3 ms·

Elsevier has always smelled bad to me. They published the Andrew Wakefield autism paper for crying out loud.

• denton-scratch 7y ago
  Well, The Lancet published it - The Lancet is probably the #1 medical scholarly journal bar none. True - The Lancet is owned by Elsevier. Ten years later, the General Medical Council found that Wakefield's research had been dishonest, and on that basis The Lancet retracted the article. But I don't think it's right to criticise Elsevier over the publication of a paper that wasn't conclusively falsified for another decade. Reviewers are not supposed to be detectives; it's not their job to expose deliberate fraud. They rely on the material submitted by the author. This is the much same as for auditors; they rely on the documents supplied by the auditee's accounting team, they're not in the business of investigating criminality and blatant lying. Elsevier smells no worse to me than any other commercial publisher of scholarly journals. To be clear, I think they all have a pretty dodgy whiff about them; but I'm not aware that Elsevier is any worse than the others.
  • jshowa3 7y ago
    Most papers I've heard of that exhibit malfeasance come from Elsevier and it's my understanding that the journal editors manage the whole peer review process and are compensated by the publisher through some form of an agreement. And yes, it is the job of reviewers to at least recommend not publishing a paper that can be detected as fraudulent.