Thread by @Jerbivore

Looks like Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose are at it some more setting up hoaxes, and consider themselves great heroes. Here are some cursory thoughts I have:

First of all, if the papers are as described in WSJ, then they are no good. The journals should look into making the editorial board clean up their standards.

That being said, at the very least, you can see that the majority of their papers did not get passed through. These journals have editorial standards.

I can’t really weigh in as I don’t publish in these journals, but these don’t necessarily appear to be the top journals in the field. I was able to find 22 feminist journals ranking above Hypatia.

That being said, Impact Factoris a single dimensional way to look at a journal. You wouldn’t want to see this in a top 5 journal for sure, but impact factor isn’t everything.

Hypatia should clean up their act.

That being said, it doesn’t really point to anything systemic, at least at this point. I’d like to remind folks that peer review doesn’t require referees to replicate experimental work, referees are busy and not compensated, and shit slips through.

This is very hard to get across, but you get shit work in hard science journals too. It’s very hard to impress this because to understand the physics and phenomena behind colloidal science takes a lot of work to understand.

Here’s a good video on peer review detailing an egregious case in a nanoscience journal. Blatant forgery of images. The referees should have caught this. But they didn’t.

I only say this because it’s an example of some blatant bullshit that gets through peer review that non nanotechnologists can clearly see. It’s much much harder for folks to not understand when the pressure doesn’t make sense, scales are off, etc.

For the record, that IS an example in a top 5 journal. We can talk about how top journals have a problem with accepting studies because the findings are sexy, exciting and groundbreaking only to discover that they’re nonsense, but this is to emphasize a point.

Does a handful of bad editorial jobs implicate a field? Is Biotech, psychology, and toxicology implicated because of the front entries on retraction watch today?

retractionwatch.com

The answer is no. These individual cases are bad and the papers should be retracted and the journals should do a clean up. But as far as I’m concerned the fact that most of these were caught is a good sign.

Ultimately, there are much, much bigger factors that should be taken into account. The fact that referees are busy and uncompensated is the biggest one, and the unbelievable pressures of academia and publish-or-perish is a big problem.

Once we provide more adequate career paths for those in the academy, provide better conditions for professors pressured into tenure and interesting work, then we will probably see a drastic reduction in poor-quality work across the board.

And yeah, that means better refereeing, and better journal editing, and fewer hoaxes getting through.