A friend of mine reached out to me via LinkedIn several months ago, stating he could probably use Tableau and some public datasets to DDoS the medical peer revi

A friend of mine reached out to me via LinkedIn several months ago, stating he could probably use Tableau and some public datasets to DDoS the medical peer review system and earn tenure at the same time: low impact factor * a million is still going to be a lot better than the alternative. Sadly, I didn't hear anything terribly insightful when I asked him about spurious correlations and data mining as a perjorative term, so I left that one alone, and I assume he doesn't have the balls to go through with it since you know, there are actual people in the tenure committee who have to review your CV. One angle that isn't quite clear to me from the article; if you build a system to harvest datasets, find correlations, and push them through a set of templates with conditional subtemplates based on saliency, with correct citations of source data to produce a single article, is it wrong to put your name on it? And if you do 30 of them? Obviously selling your naming rights to papers harms both the community who might wish follow up with the authors on scholarship, and those who use peer reviewed publications as a filter. But I think the real lesson here might just be that abusing the university administration's institutional data analysis platform to game your tenure case seems like a waste of time in comparison to selling one weak article a day for 10,000 bucks.