5 ms·

What about Editor's ethics or lack thereof? I got accepted in a Chinese-oriented journal (i.e. most of the Editorial Board were Chinese) - I am not just 'sayin

What about Editor's ethics or lack thereof? I got accepted in a Chinese-oriented journal (i.e. most of the Editorial Board were Chinese) - I am not just 'saying' this, I'm saying because the OP mentioned "it's a Chinese thing" over results and datasets, whatever, I digress. On the last revision round, the Editor told me that I was lacking some references, which he promptly send me. Turned out that 6 out 6 of his 'recommendations' were papers HE WAS ONE OF THE AUTHORS. Since the paper was not OFFICIALLY accepted, I caved in and cited the guy (3 times), to my UTTER DISMAY. If you don't play the game, other Chinese are playing the game and having the results. I don't mean to insult Chinese people, but this is what is happening...

lrem 6y ago
Oh, this is not a China thing. I've had a paper have a bunch of reviewers suggest a bunch of references each. Every bunch had every paper share at least one author. Every bunch was pairwise disjoint in the author sets. Draw your own conclusions. Edit: just to be clear: I didn't at the time read that as "submission tax". More of, trying to be helpful and using things they personally were familiar with. Most, if not all, of the extra references would make our paper better... If we weren't fighting that damned page limit, that is.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  More and more evidence that the magazine based publication route is a net negative to science.
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    Question is, why don't scientists just put everything on public platforms (read: github) and call it a day? Is it only a matter of funding, or do other factors also play a role in that?
    - Vinnl 6y ago
      Because nobody reads it there and, more importantly, funders don't recognise the work you've done there. The "prestige" (as indicated by the scientific-looking but mostly inaccurate "Impact Factor") of the journal you publish in determines how good they think your work is. I wrote about that a while ago here: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or-break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...
      - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
        > Because nobody reads it there That's a problem that would fix itself the moment most useful research was mainly available on such platforms. > more importantly, funders don't recognise the work you've done there Once again, that sounds like mostly a problem that would disappear if a large migration to open platforms was to happen. ---- So it seems the main poroblem seems to be that there's no incentive to be among the first to make the move? IIRC it's often the journals that don't want content to be published elsewhere, so I guess just doing both is also not that simple.
        Vinnl 6y ago
        Yep exactly, it's a classic coordination problem.
    - captain_price7 6y ago
      For all its faults, peer-review is still the best mechanism to keep science in right track. What you propose would mean twitter or facebook will replace those journals, people with huge twitter followings, or "celebrity" scientists would dominate science, the works of people without such marketing skills would get drowned out. (This is sort of true for current system too, but I think situation would be much worse in new system.)
      - jpeloquin 6y ago
        > For all its faults, peer-review is still the best mechanism to keep science in right track. Peer review is often effective, but it can't reliably block fraudulent publications like those described in the posted article. Most bad papers are rejected, but the authors can always try again at another journal. Any paper will probably get published somewhere, eventually, even if only in a Hindawi or MDPI journal. The journals aren't accountable to anyone, and as long as they have enough good articles to serve as cover, academics will need to pay for access because citing relevant prior work is obligatory. The publishing system is very weak against fraud.
idoubtit 6y ago
I don't think this is related to the country of the editor. The lack of ethics is more preponderant in low-quality reviews (many junk reviews are Asian) and in some domains (more in medical reviews than mathematics). Here is an example that even the highest profile journal can lack ethics: circa 2005, Nature published a paper comparing a selection of scientific articles from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The editorial board of Nature selected the articles and sent them to reviewers. They only publishes metrics and a few quotes of their data (the list of selected articles and the reviews). The results were surprising and made a lot of buzz. But Britannica noted that one of these quotes was a sentence that was not it their encyclopedia. Nature had to admit that they selected some Wikipedia articles, and when they could not find the equivalent Britannica article, they sometimes built it by mixing articles and adding a few sentences of their own. Obviously, the process were totally biased, from the selection to the publication.
nxpnsv 6y ago
I found this behavior in Europeans and Americans too. It is not a Chinese specific thing...
- iagovar 6y ago
  I've never seen it in Spanish publications, although I've been told it happens (social sciences). I know about the politics too, that's the main reason why I never went to pursue an academic career, but being honest I never witnessed such plain fraud in my UNI. It was more of a friends-get-all scheme.
  - nxpnsv 6y ago
    I think it depends on your field a little. I did not see this during my years in particle physics...
crististm 6y ago
So you lowered your bar huh? Who am I to judge, but I would have preferred a story with something more than the game is rigged and that's what I get to play with
- raister 6y ago
  The paper was not accepted at that point. He could just denied publication out of spite. I played the odds, and got published, despite doing that. I'm sorry the story ended badly :) and yes - I've lowered the bar, sadly.
  - sn41 6y ago
    I will not judge you. Citation indices are horrible and perpetuate this fraud. I was telling a student of mine yesterday, 10 years ago the game was to get publications in prestigious venues. Now the game is to have a stellar scholar.google.com profile. The two games are perhaps correlated, but the correlation coefficient is not very high.
hasjekyll 6y ago
Unfortunately this happens in astronomy in non-Chinese journals too.
sn41 6y ago
Oh boy, this is very common. This is not specific to a country or ethnicity, unfortunately. You also see grad students shilling for their guides.
austinjp 6y ago
As others have noted, this is a global problem, not just Chinese. The version that is more difficult to detect is when a cabal of colleagues agree to push each others' papers in this way. So editor A says "you should really quote authors B, C and D." And somewhere else, editor B is saying "you should really quote authors A, C and D." Machine learning might be a way to tackle this at scale, by teasing out these associations. Of course, this relies on a degree of transparency. Some journals publish all editors' comments and all revisions of a paper. This is a Good Thing, but humans aren't reading all published research, let alone all the meta data. If someone with relevant ML skills wants to address this, and fancies starting a project, do get in touch :) A note on the Chinese insinuations that have been mentioned: As always, it's a bit more complex. There may well be reasons that some states might sponsor or 'encourage' gaming of intellectual institutions. If the world is viewed as a zero-sum game, and the currency is power, this unfortunately seems inevitable. Science tends away from this and towards collaboration, but 'politics' often seems to tend toward competition. I've seen university heads explicitly declare to all staff how they intend to game the national rankings, and nobody bats an eyelid, it's business as usual. It's daft and harmful, and frankly I think it requires hard effort from idealistic grassroots activists to address it. Societal improvements are often won through struggle, they're not given away, they don't happen by incremental evolution.
- petschge 6y ago
  How do you propose to detect if A, B, C and D are a cabal that push their own papers or if they are the people who actually know the subject and want to improve the quality of paper that new people produce?
  - austinjp 6y ago
    Well indeed, that's why I said it's harder to detect :) More worrying, what does it mean for science if we can't distinguish between a self-serving cabal and genuine good intentions?

lrem 6y ago

Oh, this is not a China thing. I've had a paper have a bunch of reviewers suggest a bunch of references each. Every bunch had every paper share at least one author. Every bunch was pairwise disjoint in the author sets. Draw your own conclusions. Edit: just to be clear: I didn't at the time read that as "submission tax". More of, trying to be helpful and using things they personally were familiar with. Most, if not all, of the extra references would make our paper better... If we weren't fighting that damned page limit, that is.

jacquesm 6y ago
More and more evidence that the magazine based publication route is a net negative to science.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  Question is, why don't scientists just put everything on public platforms (read: github) and call it a day? Is it only a matter of funding, or do other factors also play a role in that?
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    Because nobody reads it there and, more importantly, funders don't recognise the work you've done there. The "prestige" (as indicated by the scientific-looking but mostly inaccurate "Impact Factor") of the journal you publish in determines how good they think your work is. I wrote about that a while ago here: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or-break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...
    - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
      > Because nobody reads it there That's a problem that would fix itself the moment most useful research was mainly available on such platforms. > more importantly, funders don't recognise the work you've done there Once again, that sounds like mostly a problem that would disappear if a large migration to open platforms was to happen. ---- So it seems the main poroblem seems to be that there's no incentive to be among the first to make the move? IIRC it's often the journals that don't want content to be published elsewhere, so I guess just doing both is also not that simple.
      - Vinnl 6y ago
        Yep exactly, it's a classic coordination problem.
  - captain_price7 6y ago
    For all its faults, peer-review is still the best mechanism to keep science in right track. What you propose would mean twitter or facebook will replace those journals, people with huge twitter followings, or "celebrity" scientists would dominate science, the works of people without such marketing skills would get drowned out. (This is sort of true for current system too, but I think situation would be much worse in new system.)
    - jpeloquin 6y ago
      > For all its faults, peer-review is still the best mechanism to keep science in right track. Peer review is often effective, but it can't reliably block fraudulent publications like those described in the posted article. Most bad papers are rejected, but the authors can always try again at another journal. Any paper will probably get published somewhere, eventually, even if only in a Hindawi or MDPI journal. The journals aren't accountable to anyone, and as long as they have enough good articles to serve as cover, academics will need to pay for access because citing relevant prior work is obligatory. The publishing system is very weak against fraud.

idoubtit 6y ago

I don't think this is related to the country of the editor. The lack of ethics is more preponderant in low-quality reviews (many junk reviews are Asian) and in some domains (more in medical reviews than mathematics). Here is an example that even the highest profile journal can lack ethics: circa 2005, Nature published a paper comparing a selection of scientific articles from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The editorial board of Nature selected the articles and sent them to reviewers. They only publishes metrics and a few quotes of their data (the list of selected articles and the reviews). The results were surprising and made a lot of buzz. But Britannica noted that one of these quotes was a sentence that was not it their encyclopedia. Nature had to admit that they selected some Wikipedia articles, and when they could not find the equivalent Britannica article, they sometimes built it by mixing articles and adding a few sentences of their own. Obviously, the process were totally biased, from the selection to the publication.

nxpnsv 6y ago

I found this behavior in Europeans and Americans too. It is not a Chinese specific thing...

iagovar 6y ago
I've never seen it in Spanish publications, although I've been told it happens (social sciences). I know about the politics too, that's the main reason why I never went to pursue an academic career, but being honest I never witnessed such plain fraud in my UNI. It was more of a friends-get-all scheme.
- nxpnsv 6y ago
  I think it depends on your field a little. I did not see this during my years in particle physics...

crististm 6y ago

So you lowered your bar huh? Who am I to judge, but I would have preferred a story with something more than the game is rigged and that's what I get to play with

raister 6y ago
The paper was not accepted at that point. He could just denied publication out of spite. I played the odds, and got published, despite doing that. I'm sorry the story ended badly :) and yes - I've lowered the bar, sadly.
- sn41 6y ago
  I will not judge you. Citation indices are horrible and perpetuate this fraud. I was telling a student of mine yesterday, 10 years ago the game was to get publications in prestigious venues. Now the game is to have a stellar scholar.google.com profile. The two games are perhaps correlated, but the correlation coefficient is not very high.

hasjekyll 6y ago

Unfortunately this happens in astronomy in non-Chinese journals too.

sn41 6y ago

Oh boy, this is very common. This is not specific to a country or ethnicity, unfortunately. You also see grad students shilling for their guides.

austinjp 6y ago

As others have noted, this is a global problem, not just Chinese. The version that is more difficult to detect is when a cabal of colleagues agree to push each others' papers in this way. So editor A says "you should really quote authors B, C and D." And somewhere else, editor B is saying "you should really quote authors A, C and D." Machine learning might be a way to tackle this at scale, by teasing out these associations. Of course, this relies on a degree of transparency. Some journals publish all editors' comments and all revisions of a paper. This is a Good Thing, but humans aren't reading all published research, let alone all the meta data. If someone with relevant ML skills wants to address this, and fancies starting a project, do get in touch :) A note on the Chinese insinuations that have been mentioned: As always, it's a bit more complex. There may well be reasons that some states might sponsor or 'encourage' gaming of intellectual institutions. If the world is viewed as a zero-sum game, and the currency is power, this unfortunately seems inevitable. Science tends away from this and towards collaboration, but 'politics' often seems to tend toward competition. I've seen university heads explicitly declare to all staff how they intend to game the national rankings, and nobody bats an eyelid, it's business as usual. It's daft and harmful, and frankly I think it requires hard effort from idealistic grassroots activists to address it. Societal improvements are often won through struggle, they're not given away, they don't happen by incremental evolution.

petschge 6y ago
How do you propose to detect if A, B, C and D are a cabal that push their own papers or if they are the people who actually know the subject and want to improve the quality of paper that new people produce?
- austinjp 6y ago
  Well indeed, that's why I said it's harder to detect :) More worrying, what does it mean for science if we can't distinguish between a self-serving cabal and genuine good intentions?