Tag: peer review

The results of one in four medical clinical trials are probably fraudulent or unreliable

9:11 am

In 2020 a researcher in Great Britain decided to analyze the raw data used by 500 medical clinical trials, and found that one in four contained fraudulent or unreliable data.

Carlisle, an anaesthetist who works for England’s National Health Service, is renowned for his ability to spot dodgy data in medical trials. He is also an editor at the journal Anaesthesia, and in 2017, he decided to scour all the manuscripts he handled that reported a randomized controlled trial (RCT) — the gold standard of medical research. Over three years, he scrutinized more than 500 studies.

For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data.

Carlisle called these ‘zombie’ trials because they had the semblance of real research, but closer scrutiny showed they were actually hollow shells, masquerading as reliable information. Even he was surprised by their prevalence. “I anticipated maybe one in ten,” he says.

There is the real story, however.

Carlisle rejected every zombie trial, but by now, almost three years later, most have been published in other journals — sometimes with different data to those submitted with the manuscript he had seen. He is writing to journal editors to alert them, but expects that little will be done.

In other words, the peer-review medical community continues to allow fake research to be published, even when it has been warned that research is fake.

But of course, we must trust everything they tell us. They are SCIENTISTS, and we must “follow the SCIENCE!”

2 comments

Today’s blacklist victim: Distinguished scientist and long-time journal editor forced to resign due to threats

12:40 pm

Jose Domingo, blacklisted scientist
Dr. José Luis Domingo, blacklisted scientist

The modern dark age: Dr. José Luis Domingo, an often cited expert on toxicology and editor for the last seven years of the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, has been forced to resign his position because of threats and slanders directed at him after he approved the publication of a peer-review paper that documented the potential harmful effects of the mRNA COVID shots.

About a month after the paper was published, Domingo said, he began receiving angry emails and messages. These included insults, calls to resign, demands to retract the paper, and even threats. One email asked him how he could sleep at night, knowing that the scientific paper that he had allowed to be published would lead to the death of millions of people.

The angry messages, he said, were filled with ad hominem attacks against him and against the paper’s co-authors, but did not specify their scientific objections to the contents of the paper.

…Since then, pro-vaccine factions have increased their personal campaign against him, going so far as to adding false information to the Wikipedia entry about him, as well as attacking the Wikipedia page of the journal itself. Both, he said, were negatively modified by pro-vaccination activists. Indeed, an Oct. 4 version of his page, accessed via internet archive, included a subheading entitled “Antivaccine controversy” that accused Domingo of “spreading disinformation during the pandemic.” That paragraph has since been removed.

Domingo even offered — in a gesture of open-mindedness and good will — to publish one of the more-detailed attack messages, if the writers would agree to peer review. They did agree, and then discovered that with peer-review you need to have some facts to back up your accusations. They did not, and their paper was rejected.

No matter. These individuals then found another journal, Stem Cell Reviews and Reports, to publish their attack essay, demanding once again that Domingo retract the paper while once again accusing him of causing the death of millions by its publication:
» Read more

10 comments

Another obvious hoax paper published by peer-review journal

11:13 am

Alan Sokal strikes again! Using fake names whose initials spell out SOKAL III, several anonymous scientists were successful in getting the peer-review journal Higher Education Quarterly to publish a completely fake paper, with numerous errors on every page, no data, absurd math, and whose authors gave themselves fake credentials.

Peer reviewers failed to perform basic due diligence on the paper submitted in April and approved in October, neglecting, for example, to verify that authors “Sage Owens” and “Kal Alvers-Lynde III” were UCLA professors as they claimed. Owens even used an encrypted email service for correspondence with the journal.

They didn’t check whether the conservative foundations named as active funders of higher education actually existed. The “Randy Eller Foundation” is made up, while the Olin Foundation shut down in 2005.

The author who goes by Owens told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the journal didn’t even ask to see their data: “Every page has some glaring errors.”

The paper was quickly retracted by the journal, but appears so fake that the entire editorial board of this journal should resign.

Alan Sokal by the way did this exact same thing in 1996, proving that most social and gender study journals were utter bunk. Not that his hoax accomplished much, as these brainless departments marched on until they have permeated all of academia with their nonsense, with Critical Race Theory now leading the way.

Read the whole article. Based on some comments by Owens, it is very possible that these hoaxers have gotten a slew of similar papers published, and are only waiting to pull the string.

37 comments

Investigation forces retraction of 800+ Russian science papers

9:10 am

An investigation by Russia’s Academy of Sciences has forced the retraction of more than 800 Russian science papers, many for plagiarism.

The RAS commission’s preliminary report documenting the problems and journals’ responses to them is “a bombshell,” says Gerson Sher, a former staffer at the U.S. National Science Foundation and the author of a recent book on U.S.-Russia science cooperation. The report, released yesterday, “will reinforce the suspicions and fears of many—that their country is not going down the right path in science and that it’s damaging its own reputation,” says Sher, who applauds RAS for commissioning the investigation.

Russia’s roughly 6000 academic journals, the vast majority published in Russian, are popular among the country’s academics. A 2019 study found that Russian authors publish far more in domestic journals than, for instance, their counterparts in Poland, Germany, or Indonesia. But standards are often low. In March 2018, for instance, Dissernet, a network aimed at cleaning up the Russian literature, identified more than 4000 cases of plagiarism and questionable authorship among 150,000 papers in about 1500 journals.

And Russian authors frequently republish their own work, says Yury Chekhovich, CEO of Antiplagiat, a plagiarism detection company. In September 2019, after sifting through 4.3 million Russian-language studies, Antiplagiat found that more than 70,000 were published at least twice; a few were published as many as 17 times. Chekhovich believes most instances are due to self-plagiarism. Meanwhile, the website 123mi.u claims to have brokered authorships for more than 10,000 researchers by selling slots on manuscripts written by others that were already accepted by journals.

In many ways this report reflects the overall corruption that appears to permeate the upper echelons of Russian culture. Rather than do real science and report it to the world, Russian scientists publish in Russian in ways that get them in-house promotions but do little to advance science.

That this investigation was conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences however is a positive sign. It indicates a desire to clean things up.

3 comments

University punishes professor for uncovering academic fraud and incompetence

10:17 am

Portland State University (located in that hotbed of antifa fascist violence) has announced that it is punishing one of its professors for uncovering academic fraud and incompetence by co-writing several fake science papers and getting them published.

Peter Boghossian made headlines in 2018 after he and two other researchers set out to prove a point about the integrity of “peer-reviewed” academic publications by submitting several fake studies including an analysis of “dog rape culture,” and a piece that was simply a section of Hitler’s Mein Kampf reworked to include a smattering of academic buzzwords. After seven of the team’s fake submissions were accepted and published by esteemed academic journals, a Campus Reform investigation led the publisher of the infamous Portland “dog park rape culture” article to question the origins of the submission. This ultimately revealed the article as part of a larger effort by Boghossian and his team to demonstrate the inadequacies of these publications.

After his experiment, Portland State threatened Boghossian with disciplinary action, accusing him of conducting research misconduct. The school asserted that Boghossian had unethically conducted research on human subjects with his experiment. According to the school’s Institutional Review Board, Boghossian would have needed to obtain “informed consent” from the individuals reviewing his hoax articles in order for his actions to have been considered ethical.

The IRB conducted several reviews of Boghossian’s work involving his treatment of animal subjects, human subjects, and the possibility of “plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification.” On July 17, the university sent Boghossian a letter informing him that he is now barred from conducting any “human subjects related research,” as well as any university-sponsored research. Boghossian is prohibited from conducting research until he “can show satisfactory evidence of understanding of the protections afforded human subjects,” by completing a “protection of human subjects” training course and subsequently meeting with the Assistant Vice President for Research Administration to “assure [his] understanding.”

The letter, sent from Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies Mark McLellan, also warns Boghossian that the university president, as well as his department chair, dean, and provost, will be advised as to his “lack of academic integrity” and “questionable ethical behavior.”

This story is closely related to the Oberlin story below. Both universities are typical modern leftist madhouses, dominated by fake and politically driven academics who will brook no dissent. They are also increasingly bigoted against ordinary white Americans, merely because they are white. Boghossian and his cohorts did the academic community a service by identifying journals where bad research was being routinely published. His university immediately moved to squelch his effort by punishing him.

Is this the kind of place you want to send your kids? Is this the kind of place you’d want to attend, if you were a high school student?

5 comments

China punishes more than 500 scientists for peer review fraud

8:51 am

An investigation in China has revealed peer review fraud in more than 100 papers, causing that nation to discipline more than 500 researchers.

MOST’s 27 July announcement marked the culmination of an investigation into the mass retraction this past April of 107 papers by Chinese authors that appeared in a single journal, “Tumor Biology.” The papers, published between 2012 and 2016, were pulled after editors found “strong reason to believe that the peer review process was compromised,” Editor-in-Chief Torgny Stigbrand, of Umeå University in Sweden, wrote on 20 April on the website of the publisher Springer. (Springer, an arm of Springer Nature, published “Tumor Biology” until December 2016; the journal is now operated by SAGE Publications.)

Investigators say the authors engaged in an all-too-common scam. “Tumor Biology” allowed submitting authors to nominate reviewers. The Chinese authors suggested “experts” and provided email addresses that routed messages from the journal back to the researchers themselves, or to accomplices—sometimes third-party firms hired by the authors—who wrote glowing reviews that helped get the papers accepted.

As the article notes, the journal is as guilty as these fake scientists.

“Tumor Biology,” which is owned by the International Society of Oncology and BioMarkers, has a history of problems. In 2016 it retracted 25 papers all at once for similar peer-review problems. The journal now has the dubious distinction of having retracted “the most papers of any other journal,” according to Retraction Watch. An investigation by ScienceInsider found that several scientists listed on its editorial board had no relationship with the journal and one had even passed away several years ago. The journal “should also improve their examination system to prevent [abuse by] unscrupulous researchers,” Chen says.

SAGE took over responsibility for publishing the journal “with the agreement that there would be a complete overhaul of the editorial structure and peer review practices of the journal, specifically the use of preferred reviewers,” a SAGE spokesperson wrote in an email to ScienceInsider.

Not surprisingly, the article includes some whining about the harshness of China’s punishments. Of the more than 500 disciplined, 314 were merely co-authors on a paper, and had not directly participated in the fraud. The investigation concluded that they should have been more diligent and aware of what the lead authors were doing, a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

Leave a comment

Fake “Star Wars” science paper accepted/published by four journals

10:16 am

Peer-review science at its best! A fake science paper, loaded with quotes and references to the Star Wars movies, has been published or accepted for publication by four medical journals.

A neurology expert has revealed they were able to convince a trio of medical journals to publish their Star Wars-themed ‘fake’ manuscript, despite it being packed full of references to George Lucas’ iconic series. The author, who writes online under the name Neuroskeptic, said their paper titled ‘Mitochondria: Structure, Function and Clinical Relevance’ was poorly written and ‘an absurd mess of factual errors, plagiarism and movie quotes’.

‘I wanted to test whether ‘predatory’ journals would publish an obviously absurd paper,’ the hoax’s author wrote for Discover Magazine. ‘So I created a spoof manuscript about “midi-chlorians” – the fictional entities which live inside cells and give Jedi their powers in Star Wars. I filled it with other references to the galaxy far, far away, and submitted it to nine journals under the names of Dr Lucas McGeorge and Dr Annette Kin.’

The name of the authors given in the fake piece are thinly-veiled references to Lucas – Star Wars’ creator – and Anakin Skywalker. Neuroskeptic went on in their blog post to explain the paper was picked up by four different journals – the American Journal of Medical and Biological Research, the International Journal of Molecular Biology: Open Access, the Austin Journal of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and American Research Journal of Biosciences. The AJMBR did not publish the paper but did request a $360 fee in order to do so.

That this keeps happening suggests that much of what is published in peer-review journals is equally bad, and should never see the light of day. The bad work gets published because the journals make their money by charging the scientists to publish things, and the scientists need to get in print to justify their cushy jobs in academia. Sadly, no one seems to care whether they can teach.

2 comments

Hoax “penis as concept” paper finally retracted

11:19 pm

It only took ten days, but the journal Cogent Social Sciences has finally retracted the hoax paper it published entitled “The conceptual penis as a social construct.”

In retracting the paper, the journal merely stated, “This article has been retracted by the publisher. For more information please see the statement on this article.”

That statement was filled with a lot of excuses and platitudes about “working closely with the academic editorial teams of all our journals to review our processes,” but little apparent recognition that the hoax demonstrated without question that quality of the gender studies field is simply crap. In fact, it appears the goal of their reviews isn’t to question the quality of the academic research, but to establish policies that will prevent another hoax. As far as they are concerned, it is okay to publish this exact same junk, as long as its authors sincerely believe it to be true.

9 comments

Dog sits on editorial board of seven medical journals

4:16 pm

An Australian professor wondered if he could get his dog Ollie picked to be on the editorial board of a number of medical journals, and was astonished to discover seven who agreed without reservations.

Ollie’s owner is Mike Daube, Professor of Health Policy at Curtin University in Perth. Ollie likes to watch Mike working on his computer, and Mike gets a lot of emails from predatory journals. Wondering just how low these journals would go, he put together a curriculum vitae for his dog – detailing research interests such as “the benefits of abdominal massage for medium-sized canines” – and sent it off to a number of these journals, asking for a spot on their editorial boards.

Remarkably, the vast majority accepted Ollie without demur, and her name now adorns several journal websites. Ollie is a trailblazer, Professor Daube says, being the first dog ever to get on the editorial board of a journal.

“What makes it even more bizarre is that one of these journals has actually asked Ollie to review an article. It’s entitled “Malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumours and their management.” Some poor soul has actually written an article on this theme in good faith, and the journal has sent it to a dog to review.”

The article provides a nice look at the problems facing the modern peer review journal field.

12 comments

Academic journal publishes another hoax paper

1:39 pm

The coming dark age: The academic journal Cogent Social Science has published a hoax paper that claims the penis is a social construct that is causing global warming.

The authors begin, “Anatomical penises may exist,” but the “conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct.” It goes downhill from there. “There are many women who have penises,” they boldly claim. Then, they gratuitously listed some crude synonyms for the penis, such as: “beaver basher,” “custard launcher,” “pork sword,” and “mayo shooting hotdog gun.” They explained that “manspreading” — when a man sits with his legs open — is “akin to raping the empty space around him.”

At this point, it is worth stopping to ponder that this didn’t raise any red flags with the editors of the journal. Not only did they think this was perfectly intellectual, publishable material, they praised the authors for their work.

Yet, the absurdity didn’t end there. The authors tied everything in to climate change.

Even more astonishing was this statement by the authors:

In their tell-all article in Skeptic, the authors admit they jammed the paper full of jargon and made it purposefully incoherent. They said, “After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.” Finally, they made this particularly damning observation: “We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.”

Make sure you read the tell all article, which step by step reveals the utter bankruptcy of the entire social science field that would allow this fraud to get published, getting passed by two reviewers and a partner journal that recommended the paper to Cogent Social Science.

As I said earlier this week, the time has come to cut off all funding to any university that supports anyone who teaches this crap. Donations from alumni should cease. Parents should refuse to send their children there. And the students there now should rise up in outright revolt, demanding their money back.

14 comments

Science conference accepts fake paper

11:30 pm

I’m so glad it was peer-reviewed! A fake physics paper written entirely in gibberish using autocomplete function has been accepted by a science conference.

Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at the Human Interface Technology laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, received an email inviting him to submit a paper to the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics in the US in November. “Since I have practically no knowledge of nuclear physics I resorted to iOS autocomplete function to help me writing the paper,” he wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “I started a sentence with ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ and then randomly hit the autocomplete suggestions. The text really does not make any sense.”

It only took the conference three hours to review the work and to accept it. They then asked the author to confirm his oral presentation and register for the conference for a mere $1099.

13 comments

Two anti-fracking/anti-oil industry environmental papers retracted

11:40 pm

Thank goodness these were peer reviewed! Two environmental papers, one claiming increased air pollution near fracking sites and the second claiming that the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill caused air contamination, have now both been retracted because of “crucial mistakes.”

According to the corresponding author of both papers, Kim Anderson at Oregon State University, the journal plans to publish new versions of both papers in the next few days. In the case of the fracking paper, the conclusions have been reversed — the original paper stated pollution levels exceeded limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for lifetime cancer risk, but the corrected data set the risks below EPA levels.

The fracking paper received some media attention when it was released, as it tapped into long-standing concerns about the environmental dangers of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), which extracts natural gas from the earth. A press release that accompanied the paper quoted Anderson as warning: “Air pollution from fracking operations may pose an under-recognized health hazard to people living near them.”

Both papers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, were retracted on the same day (June 29), both due to mistakes in reported levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pollutants released from burning oil, gas, and other organic matter.

They say that the errors were due to an “honest spreadsheet error.”

One comment

Fake images in biology research papers

9:38 am

The uncertainty of peer review: A new study has found that since 1995 as many as 5.5% of all biomedical research papers per year contain duplicate or faked images.

Bik, who is at Stanford University in California, spent two years looking at articles published from 1995 to 2014 in 40 different journals, hunting for instances in which identical images were used to represent different experiments within the same paper. She cross-checked the duplications that she found with her two co-authors, both microbiologists.

Overall, 4% of the inspected papers contained such images, the researchers found. But rates ranged from over 12% in the International Journal of Oncology, to 0.3% in the Journal of Cell Biology, which has since 2002 systematically scanned images in its accepted papers before publication. Journals with higher impact factors generally had lower rates of duplicated images.

…Many of the problems were probably sloppy mistakes where people selected the wrong photograph, says Bik. But half or more look deliberate — because images are flipped or rotated or the same features occur twice in the same photograph. [emphasis mine]

Essentially, a significant number of scientists in medical research are purposely faking data.

6 comments

Science journal publishes fake study

11:06 am

The uncertainty of peer review: A science journal has published a fake study that supposedly proved that kissing a child’s “boo-boo” has no medicinal value.

In their study, the authors claim to be members of the Study of Maternal and Child Kissing (SMACK) Working Group, which they say is a subsidiary of Procter and Johnson, Inc., the maker of “Bac-Be-Gone ointment and Steri-Aids self-adhesive bandages.” Procter and Johnson, which is not a real consumer goods company, is an obvious mash-up of Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson, two consumer packaged goods companies which sell health care items like bandages and ointments. The only contact information for the study’s authors disclosed in the research paper is a Gmail address. Bac-Be-Gone ointment and Steri-Aids also do not appear to be actual products available for sale. Additionally, many of the academic research references listed at the end of the study–including one article entitled “So what the hell is going on here?”–also appear to be fake.

The journal, the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, claims on its website that all papers published by it are copy-edited and peer-reviewed. In this case I suppose the reviewers worked for Comedy Central .

5 comments

More than half of published psychology papers cannot be replicated

11:51 am

The uncertainty of science: An attempt to replicate 98 different psychological research studies has found that significantly less than half could be replicated.

In the biggest project of its kind, Brian Nosek, a social psychologist and head of the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, and 269 co-authors repeated work reported in 98 original papers from three psychology journals, to see if they independently came up with the same results. The studies they took on ranged from whether expressing insecurities perpetuates them to differences in how children and adults respond to fear stimuli, to effective ways to teach arithmetic.

According to the replicators’ qualitative assessments, as previously reported by Nature, only 39 of the 100 replication attempts were successful. … There is no way of knowing whether any individual paper is true or false from this work, says Nosek. Either the original or the replication work could be flawed, or crucial differences between the two might be unappreciated. Overall, however, the project points to widespread publication of work that does not stand up to scrutiny. [emphasis mine]

None of this surprises me. The focus of much science research, especially in the soft sciences like psychology, is statistical in nature and easily manipulated. In fact, most of it isn’t science at all, but an attempt to use mere statistics to prove a point. Science would instead try to find out why something happens, not just demonstrate through statistics that it does.

3 comments

Another slew of science papers retracted because of fraud

9:07 am

The uncertainty of peer-review: A major scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals after discovering that the so-called independent peer reviewers for these articles were fabricated by the authors themselves.

The cull comes after similar discoveries of ‘fake peer review’ by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing “reviews from fabricated reviewers”. The practice can occur when researchers submitting a paper for publication suggest reviewers, but supply contact details for them that actually route requests for review back to the researchers themselves.

Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field. In total, more than a 100 papers have been retracted, simply because the journals relied on the authors to provide them contact information for their reviewers, never bothering to contact them directly.

I suspect that these retractions are merely the tip of the iceberg. Based on the garbage papers I see published in the climate field, I will not be surprised if even more peer-review fraud is eventually discovered.

4 comments

$28 billion spent on poor biomedical research?

2:32 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new study suggests that $28 billion is spent on biomedical research that no one can reproduce.

I have no doubt that a vast amount of medical research is so poorly done that no one else will ever be able to replicate the results. However, the article notes that the way the researchers came up with the $28 billion figure is quite questionable, reviewing only about two dozen studies and then extrapolating their numbers across the entire research field. This is highly uncertain and should be taken with a grain of salt.

One comment

Same-sex science paper retracted

9:48 am

Politics corrupts science, again: The journal Science has retracted a paper that had claimed opinions on homosexual marriage could be changed quickly during a short conversation.

As noted in the journal’s retraction statement:

The reasons for retracting the paper are as follows: (i) Survey incentives were misrepresented. To encourage participation in the survey, respondents were claimed to have been given cash payments to enroll, to refer family and friends, and to complete multiple surveys. In correspondence received from Michael J. LaCour’s attorney, he confirmed that no such payments were made. (ii) The statement on sponsorship was false. In the Report, LaCour acknowledged funding from the Williams Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund. Per correspondence from LaCour’s attorney, this statement was not true.

In addition to these known problems, independent researchers have noted certain statistical irregularities in the responses. LaCour has not produced the original survey data from which someone else could independently confirm the validity of the reported findings. [emphasis mine]

LaCour was the paper’s lead author. That he cannot provide the original data immediately discredits the work. It also discredits his only co-author, Donald Green of Columbia University, who apparently put his name on the paper without ever looking at the original data as well. When the above fraud was exposed, Green quickly called for the paper’s retraction, but I wonder how it was possible he allowed it to be published in the first place. Could it have been that he supports the idea of same-sex marriage, and wanted science to contribute its support as well, regardless of the facts?

Not being able to provide the original data is the same problem that Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit had. Jones’ work documenting the global temperature for the past century has been the main source used by the entire climate field for decades, and when he couldn’t provide his original data, saying it was lost, his work should have received the same treatment as LaCour above — immediate retraction. Instead, Science protected him, as did the entire climate community.

Their willingness to cover-up Jones’ bad science is now coming back to bite them, with more examples of sloppy work getting into publication. Jones showed that it was all right to fake his results. LaCour decided to try it as well, and Green saw no reason to challenge the dishonesty. The result? Fake science done for the sake of homosexual politics.

The big difference now, however, is the willingness of Science to quickly retract the piece. It appears we are making some progress in re-establishing the rules of science to research and publication.

A minor side note: The author of the story above is John Bohannon, the same guy who just proved you can write a fake paper and get journalists to report it.

One comment

Got $500? You too can get a scientific paper published!

11:33 am

A Harvard scientist used a random text generator to create a fake science paper entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and was able to get it accepted at 17 journals. [Note: the link includes an auto-download of the pdf of the scientist’s fake paper.]

Shrime decided to see how easy it would be to publish an article. So he made one up. Like, he literally made one up. He did it using www.randomtextgenerator.com. The article is entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and its authors are the venerable Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The subtitle reads: “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Shrime submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it. (They have not “published” it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a “processing fee.” Shrime has no plans to pay them.) Several have already typeset it and given him reviews, as you can see at the end of this article. One publication says his methods are “novel and innovative”!. But when Shrime looked up the physical locations of these publications, he discovered that many had very suspicious addresses; one was actually inside a strip club.

Essentially, these fake journals are scams to get $500 from scientists, generally from third world countries who can’t get their papers published in the bigger first world journals. (What does that tell us about those bigger first world journals?)

The best line of the article however was this: “Many of these publications sound legitimate. To someone who is not well-versed in a particular subfield of medicine—a journalist, for instance—it would be easy to mistake them for valid sources.” [emphasis mine] It seems to me that if you are a journalist writing about a particular field, you should be reasonably educated on that field and be able to spot a fake journal. I certainly can. That it is assumed that mainstream journalists who report on medicine cannot speaks volumes about the quality of the field.

One comment

Sixty science papers retracted

9:17 am

The uncertainty of peer review: An internal investigation has caused the retraction of sixty peer-reviewed scientific papers that were published by a single journal, the Journal of Vibration and Control (JVC).

The network of JVC papers that emerged was incestuous, with the same small group of authors reviewing each other’s work and appearing together as co-authors. By the end of the year, the investigators had a list of 130 e-mail addresses associated with 60 papers, with one scientist as co-author on all of them: Chen-Yuan Chen of NPUE, who goes by “Peter.” When SAGE sent an e-mail to all 130 e-mail addresses requesting that the authors confirm their identity, none responded. “The authors were contacted again by SAGE in May 2014 to inform them that their papers would be retracted in the July 2014 issue,” says Sherman, but again none responded. According to SAGE’s official statement, Chen resigned from NPUE in February. Neither Chen nor officials at NPUE responded to e-mails from ScienceInsider

How was it possible for a scientist to become the sole reviewer on dozens of his own papers? The answer appears to be that Chen was allowed to nominate his own reviewers, who were not vetted by JVC,

Chen apparently created fake gmail accounts for both real and non-existing scientists and then chose these scientists both as his co-authors as well as his peer-reviewers.

Leave a comment

“I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system.”

8:22 am

From a Nobel Prize winner: “I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system.”

Read the whole interview. The scientist outlines problems not only with peer review journals but with the whole structure of modern academic science, which to his mind would have prevented him from doing his Nobel Prize winning research had this system existed then.

Leave a comment

One of the publishers who had published fake peer-reviewed papers generated by a computer program has responded aggressively to fix the problem.

12:15 am

One of the publishers who had published numerous fake peer-reviewed papers generated by a computer program has responded aggressively to fix the problem.

And by aggressive I mean positively. They have removed the fake papers and are reviewing everything they’ve published, with the help of the guy who exposed the fakes, to make sure there aren’t any other fakes not yet identified. They also say they are reviewing their procedures to figure out how this happened and to prevent it from happening again.

2 comments

Two publishers of scientific journals have withdrawn 120 papers which they have discovered were nothing more than computer-generated gibberish.

10:56 am

Layers and layers of peer-review: Two publishers of scientific journals have withdrawn 120 papers which they have discovered were nothing more than computer-generated gibberish.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers. …

Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement” (see ‘Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper’). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv. SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen’s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.

The real story here is that many of these gibberish papers were peer-reviewed by actual scientists who are supposedly experts in their fields and should have spotted the fakery immediately. That they didn’t suggests another level of corruption. Either they don’t really bother to peer review the papers they are asked to peer review, or they knew what was going on and were part of the game.

That this kind of stuff happens repeatedly in many fields of science should make us all very skeptical of any controversial scientific claim that carries with it any political component. This doesn’t mean that all published material is fake, only that we must not take anything on faith. Controversial results had better be bomb-proof before we accept them willingly.

3 comments

A bogus scientific paper, with numerous errors, was accepted for publication by more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific journals.

12:36 pm

A bogus scientific paper, with numerous errors, was accepted for publication by more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The scientist purposely wrote a paper that should have been unacceptable for publication in order to see if peer-review would spot the problems. What he found was that more than half the journals to which he submitted didn’t notice or care, and accepted the paper as is.

The journals in this case were open-access, meaning that they are free to readers but charge authors money for publication. Thus, rejecting papers is against their financial interest. Nonetheless, the number of journals willing to be unethical is quite disturbing, and reveals a rottenness lurking in the heart of the science field that no one wants to talk about.

5 comments

A new study has found that scientific misconduct and fraud is on the rise.

11:14 am

A new study has found that scientific misconduct and fraud is on the rise.

A review of retractions in medical and biological peer-reviewed journals finds the percentage of studies withdrawn because of fraud or suspected fraud has jumped substantially since the mid-1970s. In 1976, there were fewer than 10 fraud retractions for every 1 million studies published, compared with 96 retractions per million in 2007.

The study’s authors suggest that the high pressure of big science might be a cause, combined with an overall decline in our culture itself. I wonder if the influence of government money, granted not because of good science but in the service of a political agenda, might also be a contributing factor.

Leave a comment

Another psychologist has resigned amid questions over the validity of his research.

5:38 pm

Another psychologist has resigned amid questions over the validity of his research.

This and other recent cases (here, here, here, here, here, here) are more evidence that the peer review process in some fields is badly broken, that the reviewers are too often not doing the reviewing they are supposed to, and in some cases might very well be participating in scientific fraud themselves.

4 comments

A investigation has found that Japanese anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, fabricated a 172 scientific papers over the past 19 years.

12:50 pm

A investigation has found that Japanese anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, fabricated a 172 scientific papers over the past 19 years.

The panel focused on 212 of 249 known Fujii papers. It tried to review the raw data, laboratory notebooks, and records on the patients or animal subjects involved. Committee members also interviewed relevant people. Among the 172 papers judged bogus, the report claims that 126 studies of randomized, double-blind, controlled trials “were totally fabricated.” The committee identified only three valid papers. For another 37 papers, the panel could not conclusively determine if there had been fabrication. …

The panel said that the responsibility of those co-authors ranges from “serious” to “none at all.” The only one of Fujii’s co-authors specifically named in the summary is University of Tsukuba anesthesiologist Hidenori Toyooka. The report says Toyooka “was not involved in fabrication but bears significant responsibility” since he was Fujii’s supervising professor both at Tsukuba and when they both worked at Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Toyooka is listed as a co-author of many of the papers cited by the 23 journal editors. … At the same time, the investigation found that some scientists were unaware Fujii had included them as co-authors. In one case, two supposed co-authors told the panel their signatures on a submission cover letter were forged. [emphasis mine]

For a scientist to get that many fabricated papers published for that long in peer-reviewed journals strongly suggests that there is widespread corruption in his field, which in this case is anesthesiology.

Leave a comment

Researchers have found that they cannot reproduce the results of 89 percent of 53 “landmark” cancer research papers.

12:05 pm

More bad news for peer-reviewed science: Researchers have found that they cannot reproduce the results for almost ninety percent of the fifty-three “landmark” cancer research papers they reviewed.

It is worse than you think. Consider this quote:

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies. “We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.”

4 comments
1 2