The irony of this "study" of fraudulent nonsensical papers submitted to gender studies/critical theory journals is that it is itself the epitome of the shoddy scholarship it purports to unmask. Let's #peerreview it. areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/aca…
1) This study lacks the most basic controls. If you want to argue these papers were accepted because of their notional field of study, then you have to submit similarly nonsensical papers to journals in other fields.
Fortunately, although this is not cited by the authors (a manifestation of their shoddy scholarship) such a control was recently carried out by John Bohannon in a completely different field. science.sciencemag.org/content/342/61…
Bohannon submitted nonsensical papers to a number of cancer research journals and a number of these were accepted and published.
(Note that, ironically, Bohannon's conclusion that the #openaccess business model of the journals was to blame was also not supported by his data because of his lack of a good control - it's as if people submitting fake articles don't understand how to do real scholarship).
Contrary to the authors' claim that the acceptance of these nonsense articles in gender studies/critical theory journals proves that the field is prone to publishing bullshit, the fact that the same thing happened in a completely different field suggests a different explanation.
Namely that it is the only common feature in these two studies - journal publishing itself - and not any particular field that is the real culprit. It is particularly disappointing that the authors did not consider this or any alternative hypothesis to explain their data.
2) The description in the text misleadingly presents the data. The supplemental data describes 20 papers submitted a total of 48 times with 7 accepted and 7 in process. This suggests that these papers received 34 rejections and may get as many as 41.
While it would be desirable for the number of non-sensical papers published by journals to be 0, the manipulation of the data in presentation raises questions about the honesty of the authors.
3) We find it troubling that the authors places a solicitation for donations to the journal in which it was published on the publication when at least one of the authors is associated with (and may be compensated by) the journal.
In summary, while we agree with the authors that it is troubling that nonsensical papers are published in such numbers, we believe that the major conclusion of the paper - that this is a property of the field - is not supported by their data.
We therefore recommend that this paper be rejected.
