Is it incomprehensible? Why, then it must be brilliant! Just ask anyone who’s ever tried to get through Lacan!
So much is wrong here that I haven’t much to offer, really. Are academics truly paying to get their papers published these days?
Because wow.
The editor-in-chief of an academic journal has resigned after his publication accepted a hoax article.
The Open Information Science Journal failed to spot that the incomprehensible computer-generated paper was a fake. This was despite heavy hints from its authors, who claimed they were from the Centre for Research in Applied Phrenology – which forms the acronym Crap.
The journal, which claims to subject every paper to the scrutiny of other academics, so-called “peer review”, accepted the paper.
Philip Davis, a graduate student at Cornell University in New York, who was behind the hoax, said he wanted to test the editorial standards of the journal’s publisher, Bentham Science Publishers.
Davis had received unsolicited emails from Bentham asking him to submit papers to some of its 200+ journals that cover a wide range of subject matter from neuroscience to engineering.
If their papers are accepted, academics pay a fee in return for Bentham publishing the papers online. They can then be viewed by other academics for free.
Davis, with the help of Kent Anderson, a member of the publishing team at the New England Journal of Medicine, created the hoax computer science paper. The pair submitted their paper, Deconstructing Access Points, under false names. Four months later, they were told it had been accepted and the fee to have it published was $800 (almost £500).
Davis then withdrew the paper and revealed it as a hoax. Bambang Parmanto has since stepped down as editor-in-chief of the Open Information Science Journal. Parmanto told New Scientist that he never saw the paper.
Writes James Joyner:
This sort of thing seems to happen every few months, almost invariably in scientific journals with a pay-to-publish policy. Oddly, it never seems to happen in the “soft†social sciences, which engage actual peers to apply actual scrutiny received articles. This, despite the fact that the reviewers are unpaid and it costs nothing but months of agonizing effort and waiting and revising and resubmitting to publish in said journals.
Really? Sounds a bit like special pleading to me, James.
Tell me: what’s your field again…?
Found via TWITTER!
Having had my fill of these types of journals, I would have liked to see the guys pony up the money to get it published. Then they could time how long it took before someone said “what the hell??”
Soft always has been a nicer word than that frakkin greeky pseudo.
I always liked the great Sir Terry Pratchett’s idea of reverse phrenology. Instead of determining your personality by reading the bumps on your head, a dwarf with a hammer would change your character.
“What would you like today Mr President? A little more decisivness”
“Hmmm… I’m not sure. Let me talk to Rahm”
[…] Jeff Goldstein reminds of the case of Alan Sokal, who published a gibberish physics-cultural phenomenology piece […]
Meh, “Social Text.” Virtually impossible to distinguish scholarship and nonsense in such a field!
No great special pleading for the social sciences, really. Most of what’s published is likely either 1) obvious or 2) exceedingly trivial. But peer review is in fact done by others who have published in the area and taken quite seriously.
Sadly, yes, it happens. Publishing in those journals does little for your track record, of course.
Hey, IIRC they published some bullshit truther “research”.
Somebody QUIT for that one.
Oh, and now the truthers are bragging that they got published in a “peer reviewed” publication.
Sounds like the “science wars” are still raging to me…
“ Sokal had made the case that recent developments in the scientific concept of ‘quantum gravity’ pointed the way toward a future in which science would be freed from the “tyranny of ‘absolute truth’ and ‘objective reality.’ Or, to put it another way, he argued that the traditional concept of gravity was just a capitalist fiction that would be made irrelevant by the socialist/feminist/relativist theory of ‘quantum gravity.’”
Oh man, that is rich! And to think, all he had to do was put in the “tyranny of absolute truth” part, and right then and there he had all of the moral relativists eating right out of his hand. With wording like this, it’s no wonder they were so easily able to get past the parts that didn’t quite jibe with reality. Besides, none of those folks probably ever had to set foot in a physics course, instead focusing on “Issues of racism in black women of mixed and native American descent’s poetry” courses instead. But it does speak to the “intellectual incuriosness” of those reviewing it; you’d think they would at least get a physics undergrad or T/A to check it out…
But hey, what are a few stubborn facts and inconvenient truths among “collegues”? Besides, dude was busting on capitalism and the patriarchy!
I would have loved to see the Davis’ computer generated paper…
The piece de resistance of guardian piece is this:
“Mahmood Alam, Bentham’s director of publications, told New Scientist: ‘In this particular case, we were aware that the article submitted was a hoax and we tried to find out the identity of the individual by pretending the article had been accepted for publication when in fact it was not.’”
Riiiiiight, Mahmood, nice try pal, then why did you try for the 500 quid?
“Davis told the magazine that he had not been directly contacted.”
’nuff said
James, I think the problem of not taking peer review seriously is less a “social science vs. natural science” divide and more a “reputable journals vs. bottom-feeding journals” divide.
I got roped into reviewing some articles for one of these fly-by-night journals once, and it seemed like there was no way to write a nasty enough review to keep the editors from publishing the paper. Meanwhile, in the same field (a subdiscipline of chemistry) I go through a grueling review process whenever I put out a paper in an established journal.
Did I ever mention that Barry H. O’Bama was the Editor of the Harvard Law Review!!!! He’s a fucking genius.
Papers published….zero.
Broken quanta, the problem with peer review is the peers are automatons. There is no academic diversity of thought allowed these days. Ask Al Gore about it.
When I was teaching, I had a Renaissance scholar prodding me to publish a paper on The Prince in Renaissance Quarterly. Never bothered.
I figure one day I’ll just run out of shit to blog about, and I can publish it here, instead.
And we’ll be happy to review it for free!
Depends, gus. Lots of fields are really live, and have *very* heated debates going on both above board and below: nasty reviews, competing publications, published demands for errata, even screaming matches at conferences. Of course these tend to be the fields like mine that are a *long* way from any of the hot-button political issues of the day. When it comes to the Gore-y disciplines, I fully agree. In those fields you do see some total crap published in the most reputable journals, so long as it toes the party line.
Jeff,
Maybe you should write O! a letter about foreign policy, reminding him of the part about it being better to be feared than loved…
He seems to need a refresher on that part right now…
I’m starting to wonder about those Harvard men…
I happened to listen yesterday to this podcast interview of Victor Davis Hanson and Dan Carlin on Hardcore History. Scroll down through the archieve of podcasts to find it (and all of Carlin’s podcasts are pretty interesting). The lamenting the decline of the classical liberal education, Hanson talks about the decline of inductive classical reasoning (via study of the great Western classics) and the rise of deductive social and humanity studies (think Ward Churchill).
the sokal one’s pretty good, but you’ve probably never heard of this one. it’s available for free viewing here.
but at least physicists knew it was a joke. well, everyone except the three folks who cited it.
—
for the record, our big journals of repute (the APS ones, JHEP, nuc. phys. b, &c) usually only charge money if you want them to print your graphs in colour.
cheers.
This is a good place to point out the Laws of Thermodynamics as applied to publishing:
1) Money is always involved;
2) Money flows within the system;
3) If money doesn’t flow in the direction of the Author, it’s either vanity, a scam, or both.
There can be good reasons for an author to pay to be published. The expense may be minor compared to the desire to get the word out — blogging, commenting, etc. The work may be of interest only to a small group who are willing to help defray the costs — a family history is a common example. But in the vast and overwhelming number of cases, if the author is paying and the readers (and editors) are not, there is something rotten there.
Regards,
Ric
Isn’t “peer review” what Al Gore and the rest of the wailing AGW promoters hold up as absolute, unassailable authority?
Heh.
He is trying to make that the centerpiece of his domestic policy. You have to realize who the real enemies are.
Now it’s easy to see how all of the “published” AGW concurrences came from; proving that “The debate is over!”
Connivances bu charlatans…
Wow, you knew about the Sokal affair. That was some funny shit. I’ll have to read the blog more.
bu = by…
sorry
Well, Bob, one of the definitions of “peer” is “equals in standing” — “a jury of peers”, or, in this case, “peer review”.
A liar’s peers are also liars, no?
Regards,
Ric
Ric, the logic in that statement is irrefutable!
This sentence made me (literally) laugh out loud:
“Is it incomprehensible? Why, then it must be brilliant! Just ask anyone who’s ever tried to get through Lacan!”
I did indeed try to get through Lacan and all the other “names” in critical theory. As a Ph.D. student, I had to have a dictionary on my lap to make sense of some of it. I was close to despair, thinking that maybe I wasn’t really Ph.D. material after all, when I suddenly realized that it was all nonsense written to impress other academics. I felt like a cross between Alice and the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Silly me for even thinking of taking critical theory seriously.
Checking in very briefly (I have a billion things going on right now):
As with many other traditional media outlets, academic publishing is in serious trouble. Historically it’s been operated on a low-volume, high-price model (the journal might have had 200 readers and cost $500/year… which maybe covered printing costs and the salary of a part-time editor). That model made sense when short-run printing costs were very high, but makes much less sense now that the cost of disseminating the information is nearly free.
People are trying a lot of different models — reader pays, author pays, someone else (e.g., grant money) pays, but none seem to be satisfactory so far.
It’s not just the “author pays” venues that have been rocked by scandal in recent years, btw.
I think we’re going to wind up with a model where the “journal” is simply a list of links, with the actual content being stored elsewhere (perhaps on the author’s own web site, or in an institutional repository — many academic libraries are already providing these or planning to do so. The author’s institutional library commits to ensuring that the article remains available).
Production cost: zero, or nearly so.
Checking out again. If I’m scarce in the coming weeks it’s not by choice. Working through some personal family issues here (which I’d just as soon not share with the trolls), and also working my ass off with summer courses.
SBP:
physics has already moved that way, although perhaps more out of convenience. we’ve got the arXiv, a massive pre-print repository that’s updated daily.
we have our crackpots, but they’re usually pretty easy to identify. and if someone’s made a serious mistake, someone else who cares about that subset usually figures it out and the community moves on. but then, things are less politicized for us.
cheers.
physics has already moved that way, although perhaps more out of convenience. we’ve got the arXiv, a massive pre-print repository that’s updated daily.
Right, arXiv was definitely a pioneer in that area.
As you say, it’s not just the cost, it’s the convenience. It may take a year or more to get something out in a print journal. That’s not good in any case, and terrible if the field is one of those where things are changing on a near-daily basis. If you’re doing work on Shakespeare or ancient Rome, the delay is simply annoying. If you’re doing anything with computer technology or medicine, it’s simply not acceptable.
I always liked the great Sir Terry Pratchett’s idea of reverse phrenology. Instead of determining your personality by reading the bumps on your head, a dwarf with a hammer would change your character.
I have been referring to that as an attitude adjustment. I like reverse or applied phrenology much better.
“Right, arXiv”
Dunno why they didn’t just call it “arXv”. Save a letter. The long “i” is already implicit in “X”.
#28:
You’d find Lacan not so hard to read (but not worth reading) if you came to him through what preceded him — Freud and the French-professorization of Freud — but that’s not how anyone gets there, because that’s not what gettin’ edumacated is about.
You’re supposed to have picked up a few Lacan keywords without knowing why he used them, and learned to feign deference to his name in the middle of saying the same dumb shit any unacademic lefty would — like how “thoughtful conservatives” toss in a “Kirk” or “Oakeshotte” to dress up their My Dinner With Rahm talking points as righty eternal verities.
Don’t be readin’ . That’s for chumps.
So if we’re using a ball peen, will there be annealing involved now and again so they’ll stay flexible, B Moe? Or is this strictly a one-shot deal?
Just by way of background, I have a Ph.D. in chemistry and have published several papers in scientific journals, and spent countless hours reading papers from a wide variety of journals. I’ve never heard of the “Open Information Science Journal”, and I suspect it was never considered a legitimate scientific journal. Scientists generally do not pay fees to have their articles published in real journals, and real scientific journals ALL apply peer-review to articles prior to accepting them. Anyone trying to pretend that “social science” journals are more rigorous in their standards than are real science journals is simply fooling himself.
And, c’mon. Phrenology? It’s pretty obvious that these Cornell students intentionally picked a “journal” which they knew at the outset was bogus, and that would give them a chance to have their article accepted and garner some attention. Because, and I suspect they knew this, if they’d submitted their “crap” to a real journal, they’d have been shot down and gotten no write-up from anyone. Social science, indeed.
rXv, Slart. As long as you’re losing redundant characters.
If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit.
She blinded me with science.
Right, Squid. Forehead well and duly slapped.
You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your post modern deconstrutionist studies and you make an effort to understand Lucan, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.
I find that my thirst for incomprehensible soft-science prose is adequately slaked by the Postmodernist Essay Generator.
Yes, yes, yes, but we must take into account the article’s organic inscription and systematic articulation from within the traces of the before and the outside of its metaphysical containment.
That thing is beautiful, SI. Makes me want to enroll in some classes this fall.
“A zebra does not change its spots.”
glad “phrenology” didnt tip them off.
i’ll warrant “entrail and offal reading” may have.
The symbolic outside, you peasant!
Symbolic outside? That is explicitly implied and tacitly understood by its absence in the statement. Pay attention.
My writing improved greatly when I started using this.
All the best science questions have already been answered on MythBusters
I suppose they might come up with something new in that Hadron Death Machine though.
“Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.”
I am not sure where Twitter falls into this, but I am sure I am responsble for it somehow.
applied phrenology? /headdesk that can’t be real. can not. as retarded as some X studies are, and i should know, this smells of fish and meta-hoax, to me. call me cynical. i still have that sokal thing in a box somewhere, probably with a bunch of artForums and octobers and early subgenius church artifacts. i knew it was a hoax when i bought it, the sokal thing. but i thought it might have some sort of historical foot-notiness and i wanted to have a copy for that reason. and it made me laugh a lot and many times, reading it in various altered states. it was some pretty cool culture jamming, at the time. anyway, not even taking the hoax article into consideration i have a lot of difficulty believing, am not able to suspend my disbelief to believe that there exists a serious scholarly phrenology journal.
argh. never mind. i just re-read the thing. and whoa. okay. they believed that? that’s even more headdesky than i thought. sorry for being dumb. operating on two hours sleep today.
As part of my asbestos oriented law practice, I had to wallow though all sorts of rubbish in the “journals”. When people thought the Lancet was off for publishing bogus casualty figures from Iraq – it was only confirmation of what I had seen for years before.
The worst of all offenders, as far as “useless” goes, have to be the journals that publish all sorts of ‘research’ by the Public Health degree wielders. All the rubbish of politics, none of the usefulness of medical advances!
Pay to publish a scientific paper? Bizarre. Never heard of it. I wouldn’t trust a source like that in the first place.
Paying to get published: Many of the premiere journal in the hard sciences (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Biological Chemistry, etc.) have page fees for publishing scientific papers reporting one’s research. HOWEVER, these journals require Peer-Review by at least two independent, anonymous reviewers knowledgeable in the field.
Not the same a this story reports.
You really have nothing to say about Iran?
OMG Jeff G is so AMAZING!!! What are you listening to!! Join me on the NOH8 campaign train!!
According to the Barack Obama it would be wrong to meddle with the freedom-seeking Iranian people even if they want to shoot the explodey nuclear missiles at us to where they blow up on our heads and we should listen all of us cause the Barack Obama is the smartest one. You think maybe that’s why Mr. Soros picked him for president?
You really have nothing to say about Iran?
No, you…
Kate, why don’t you go post something on your blog about Iran, and let Jeff run his site as he would?
I think this is emblematic of the fringes like some wanker from Ball State (no judgements, just a funny name) wants to establush himself so he rounds a journal so he can tenure at Soylent Green U but the interviewer knows the journal is garbage and the interviewee is like yea we had some difficulties finding reputable peepoles but at least I had the initiative so that’s what I got going for me. But for real some of the most rigorous stuff is the most boring like a decade long wankfest about the approriate concentrations of beta antagonists in rat brains what lead to drugs what only have numbers but the good doctor what reads his literature knows that nan-190 is what I need now.
some wanker from Ball State
Or maybe Morehead State.
drugs with numbers is the future
Under Obamacare lots of numbers, very few drugs.
but what about all those marketing people that make up fun names with “X”s and “Z”s?
Drugs and numbers.
It’s the Ch*c*g* way.
Sixty-nine, please.
hi maggie I made a link for you to click yesterday
i will make again. brb.
Blast !
‘feets wins.
Share, please.
here … that would be a good link for maggie I thought when I saw that. I just was wandering around Twitter trying to look unthreatening and I found it.
oh yeah, thanks hf. I was just thinking I should check that out now that I’m home.
Ouch.
No.
Quoted in the original post, by Jeff. Sometimes reading the entire text prevents avoidable embarrassment.
Kind of like the embarrassment that editor suffered.
oh, Sitzprobe, I know, but really only ever heard it with opera.
I suspect a lot of the B-grade journals wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for their utility in padding the ol’ resume. As long as tenure committees count widgets — Has he taught for eight years? Check! Has he published at least 12 peer-reviewed articles? Check! — there will always be journals happy to publish anything you send them, for a fee.
As for the social sciences, I once got curious when I discovered that a colleague had published the same article twice, in two different journals, with only slight differences. So I started checking out his other publications. Turned out he’d published the same article five times, changing little other than the title, and listed it on his CV each time. Yes, he got tenure. Yes, he’s an idiot. But he’s a widely published idiot!
Swen Swenson: Don’t forget–Has he or she supported the correct candidates and political positions. Of course, they never admit that is an actual criteria or what consitutes “correct”.
There are some very reputable journals that charge authors extra if they want any old Tom, Dick or Harry to read their paper online. This is one of them.
This has me wondering where all that peer-reviewed shit about AGW got published.
This seems really sorta kinda also tangentially related to an article that I read yesterday. here. In explaining why a company was refusing to do business with a documentary maker, for translating:
Would you really want someone who thinks class means Al Gore to translate anything for you?
Hey, you know what, I’ve gotta go on that ‘Letterman’ show. That show is so lame.
It’s pretty obvious that these Cornell students intentionally picked a “journal†which they knew at the outset was bogus, and that would give them a chance to have their article accepted and garner some attention.
No.
Philip Davis, a graduate student at Cornell University in New York, who was behind the hoax, said he wanted to test the editorial standards of the journal’s publisher, Bentham Science Publishers.
Quoted in the original post, by Jeff. Sometimes reading the entire text prevents avoidable embarrassment.Your employment of a patently foolish argument is good enough. The fact that you put forth your patently foolish argument with an air of condescension should win you some kind of award. First, if someone tries to make a point by perpetrating a “hoax”, but chooses a completely meaningless target (like a bogus journal) for their “hoax”, they’re not going to come out afterward and say, “Yes, we intentionally chose a meaningless target, so please disregard the whole thing and pay no more attention to us.” Second, the fact that, when explaining their choice of target, they mentioned the name of the publisher but not the name of the journal, quite obviously says absolutely nothing. “Open Source Science Journal” is obviously a bogus journal, and this hoax wasn’t required to demonstrate that. The mere phrase “Open Source” is a pretty blatant red flag. I don’t know whether Bentham publishes any real journals. But regardless of that, the grad students here clearly picked a journal that was obviously bogus, knowing full well that was the only way they’d get an obviously bogus paper accepted. Whether they state this after the fact, or whether they name the publisher rather than the journal when answering a reporter’s question, does not and cannot remotely suggest otherwise.
I suspect a lot of the B-grade journals wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for their utility in padding the ol’ resume. As long as tenure committees count widgets — Has he taught for eight years? Check! Has he published at least 12 peer-reviewed articles? Check!
There’s no question that lots of scientists engage in publication padding, and that many weak papers, whether due to redundancy or ill-conceived arguments and experiments, get published. But that is not remotely the same thing as suggesting that you can get a completely nonsensical, computer-generated paper published in a legitimate, peer-reviewed journal in the natural sciences. You can’t.
Even Al can have a whiff of wisdom in his spew though the Constitution should be thought of more as an OS with the laws as software running on it. From that standpoint Godel found a bug that allowed fascism a backdoor into the system. Perhaps it is the one being exploited by the Left in our time.
No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.
That Godel thing was interesting. I would like to know how he thought it would be done.
Until that paper was discovered in November 2008 the story was considered to be a legend that might have some truth to it. The hardest part of a discovery is the finding that there is something to be discovered in a certain area at all.
It would be unusual if enemies of the USA, in particular the two great Communist systems of the USSR and China, had not, upon hearing of this “discovery”, devoted some of their considerable linguistic and mathematical talents toward finding what Godel had found.
I suspicion is the current administration will give us a glimpse into what they did find. The use of the “czars” instead of cabinet officials to run things might be part of it.
My not I in the 3rd paragraph.
This has me wondering where all that peer-reviewed shit about AGW got published.
Turns out that peer review in the hard sciences often entails no more than a “smell-test.” The peer reviewers do not ask for the raw data and methodologies at that stage: they only make sure that the paper is appropriate for the journal, that it presents new research, and that the methodology appears to be OK.
After the paper is published, others in that field should ask the author(s) for the raw data and methodologies in an effort to reproduce the results. That’s what happened with Mann’s hockey stick and McIntyre: the latter read the former’s article and merely asked to see the raw data, etc. The rest is history.
Excellent assumption geoffb…
And Frank Marshall Davis began that work long ago, in the faraway place of Hawaii…
Davis, Stalin, and the Devil are all slapping high fives in hell and hanging “mission accomplished” banners…
No doubt Gödel could have figured a way to twitter his concept in a formula of 140 characters or less…….
Turns out that peer review in the hard sciences often entails no more than a “smell-test.†The peer reviewers do not ask for the raw data and methodologies at that stage: they only make sure that the paper is appropriate for the journal, that it presents new research, and that the methodology appears to be OK.
I would venture to say that you have no idea what you’re talking about. There are crappy reviewers. A lot of them. Just as there are substandard practitioners of anything. But when you submit a manuscript for consideration, you submit it with a detailed materials and methods section that lays out exactly how you analyzed the subject. A peer review is not a vague smell test, at least not by intrinsic set up. All the information is laid out. Whether the reviewers are capable of making a rigorous analysis is a separate question. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. But all the methodologies are laid out for them to peruse.
The notion that theres something wrong with researchers paying to publish their research is so idiotic only a liberal could have come up with it.
Did you imagine that previously, articles were published for free? Of course not, it has always cost money to publish articles. In the past, the reader paid to read the article. This had some massive disadvantages — (1) only readers with access to large sums of money, or an academic subscription could read the article (meaning the general public could never read it), (2) academics at smaller institutions would only have access to a small number of journals, so (3) the authors work would only be read, and cited, if it was published in one of the few journals that nearly all universities subscribed to.
In both the old system and the new system, money changed hands. In both systems, money goes *only* to the journal, and *never* to the author. The only difference is between reader pays versus author pays.
Author pays makes so much more sense that we will see all journals abandon the other foolish system within 102-0 years. No matter what some hippy-dippy ideas about how “publication should be free, dude!” might ahve to say about it.
I would venture to say that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
I am repeating what I read on climateaudit.org some time ago (in the comments) about how Michael Mann’s flawed research got through the gatekeepers.
You are correct: I have no personal knowledge with the subject on which I expounded.
I would venture to say that you have no idea what you’re talking about. There are crappy reviewers. A lot of them. Just as there are substandard practitioners of anything. But when you submit a manuscript for consideration, you submit it with a detailed materials and methods section that lays out exactly how you analyzed the subject. A peer review is not a vague smell test, at least not by intrinsic set up.
Dude, did you read the article linked at the top of the page? Did you read the original post? What is this intrinsic set up of which you speak, and what the hell does that even mean. If there are some objective standards that a peer review process must meet in order to be certified an Official Peer Review, then please show me where and how it works, otherwise it appears to me that peer review is a so broad as to be nearly meaningless term.
Careful Showy,
I dig what you’re sayin’, and have a background in the hard sciences so, although I’m biased, agree with much of what you say…
But please be a bit less harsh with some of the humanities folks around here, and especially Dicentra…
We luvs us some Dicentra around heeyah!
No offense meant, but she’s done a lot of reaserch onto the whole climate change connivance and found that Mann was able to slip through some pretty shoddy work. A statistical variation to be sure though, as I admit there can be far more subjectivity inherent in humanities subject matter than in the hard sciences.
Best Wishes
#36 It’s pretty obvious that these Cornell students intentionally picked a “journal†which they knew at the outset was bogus, and that would give them a chance to have their article accepted and garner some attention.
That’s not the way I read it. I don’t think he decided to pull a hoax and then picked a publisher. He states that they sent him unsolicited generic e-mails inviting submission, for a fee. That should be two red flags, but it isn’t dispositive. A tenured prof would probably just ignore it but a grad student has has time and reason to make the investigative effort. (For him a legitimate peer-reviewed online journal would be a good way to get his feet wet, so to speak.)
#86But that is not remotely the same thing as suggesting that you can get a completely nonsensical, computer-generated paper published in a legitimate, peer-reviewed journal in the natural sciences. You can’t.
That is tautological; a peer-reviewed journal that publishes nonsense is by that act illegitimate. The worry is that an apparently legitimate journal is in fact an illegitimate scam. And so this appears to be.
FWIW, I’ve never had a peer-review that didn’t at least catch a typo or suggest rephrasing. A good journal will forward copies of the reviewers’ comments even if the paper is accepted with no changes needed.
Dude, did you read the article linked at the top of the page? Did you read the original post? What is this intrinsic set up of which you speak, and what the hell does that even mean. If there are some objective standards that a peer review process must meet in order to be certified an Official Peer Review, then please show me where and how it works, otherwise it appears to me that peer review is a so broad as to be nearly meaningless term.
Dude, yes I did, and yes I did, and I’ve already commented on why this article has nothing meaningful to say about real scientific journals. The “intrinsic set-up” is 3 generally recognized experts in the field who are hired by the journal to read a submitted manuscript in its entirety, critique it, determine whether its suitable for publication according to the journal’s standards, and what changes, if any need to be made prior to publication. That’s the intrinsic set-up. It’s certainly not perfect, nor can it be, but it’s also not just a “smell test” (a far more vague phrase which you seemed to have no problem with). Among people who have actual experience with the peer review process in natural sciences, I’d wager you’d find very few who have been more critical of that process than I have. But some of you are going way overboard in pretending that scientific publication is largely just a bunch of people paying someone money to get papers published on the nature of their belly-button lint.
Careful Showy,
I dig what you’re sayin’, and have a background in the hard sciences so, although I’m biased, agree with much of what you say…
But please be a bit less harsh with some of the humanities folks around here, and especially Dicentra…
We luvs us some Dicentra around heeyah!
No offense meant, but she’s done a lot of reaserch onto the whole climate change connivance and found that Mann was able to slip through some pretty shoddy work. A statistical variation to be sure though, as I admit there can be far more subjectivity inherent in humanities subject matter than in the hard sciences.
Best WishesBob, I’ve been on this site for a long time, and I really don’t think it’s the place where you have to soften your comments to the point that you can’t tell someone you don’t think she knows what she’s talking about on a certain issue. This has nothing to do with the hockey stick or with climatology: I’m well aware there’s an enormous amount of complete horse-crap infesting that field. But some of you folks (humanities folks, apparently, which frankly, makes it much worse) are going way overboard in your characterizations of the chicanery of science.
#78 As long as tenure committees count widgets — Has he taught for eight years? Check! Has he published at least 12 peer-reviewed articles? Check! — there will always be journals happy to publish anything you send them, for a fee.
True as far as it goes, but only if you think the tenure committee uses those criteria. My tenure submission had to include detailed descriptions of each journal, its ranking in the field, its acceptance rate, its citation rate (called an “impact factor”) and its relevance (an “immediacy index”). Basically they want to know if the journal publishes every paper it receives and if anyone is actually reading this stuff once it’s published.
In addition, I had to submit a list of tenured faculty in my field at other universities or labs that I had never worked with who I felt could understand my work. The dean picked three of those and asked them to read of my papers and write a detailed overview of my professional work: was it legitimate? Was I contributing to the field? Was it a reasonable rate of publication given my age? Was I padding with repetition?
Overall, seven levels of review and about 24 faculty, 3 outside readers, and the board of regents had to approve my tenure application. And conversations I have had after the fact convinces me the even the president read every word of my 80-page application. True, not every university has the same process, but the widget-counters tend to get the reputations they deserve.
The same with journals: high standards lead to good reputations. And journals with good reputations don’t get cut when the budgets get tight. It’s enlightened self-interest on everyone’s part.
After all this, don’t you think that the submission rate of Bentham Publishers will suffer? Mr. Davis has done the community a favor IMHO.
That isn’t what I am trying to say at all, and I work in the field of construction materials testing, very hard science that gets people killed if you fuck up.
All dicentra and I were pointing out is that some of this AGW propoganda out there that is being touted as peer-reviewed could very well be the product of some bogus scientific journal such as the one cited rather than legitimately peer reviewed by real scientists in a real scientific process. I am not casting stones at real scientists, and I don’t think dicentra is.
You’re getting it backwards: they chose the target first, and then cooked up the hoax.
Again, your reading comprehension is what’s at fault here, though I give you points for being prickly enough to pick up on the dig.
Showy,
Please don’t mistake my jocular tone. As I mentioned, I too have a hard science background,(MS in aerospace engineering), and said I agreed with you.
I meant no disrespect to you, and I guess was only asking that you take it wasy on the many humanities types that populate PW. As you acknowledged, virtually the entire field of climatology is infested with folks that give the scientific method a bad name. But, many people are only exposed to that chicanery, and have little experience with the actual rigor involved in getting an actual scientific paper published.
Besides, many of the folks here would acknowledge the utter drivel that passes for social science in some circles these days…
I simply mistook you’re tone for harsh, and apologize if it offended you…
That is tautological; a peer-reviewed journal that publishes nonsense is by that act illegitimate. The worry is that an apparently legitimate journal is in fact an illegitimate scam. And so this appears to be.
FWIW, I’ve never had a peer-review that didn’t at least catch a typo or suggest rephrasing. A good journal will forward copies of the reviewers’ comments even if the paper is accepted with no changes needed.
My point was that it’s not possible to get a computer generated paper published in a journal that actually does employ peer review by generally recognized experts in the field. That’s not a tautology. And it’s not as if people don’t know what the legitimate journals in the field are, and would say, “Hey, I’ve never heard of the Open Source Science Journal, but I’ll just assume it’s legit, despite it’s suspicious sounding name and the fact that I’ve never read a paper that was published in it.” Scientific journals have reputations, or not, based on years of experience by everyone in the field. And as you point out, even if you know nothing about the reputations of various journals, it’s pretty easy to tell from the outset whether a journal employs meaningful peer review. But going back to the original article here, to debunk the Open Source Science Journal is kind of like debunking that “journal” published by the guy who claims that global warming causes increased volcanic activity. It’s funny and all, and particularly so that MSNBC would cite it, but it doesn’t really say anything about actual scientific journals.
You’re getting it backwards: they chose the target first, and then cooked up the hoax.
Again, your reading comprehension is what’s at fault here, though I give you points for being prickly enough to pick up on the dig.
I neither specified nor assumed an order in the sentence you quoted or elsewhere. Nor is the order of choosing the hoax and choosing the target remotely relevant to the point. Otherwise, good point.
I’ve already commented on why this article has nothing meaningful to say about real scientific journals.
I understand where you are coming from, Showy. But the article does have something very meaningful to say by alleging that Bentham Publishers does not publish “real” scientific journals, a statement that affects 250 journals in a number of fields. This article can be googled, and will show up when an academic’s work is evaluated by some third party and serve as a warning.
A few years ago, a member of the American Physical Society suggested the APS begin to try and actively correct misconceptions about physicists in movies and TV. (The ACS had formed a team to do this for chemists a few years earlier.) Most members felt it wasn’t needed, because they didn’t see many misrepresentations in the media. When they saw Denise Richards playing a physicist in a James Bond flick, their reaction was “real physicists don’t act like that, ergo she’s not really portraying a physicist.” Which meant there was nothing to speak up about, the general public’s impressions that this was a physicist notwithstanding. I think you are doing some of that here.
That isn’t what I am trying to say at all, and I work in the field of construction materials testing, very hard science that gets people killed if you fuck up.
All dicentra and I were pointing out is that some of this AGW propoganda out there that is being touted as peer-reviewed could very well be the product of some bogus scientific journal such as the one cited rather than legitimately peer reviewed by real scientists in a real scientific process. I am not casting stones at real scientists, and I don’t think dicentra is.
I wasn’t responding to you B Moe. I was responding to the statement, “Turns out that peer review in the hard sciences often entails no more than a “smell-test.†The peer reviewers do not ask for the raw data and methodologies at that stage: they only make sure that the paper is appropriate for the journal, that it presents new research, and that the methodology appears to be OK.. That reads to me as a fairly broad-based, and completely inaccurate, characterization of the publication process in real scientific journals. It does not read to me as “some of this AGW propoganda out there that is being touted as peer-reviewed could very well be the product of some bogus scientific journal such as the one cited rather than legitimately peer reviewed by real scientists in a real scientific process”.
A few years ago, a member of the American Physical Society suggested the APS begin to try and actively correct misconceptions about physicists in movies and TV. (The ACS had formed a team to do this for chemists a few years earlier.) Most members felt it wasn’t needed, because they didn’t see many misrepresentations in the media. When they saw Denise Richards playing a physicist in a James Bond flick, their reaction was “real physicists don’t act like that, ergo she’s not really portraying a physicist.†Which meant there was nothing to speak up about, the general public’s impressions that this was a physicist notwithstanding. I think you are doing some of that here.
That’s not what I’m doing at all. If you want to analogize the two situations, I’m saying to the people who saw the Denise Richards show, “Contrary to what this show might lead you to believe, Denise Richards is not an actual physicist. And in that episode where she had sex with the grad student on top of the laser table, actual physicists generally don’t do that”. I’m not making any arguments one way or the other as to whether the APS should undertake a campaign to neutralize the Denise Richards stereotype.
And it’s not as if people don’t know what the legitimate journals in the field are, and would say, “Hey, I’ve never heard of the Open Source Science Journal, but I’ll just assume it’s legit, despite it’s suspicious sounding name and the fact that I’ve never read a paper that was published in it.†Scientific journals have reputations, or not, based on years of experience by everyone in the field. [Emphases added.]
Qualifiers there, Showy. A lowly reporter has a deadline and free web access to a Bentham journal or he can schlep to the local university library to look something up in the “real” journal since the newspaper won’t pay $2000 a year for a subscription. Guess what happens?
I once read an article in the New Haven paper about a nuclear reaction involving “icthium” because my Yale colleague has a thick accent and the science editor apparently didn’t know that lithium had three protons. Every morning I hear radio announcers summarize research published in various journals, many I have never heard of. Thomson Scientific tracks over 6400 science journals. They can’t all be the best but that doesn’t make number 6000 illegitimate. That media mention may be enough for the average listener or reporter to presume it’s a legitimate source.
No, an experienced scientist won’t be fooled but there are people publishing in these journals. If they are unaware they need to be made aware and if they are dishonest they need to be publicly called on it.
I simply mistook you’re tone for harsh, and apologize if it offended you…
It didn’t offend me at all, and I didn’t mean to give that impression. My point was simply that people on this board and on this thread generally say what they mean, without trying to give offense (usually), but also without beating around the bush, and I was doing the same. Or so I thought.
Qualifiers there, Showy. A lowly reporter has a deadline and free web access to a Bentham journal or he can schlep to the local university library to look something up in the “real†journal since the newspaper won’t pay $2000 a year for a subscription. Guess what happens?
I once read an article in the New Haven paper about a nuclear reaction involving “icthium†because my Yale colleague has a thick accent and the science editor apparently didn’t know that lithium had three protons. Every morning I hear radio announcers summarize research published in various journals, many I have never heard of. Thomson Scientific tracks over 6400 science journals. They can’t all be the best but that doesn’t make number 6000 illegitimate. That media mention may be enough for the average listener or reporter to presume it’s a legitimate source.
No, an experienced scientist won’t be fooled but there are people publishing in these journals. If they are unaware they need to be made aware and if they are dishonest they need to be publicly called on it.CJ, it seems to me that we’re arguing two completely separate things. I’m not arguing that misperceptions about science don’t exist, or that novices, journalists, even “science writers” don’t frequently mistake crockery for science or perform hatchet jobs when trying to describe scientific studies. I’m well aware all of those things happen. I’ve seen plenty of incidents of “science writers” for everything from the local paper to Time magazine completely mischaracterize a scientific study. What I’m doing here is arguing against what I believe to be one instance of a misperception (or perhaps more accurately, a gross exaggeration). The fact that I’m arguing against what I believe to be a misperception implies, I would think, that I recognize that misperceptions do exist.
And as for AGW, what this hoax demonstrates has very little to do with the problems in climatology in my opinion. Joke journals exist, and occasionally people (generally novices) are snookered by them, but it’s a pretty minor problem, and not exclusive to AGW. The problem with climatology is the politicization that has everyone, from researchers, journal reviewers, editors, grant issuers, politicians, involved in a self-feeding cycle wherein, if you publish bold new “evidence” of AGW, you get attention and funding. If you publish, or try to publish, something disagreeing with AGW, you’re much more likely to get ignored or ridiculed. It’s the political drive, not the lack of peer-review, or the existence of joke journals, that feeds this. AGW demands government action, anti-AGW does not. Few other scientific fields have this influence.
I’ve been on this site for a long time, and I really don’t think it’s the place where you have to soften your comments to the point that you can’t tell someone you don’t think she knows what she’s talking about on a certain issue.
I am a recovering humanities folk (now a tech writer), and I have learned to dig the hard sciences types. Hard science types usually lean toward the Aspie side of the scale, and Aspies prefer to be Blunt But Accurate rather than bother with sugar-coating everything to preserve the tender sensibilities of those moronic neurotypicals, who don’t seem to get that no offense is intended and would do well to take their mushy hearts off their sleeves for once instead of insisting that everything be carefully modulated according to rules that only they understand.
I was not sent into an attack of the vapors when Showy challenged my background in peer review procedures (but thanks for the defense of a lady, fellas!). I am Blunt But Accurate myself (and mildly Aspie), so I get where Showy was coming from. I may have researched some of the issues related to AGW (mostly meta-issues, such as the behavior of the scientists), but I have never submitted a paper to a scientific journal for peer review, nor have I been a peer who has reviewed such a paper. So Showy just detected my ignorance and said so.
No harm, no foul.
This has nothing to do with the hockey stick or with climatology: I’m well aware there’s an enormous amount of complete horse-crap infesting that field. But some of you folks (humanities folks, apparently, which frankly, makes it much worse) are going way overboard in your characterizations of the chicanery of science.
The conversation on climateaudit.org (whence I got the idea I expressed) was discussing how the term “peer-reviewed” has been used to grant bullet-proof credibility to the AGW alarmists. Someone tried to qualify what “peer-reviewed” actually means, and the writer may have limited himself to climate science.
And although Steve McIntyre has exposed a tremendous amount of laxity in the climate sciences, that does not translate to laxity elsewhere in the sciences. Furthermore, vanity publications have always earned the scorn of one’s peers, whether in the sciences or the humanities.
What I’m doing here is arguing against what I believe to be one instance of a misperception (or perhaps more accurately, a gross exaggeration). The fact that I’m arguing against what I believe to be a misperception implies, I would think, that I recognize that misperceptions do exist.
I think I understand you now. My bad. Your reactions to B Moe and dicentra struck me as overly confident that “it can’t happen here.” I inferred that you think some journals are somehow immune to bad process or a thumb on the scale. They may be less susceptible but they aren’t immune. Science is the #2 ranked journal after Nature, and yet it has been less than rigorous in its presentation of AGW, especially in editorials. An unusually large number of climate science journals are relatively young and there has been less of a “natural” reputation-building process than with the decades-old journals. Most of the media and the public don’t seem to be inclined to question or evaluate the trustworthiness of these journals unless it fits their political purposes.
On the flip side, being entirely online or called “open source” doesn’t automatically mean the journal is not “real.” Some very good online journals exist to publish what used to be sent to “rapid communications” or “review letters,” i.e., time sensitive results in quickly-moving fields. Though the best ones are associated with print journal publishers with established reputations.
Like any reputation, a journal’s must be constantly reenforced because it is so much easier to be complacent and it is much easier to diminish than solidify. A bad journal diminishes the the reputations of other journals and the entire process.
Jennifer Rubin, it appears, was actually born yesterday. I mean, fucking shock:
It’s almost as if they haven’t spent the last three decades or so trying to kill missile defense. Hopefully, her surprise is feigned; sarcastic, even.
Bob, no offense, but I don’t consider engineering a hard science. And I say that as an engineer.
Engineering is a dim shadow of physics. My opinion, naturally.
Slart,
That’s why I called it a background in hard sciences, as opposed to, “I am a scientist”…
No offense taken…
Ah, ok. No disagreement, then.
I think engineers get just enough exposure to hard science to be dangerous, or at least to feel dangerous. Personally, I find the scientific method has helped me solve a number of problems, but I habitually just start looking immediately for solutions, rather than forming hypotheses and then begin nullifying them.
Slart,
That has a lot to do with engineering being more of an applied science that reaserch based discipline.
I don’t know what your discipline is, mechanical, electrical, etc.. But, in aerospace engineering, the old school way I took it doing both astronautics and aeronautics, we actually undertook a quite a lot of scientific study, in many areas, in addition to astonishing an amount of mathematics…
In my time at Navy missle systems we did a lot of materials research pertaining to stuff I’m not at liberty to speak of in any depth really. So while not doing any ground-breaking theory development, we did some fairy in depth studies that resulted in essentially new materials and the processes to make them…
Developing ubiquitous “unobtainium” that all engineers dream of, so to speak…
The same is true for some exotic propulsion studies we did, as well as hypersonic aerodynamic control work…
So here we were researching and applying stuff that folks had never dreamed of before…
Of course these are areas where broader theories were well eatablished, and we were simply learning about, and learning to exploit, more subtle variations and effects, ones that were confined to a firmly defined operational envelope…
So you’re right that as engineers we are tempted to look for solutions instead of forming hypothesis, that’s what we do! But sometimes the divivding line with scientific research blurs a bit more for some than others…
But it is a fact that enginners most often apply the fruits of the research of hard scientists…
Be Cool!
I use the term hard science as opposed to soft sciences: political science, psychology, ecology and all that mess.
I don’t mean to imply that I am a scientist of any type, just that the applied science I use in my job is of the hard type.
Bob,
I made a post at the Pub. Would you mind reading it and give me some feedback?
Thanks
Bob:
Electrical. Not that I do much with electrons, these days. Spent my early career doing navigation and guidance analysis and design on what is now PAC-3, then moving on to SDI work, then some IRST work, then back into navigation, then back to SDI, then Army missile defense, then targeting sensors, which is what I do now.
Yeah, I pretty much agree with what you said. I just tend to hold practioners of hard science as being better than I am, no matter what kind of cool stuff that I’ve done. In some respects; in certain applications, I think I’m better. But mostly because I happen to know some things they don’t, and am willing to adapt to real-life limitations rather than try and force the customer to spend (for instance) a hundred million dollars redesigning a system so that my sensibilities are less offended.
Slart,
We agree completely. I hold real scientists in very high regard…
And, I wish I could say more but I can’t really. But, let’s just say that the group I was with got to spend the many millions of dollars you were talking about, to discover, and invent, things that were never known nor even existed before…
But as engineers we are less theoretical and more practical than research scientists.
Best Wishes
I think that line is probably a bit blurred in both direction. From my perspective, most “hard scientists” are not pure theoriticians, and most engineers are not pure tech guys. Engineers have to understand the theoretical framework underlying a system, and often tweak that theoretical framework. And scientists have to make some proof of concept, design experiments, maintain and often modify equipment, all of which requires some nuts & bolts capability. When I’ve worked with engineers, I’ve often found that out knowledge base had some broad similarities, and that one of the biggest differences was just in the terminology that we used.
Yes…we’ve adopted a quaternion notation that’s kind of at odds with Hamilton’s original formulation. It works, but it’s not what a physicist would be comfortable with. I think we’re using what NASA software engineers came up with a few decades back; it’s unconventional, but it has quaternion rotations multiply left-to-right just as rotation matrices do, rather than right-to-left.
Makes the code more readable, and the derivations a bit easier to follow for those unfamiliar with quaternions, which is just about everyone.
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