. Fools and money etc.
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AGREED! - These journals exist solely for profit - and generally can barely spell their own publication's name correctly (lol). The fundamental purpose of their existence is to suck up $$$'s, £££'s, and €€€'s from anybody that happens to THINK they are legitimate - generally from semi-bogus URL links, or sometimes from search engine results.
The sad part of this issue is that even the reputable publications often use the same pricing strategies to bolster their bottom line,
Re:"So called" means "Predatory journals" (Score:5, Informative)
Just because the other journals are, "respected" doesn't mean they are smarter. [skeptic.com]
It's been a problem for a while. [wikipedia.org]
And will continue to be. [slate.com]
Re: "So called" means "Predatory journals" (Score:1)
We have science publishing and academic review systems that favour quantity over quality and believe they can manage them with automated metrics systems (See Goodhart's law on metrics). What do you expect?
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Better.
That's what we all should expect.
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When I was in grad school, getting a paper in a journal was prestigious. Getting a paper in a conference proceedings not as much. That's because it the standards for the journal were very high, but there were a thousand conferences who needed to get more papers submitted. Of course, everyone knew what conferences were more prestigious than others, always the pecking order. Your career was going nowhere if you could only publish in the fluff conferences, and they certainly weren't gaining you any brownie p
And yet, real science still exists (Score:3)
Re: And yet, real science still exists (Score:2, Funny)
Sorry, you're not allowed to use logic when arguing about science.
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Politics is fine though, feel free to use politics when arguing about science. It's all the fashion these days.
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The fact that fake "scientific journals" exist to scam money out of the gullible does not mean that real science does not exist.
The fake journals do not scam money from the gullible. The scientists publishing in these journals know exactly what they are doing. They are paying to build their publication record, and they know that the quality of their work is too low for "real" journals. It is the institutions that look at these publication records that are being "scammed", but they are not paying for the publishing.
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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
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Re: And yet you believe in global warning? (Score:1)