5 ms·
Not surprising that these kind of things happen in social studies and it's easy to make fun of. However, lots of junk is also published in science and engineer
by zwieback 8y ago
Not surprising that these kind of things happen in social studies and it's easy to make fun of.
However, lots of junk is also published in science and engineering, it's just not as egregious and apparent.
- jjgreen 8y agoIndeed, "audacious" is not word I'd use for these kind of games, "lazy", "shooting fish in a barrel" would be closer.
- glormph 8y agoAlso, that junk is not as likely to trickle down to the news and the broader population.
- mdarens 8y agoyeah, it's not limited to social sciences, but it gets more media attention when it is because it feeds the narrative that the humanities are useless: https://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763 https://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-12...
- jf- 8y agoEngineering and science have an advantage, however, in that they are empirical and readily tested. Things evaluate to true or false, even if doing the evaluation is difficult. In the humanities, things often come down to value judgements and mere assertions, which cannot be validated one way or another.
- Moodles 8y agonot to mention a ridiculously high percentage of humanities papers are never cited once. Never. Cited. Once. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/academic-papers-citation-rates-remler/ http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/aca... Who can see this and not admit the field is in crisis?
- Balgair 8y agoDepends on what you mean by crisis. If you have a student that really needs to graduate soon, this condition is a boon.
- fipple 8y agoAt least there's a standard for junk science -- it replicates or it doesn't.
- hannob 8y agoit obviously skips the third option, which is the standard in most fields: nobody ever tries to replicate it.
- jf- 8y agoPlenty of people try to replicate, in trying to build on work from other labs. What they don’t do is publish when replication fails, but the failure to replicate usually becomes known in the community.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoIf people don't publish failures to replicate, how do you know how frequently replication failures become known in the community?
- jf- 8y agoThe same way you know that you walked out of your front door this morning without it having to be published in a scientific journal.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- daveFNbuck 8y agoTo be clear, my question is how you know how many failed replications there are that you never find out about.
- conception 8y agoThe 2nd part of academia that isn't being talked about here is citations. Getting published can be huge, but if your paper is actually garbage no one is going to cite it. That's a far better measure of the impact of a paper - who's using the data in it.
- mturmon 8y agoWitness this classic complaint from Peter Elias: https://oikosjournal.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/elias1958ire-editorial.pdf https://oikosjournal.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/elias1958ir... published in 1958 when he was editor of the IRE (now IEEE) Transactions on Information Theory.
- zwieback 8y agoThanks, that's gold, apparently things don't change as much or fast as we think they do.
- skybrian 8y agoWhy do you say "social studies" when the sociology journals didn't fall for it?
- daveFNbuck 8y agoThere are much more egregious examples in computer science publishing. A paper that just repeated the words "get me off your fucking mailing list" over and over [1] was published in a journal. I also remember there being some automatic paper generators that resulted in several publications several years back. This is 100% an issue with bogus for-profit publishing, not with any particular area of study. [1] http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf
- airstrike 8y agoFigure 1 really drives the point home
- throwaway2048 8y agoNot a journal of anybody cares about in any way whatsoever, just a scam journal that attempts to extract fees from desperate to publish researchers. Which is why they were spamming people.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoThe same is true of the journals that published the hoax papers mentioned in the article.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoI find it phenomenally interesting that people simply say what they want to be true with no consideration for whether it is or not. We are indeed moving into a post-fact world aren't we? [1] Here is the wiki page on the 'get me off your mailing list' paper. Here [2] is the page on the journal that chose to accept (after revisions) the Mein Kampf paper. You might notice certain differences. The other journals that accepted the fake papers are part of the T&F/Springer publishing networks, and some responded in this [3] article. They were not scam journals by any means of the word, just journals blinded by ideological bias. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Journal_of_Advanced_Computer_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Journal_of_Advan... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia [3] - https://reason.com/blog/2018/10/03/dog-rape-hoax-papers-pluckrose-lindsay https://reason.com/blog/2018/10/03/dog-rape-hoax-papers-pluc...
- Nasrudith 8y agoThe real meat depends on the publisher. There are always publication mills that accept basically anything or push objectively wrong agendas like AIDS denialism. It is when the bellwethers publish absolute crap that it is a sign of true rot in the field and not just a publication.