From Salvo: An entertaining but revealing development in science culture in recent years has been the intentionally nonsensical academic paper. Earlier this year, political scientist Peter Dreier admitted at Prospect that his abstract for a panel of six years ago, “On the Absence of Absences,” was “academic drivel”: I tried, as best I could within the limits of my own vocabulary, to write something that had many big words but which made no sense whatsoever. I not only wanted to see if I could fool the panel organizers and get my paper accepted. . . . Well, not only was it accepted, but he was also invited to join fellow academics in Tokyo at the annual international conference of the Read More ›

From Nature: Peer review is touted as a demonstration of the self-critical nature of science. But it is a human system. Everybody involved brings prejudices, misunderstandings and gaps in knowledge, so no one should be surprised that peer review is often biased and inefficient. It is occasionally corrupt, sometimes a charade, an open temptation to plagiarists. Even with the best of intentions, how and whether peer review identifies high-quality science is unknown. It is, in short, unscientific.More. Couple things: Peer review got started, some tell us, as a means of helping U librarians decided what journals to subscribe to. Einstein didn’t have peer reviewers because, back then, his peer were fellow Nobelists. After WWII, science became Big Business so millions Read More ›

From Retraction Watch: The editors of a journal that recently retracted a paper after the peer-review process was “compromised” have published the fake reviews, along with additional details about the case. In the editorial titled “Organised crime against the academic peer review system,” Adam Cohen and other editors at the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology say they missed “several fairly obvious clues that should have set alarm bells ringing.” For instance, the glowing reviews from supposed high-profile researchers at Ivy League institutions were returned within a few days, were riddled with grammar problems, and the authors had no previous publications. The case is one of many we’ve recently seen in which papers are pulled due to actions of a third Read More ›

From Nature: Today, with the debate about the future of peer review more fraught than ever, it is crucial to understand the youth of this institution. What’s more, its workings and its imagined goals have evolved continually, and its current tensions bear the marks of this. The referee system has become a mishmash of practices, functions and values. But one thing stands out: pivotal moments in the history of peer review have occurred when the public status of science was being renegotiated. … Current attempts to reimagine peer review rightly debate the psychology of bias, the problem of objectivity, and the ability to gauge reliability and importance, but they rarely consider the multilayered history of this institution. Peer review did Read More ›

From Adam Marcus at Stat News: What do Henry Kissinger and Martin Scorsese have in common? Fun fact: Both evidently review scientific manuscripts for money. … The EditPub site (which seemed on Thursday to be no longer up and running), is almost entirely in Chinese, but its homepage bills it as a “service center for scientific research.” Its existence came to light earlier this month after the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology retracted a 2015 article by a group from Dalian University in China. According to the journal, EditPub had “compromised” the peer review process in a way that the journal has so far refused to make public. The retraction is but the latest in some 300 similar instances of Read More ›

From Gunver Vestergård at ScienceNordic: And I have not become better friends with the system after stumbling upon scientific articles that conclude the likelihood of having a paper published is, statistically speaking, random. In other words, it is a lottery as to whether or not your paper will be accepted for publication. … A PhD is a research qualification and part of the training includes learning how to navigate the system of peer review. But I still find it hard to see how the system actually benefits research. You learn how to satisfy reviewers and editors by mastering the academic style of writing and the format of scientific papers. You learn that the transparency of your results are not so Read More ›

Bradshaw: What I’ve seen in a shockingly large slice of the Australian palaeo-science literature is not just sloppy, it’s downright disingenuous. It’s probably also funded, so … it’s kind of like a failing public school system where true causes can never be acknowledged in such a way as leads to positive change. From climatologist and conservationist CJA Bradshaw at Conservation Bytes, (offering outcome analysis for biodiversity policies), At risk of sounding a bit like a broken record (I wonder if the Millennials understand the meaning of that expression), the complex interplay of changing climatic conditions and the sudden appearance of an extremely efficient predator (humans) is likely to have operated rather differently around the world. This is because the variation Read More ›

Recently, we were discussing “Is peer review a ‘sacred cow’? Ready “to be slaughtered”? View from UD News: Yes, of course it is a sacred cow. It is worshipped, and someone is benefitting from fronting the religion. Of course, when slaughtering a sacred cow it is always advisable to decide what to do next… Besides, if we thought the sacred cow was bad,what if we get to meet the sacred rattlesnake or the sacred cockroaches? There’s a lesson in that somewhere, but meanwhile … From Times Higher, we now hear of the dark side of authorship, abuse by senior authors: Too many senior scholars abuse their power when it comes to assigning credit, argues Bruce Macfarlane … My research also Read More ›

Ready “to be slaughtered”? Asks David Gorski at Science-based Medicine: It seems to me that, at the very minimum, the era of asking scientists for suggestions for peer reviewers for their own manuscripts must end. The reasons why many (but by no means all) journals have done so for so many years are quite understandable but no longer defensible in the wake of these damaging and large scale incidents of self-peer review fraud. This practice must stop, even at the price of more work for already harried editors. One technological solution that might help would be a database of peer reviewers, each with his or her relevant field of expertise listed, as well as collaborators and those with whom they’ve Read More ›

In science journals: Because of super-specialization, the authors of papers themselves are nowadays often asked to suggest referees for peer review of their own work, but this, of course, leaves an opening for the practice of fraud. In a modern variant on Gogol’s Dead Souls, some scientists have been caught sending their papers for peer review to non-existent reviewers, complete with a curriculum vitae and an e-mail address. The article quotes the author of a blog on scientific research called “Retraction Watch,” who said “This is officially becoming a trend:” an odd way to put it, since either it is a trend or it isn’t, official recognition having nothing to do with it. There are even companies in China, apparently, Read More ›

For fake reviews. Oops. Retraction Watch reports: This is officially becoming a trend: Springer is pulling another 64 articles from 10 journals after finding evidence of faked peer reviews, bringing the total number of retractions from the phenomenon north of 230. Given that there have been about 1,500 papers retracted overall since 2012, when we first reported on the phenomenon, faked reviews have been responsible for about 15% of all retractions in the past three years. This isn’t the first time Springer has faced the issue. As owner of the BioMed Central journals, it issued 43 retractions for faked reviews earlier this year. In a statement, the publisher explains how the latest round of retractions came to light:More. Is this, Read More ›

See, for example, “Science has taken a turn towards darkness” (This, by the way, is from distinguished medical journal Lancet, not from “A-Crock-a-Lypse News and Used Car Sales.”) Now, this from Times Higher: I used to be the editor of the BMJ, and we conducted our own research into peer review. In one study we inserted eight errors into a 600 word paper and sent it 300 reviewers. None of them spotted more than five errors, and a fifth didn’t detect any. The median number spotted was two. These studies have been repeated many times with the same result. Other studies have shown that if reviewers are asked whether a study should be published there is little more agreement than would Read More ›

Measuring the effectiveness of scientific gatekeeping Significance Peer review is an institution of enormous importance for the careers of scientists and the content of published science. The decisions of gatekeepers—editors and peer reviewers—legitimize scientific findings, distribute professional rewards, and influence future research. However, appropriate data to gauge the quality of gatekeeper decision-making in science has rarely been made publicly available. Our research tracks the popularity of rejected and accepted manuscripts at three elite medical journals. We found that editors and reviewers generally made good decisions regarding which manuscripts to promote and reject. However, many highly cited articles were surprisingly rejected. Our research suggests that evaluative strategies that increase the mean quality of published science may also increase the risk of Read More ›

Wouldn’t that be a party?