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There's a expose like this every couple of years, but nothing ever changes. My adviser told me entertaining stories of pranksters putting fake articles into CS
by glangdale 10y ago
There's a expose like this every couple of years, but nothing ever changes. My adviser told me entertaining stories of pranksters putting fake articles into CS journals from "The Austrian Naval Academy". I suspect one reason things don't change much is that the publishing game is shades of grey all the way up to the best publications - a third-tier journal won't publish complete gibberish, but you certainly might be able to get some pretty shallow stuff into it and I would be very surprised if anyone, say, checked the references or reality-tested the results.
- searine 10y agoThis is mostly due to the audience. Scientific journals are written for a scientific audience. For the most part, scientists get very adept at identifying good articles from bad, even in well regarded journals. Thus the system polices itself, by rewarding good articles with citations and letting bad or trivial articles wither. Unfortunately, the general public lacks that inherent skepticism, leading them to cite spurious articles from the East-Austrian Journal of Ass-scratch.
- arcanus 10y ago^ This. Peer-review is not a magical panacea that guarantees anything. The way to judge the impact of a scientific paper is through its citation count, perhaps normalized by a typical count for that particular field.
- kardos 10y agoUntil the sham articles start citing each other to game that approach
- JorgeGT 10y agoOr the classic... "Reviewer #1: Nice paper, but seems authors have missed this recently published work by TotallyNotReviewer1 et al. which could add..."
- visarga 10y agoSay you a are researcher leading a group. Then your name is going to appear on all papers published by your group (mentioned last). I don't think it should count the same as being the first mentioned author. Simple citation count is not good enough. Another situation: say you are the author of a dataset. Then all papers using your dataset are going to mention you, but such mentions are qualitatively different. They should not be counted in the same category.
- arcanus 10y agoConversely, when scanning a table of contents, I look at the last author first, because that tells me what group produced the work.
- detaro 10y agoImpact and correctness are two very different things. Cool results often get cited quite a bit, without much checking if the result actually is valid/can be repeated. (but yes, peer review doesn't solve this either, especially not in the current form)
- braveo 10y agoyep: see the current problems some of the social sciences are having with reproducibility.
- grigjd3 10y agoI know of research groups that intentionally cite other members of the same group to get citation numbers up. Sure, some of it is legit, but some is clearly not - particularly when actively ignoring relevant work from other groups.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hammock 10y ago>There's a expose like this every couple of years, but nothing ever changes. Why would it? These are not "predatory journals," they are akin to diploma mills for quack scientists and it's a mutually beneficial arrangement. Scientists get published, and the publisher gets paid. The only one harmed in this arrangement is a hypothetical third party, and that is dubious.
- foobarian 10y agoI know it's funny now because Austria is landlocked but back when it controlled Croatia they did have a naval academy near Rijeka. It's where Captain von Trapp went (from Sound of Music)
- glangdale 10y agoYes indeed, there was a substantial Austro-Hungarian Navy. I wound up reading a decent amount about this when I went looking for an on=line account of my adviser's story. Still, I suspect the Austrian Naval Academy was not a powerhouse of computer science research at the time...