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The wonderful thing about the western world is that most countries value freedom of the press. The dark side of this is that you can spin up your own “scientifi

The wonderful thing about the western world is that most countries value freedom of the press. The dark side of this is that you can spin up your own “scientific journal” and charge people to publish in it, game the rankings like any common SEO scam, and nobody will stop you because (especially here in the US) you’re exercising your first amendment rights. Then people can fill it with nonsense and even script-generated fake papers. People outside the scientific community can also scam more “legitimate” for-profit journals in various ways, resulting in more silly publications that the actual scientific community has to filter out. It’s very annoying. None of this has any more bearing on fraud by professional scientists than, say, the existence of some garbage-filled Wikimedia server or a badly-edited Wikipedia page means that the Wikipedia editors themselves are fraudsters.

mike_hearn 3y ago
With respect, I think you should research the topic more deeply before assuming that this is some sort of fringe problem that doesn't exist in the "actual" scientific community. The second link I provided is by Nature News and states specifically that the problem affects "prestigious journals" (their words). Auto-generated papers have been published in journals from the IEEE, Elsevier, Springer Nature and other well known publishing houses. These papers have supposedly passed peer review in western journals that have been around for decades, and have been signed off by professional academics. Invariably no satisfactory explanation for how this happens is provided, with "we got hacked" being a remarkably common claim. Quite how you publish an entire magazine full of fraudulent articles due to one person getting hacked is unclear; actual newspapers and magazines don't ever have this problem. Here's an example. The Springer Nature journal "Personal and Ubiquitous Computing" was established in 1997 and has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_and_Ubiquitous_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_and_Ubiquitous_Comput... The Editor-In-Chief is a British academic, who also has his own Wikipedia page. So these aren't fly-by-night no-brand nobodies. Yet this journal somehow managed to publish dozens of obviously auto-generated papers, like this one: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs00779-021-01621-5/MediaObjects/779_2021_1621_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs007... "The conversion of traditional arts and crafts to modern art design under the background of 5G mobile communication network" or https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs00779-021-01611-7/MediaObjects/779_2021_1611_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs007... "The application of twin network target tracking and support tensor machine in the evaluation of orienteering teaching" The papers are just template paragraphs from totally unrelated topics spliced together. Nobody noticed this had happened until months after publication, strongly implying that this journal has no readers at all (this is a common theme in all these stories, they never seem to notice themselves). The editor agreed the papers were nonsense (his words), but blamed peer reviewers. Yet this journal claims to have a large editorial board with over 40 people on it, mostly from universities in the Europe, USA and China. What's amazing is that this exact same "attack" had happened before. The previous year Springer Nature had to retract over 400 papers which were auto-generated in the exact same way. They learned nothing and appear to treat the problem as a similar level of severity to filtering email spam. And in the last six months alone we've seen major fraud scandals impacting Stanford (the President no less), Harvard and Yale. These are supposedly elite universities and researchers. Francesca Gino was earning over $1M a year. Yet their fraud is being uncovered by motivated volunteers, not any kind of systematic well funded science police. So all the signs here point towards fraud being incredibly easy to get away with. Whole journals have literally no readers at all, academia relies on Scooby-Doo levels of policing, and supposedly prestigious brands are constantly having fraud uncovered by random tweeters, undergrads doing journalism as a hobby etc.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  As far as research is concerned, the names you mentioned are not prestigious brands. Universities are organizations that provide facilities and services in exchange for their share of grant money. Publishers publish whatever people are willing to pay for. Prominent mentions of supposedly prestigious institutions are a red flag in science reporting. Very often, either the writer is trying to promote something, or they don't know what they are talking about. There are two parallel academias. There is the reputable high-trust one, where it's easy to get away with fraud, because people generally don't commit it. And there is the scammy one that exists to help people to game the metrics. While the two overlap a bit, they are mostly disjoint. If you are an academic, you get a steady stream of spam from the scammy side of the academia. You get calls to submit papers to a conference with "Proceedings by Springer" (but the scope of the conference is barely mentioned), you get invited to become an "ΕԀitоrial ΜҽmƄҽr" of a journal, and so on. Those are like Nigerian letters. They make it very explicit that they are scams, in order to avoid wasting people's time. You guessed that nobody reads the journal you mentioned, and that's trivially true. Of course nobody reads journals, because their scopes are too wide. No matter what you are working on, most articles in the journals you publish in are irrelevant to you. People read only articles that look interesting or relevant. If nobody cares about an article, it doesn't get read. While the rest of the world is based on top-down hierarchies, that's not a good model for understanding research. In general, the higher up in the hierarchy you go, the less relevant things become. The article is more relevant than the journal, and the journal is more relevant than the publisher. A rank-and-file professor is more relevant than a department chair. A department chair is more relevant than a dean. And a dean is more relevant than a chancellor/president/whatever.

mike_hearn 3y ago

With respect, I think you should research the topic more deeply before assuming that this is some sort of fringe problem that doesn't exist in the "actual" scientific community. The second link I provided is by Nature News and states specifically that the problem affects "prestigious journals" (their words). Auto-generated papers have been published in journals from the IEEE, Elsevier, Springer Nature and other well known publishing houses. These papers have supposedly passed peer review in western journals that have been around for decades, and have been signed off by professional academics. Invariably no satisfactory explanation for how this happens is provided, with "we got hacked" being a remarkably common claim. Quite how you publish an entire magazine full of fraudulent articles due to one person getting hacked is unclear; actual newspapers and magazines don't ever have this problem. Here's an example. The Springer Nature journal "Personal and Ubiquitous Computing" was established in 1997 and has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_and_Ubiquitous_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_and_Ubiquitous_Comput... The Editor-In-Chief is a British academic, who also has his own Wikipedia page. So these aren't fly-by-night no-brand nobodies. Yet this journal somehow managed to publish dozens of obviously auto-generated papers, like this one: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs00779-021-01621-5/MediaObjects/779_2021_1621_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs007... "The conversion of traditional arts and crafts to modern art design under the background of 5G mobile communication network" or https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs00779-021-01611-7/MediaObjects/779_2021_1611_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs007... "The application of twin network target tracking and support tensor machine in the evaluation of orienteering teaching" The papers are just template paragraphs from totally unrelated topics spliced together. Nobody noticed this had happened until months after publication, strongly implying that this journal has no readers at all (this is a common theme in all these stories, they never seem to notice themselves). The editor agreed the papers were nonsense (his words), but blamed peer reviewers. Yet this journal claims to have a large editorial board with over 40 people on it, mostly from universities in the Europe, USA and China. What's amazing is that this exact same "attack" had happened before. The previous year Springer Nature had to retract over 400 papers which were auto-generated in the exact same way. They learned nothing and appear to treat the problem as a similar level of severity to filtering email spam. And in the last six months alone we've seen major fraud scandals impacting Stanford (the President no less), Harvard and Yale. These are supposedly elite universities and researchers. Francesca Gino was earning over $1M a year. Yet their fraud is being uncovered by motivated volunteers, not any kind of systematic well funded science police. So all the signs here point towards fraud being incredibly easy to get away with. Whole journals have literally no readers at all, academia relies on Scooby-Doo levels of policing, and supposedly prestigious brands are constantly having fraud uncovered by random tweeters, undergrads doing journalism as a hobby etc.

jltsiren 3y ago
As far as research is concerned, the names you mentioned are not prestigious brands. Universities are organizations that provide facilities and services in exchange for their share of grant money. Publishers publish whatever people are willing to pay for. Prominent mentions of supposedly prestigious institutions are a red flag in science reporting. Very often, either the writer is trying to promote something, or they don't know what they are talking about. There are two parallel academias. There is the reputable high-trust one, where it's easy to get away with fraud, because people generally don't commit it. And there is the scammy one that exists to help people to game the metrics. While the two overlap a bit, they are mostly disjoint. If you are an academic, you get a steady stream of spam from the scammy side of the academia. You get calls to submit papers to a conference with "Proceedings by Springer" (but the scope of the conference is barely mentioned), you get invited to become an "ΕԀitоrial ΜҽmƄҽr" of a journal, and so on. Those are like Nigerian letters. They make it very explicit that they are scams, in order to avoid wasting people's time. You guessed that nobody reads the journal you mentioned, and that's trivially true. Of course nobody reads journals, because their scopes are too wide. No matter what you are working on, most articles in the journals you publish in are irrelevant to you. People read only articles that look interesting or relevant. If nobody cares about an article, it doesn't get read. While the rest of the world is based on top-down hierarchies, that's not a good model for understanding research. In general, the higher up in the hierarchy you go, the less relevant things become. The article is more relevant than the journal, and the journal is more relevant than the publisher. A rank-and-file professor is more relevant than a department chair. A department chair is more relevant than a dean. And a dean is more relevant than a chancellor/president/whatever.