It's not so much that the emphasis on research and publication is "excessive" is that in the absence of solid metrics for the quality of the research being done, professors think in terms of the "minimum publishable unit," and the cynic advises the tenure-trackers that deans can't read, but they can count. Thus emerges the vanity press and archival journals and electronic publication, and the best efforts of faculties to rank journals or to calculate "impact factors" can be for naught. Or they can lead ambitious professors to cut corners.I've been retired ten years, and if anything, conditions have not improved. "I have called attention to the administrative usurpations turning the calling of professor into the chore of special education teacher whilst requiring the sort of input-measurement useful in crafting a control panel in such a way as to encourage derivative scholarship of the minimal publishable unit form, rather than engaging in creativity."
How bad has it gotten? Worse than faked minimal publishable units. It goes beyond mockery now. Read on.
We've called attention previously to fake papers being withdrawn. It isn't enough to arrange refereeing rings in order for scholars to reciprocally cite each other's work, ostensibly to improve the narrative, and incidentally gundecking those citation metrics people obsess over. (I still get encouragements to brag on my work. The best stuff is nearly forty years old. If it has value, let others find it.)
Paper-faking is big business.
It was reported a few weeks ago that Wiley, one of the oldest and most established academic journal publishers, was retracting 11,300 papers, many of which were partly or wholly fabricated. Further, Wiley is shutting down 19 journals.A number of the journals were in a portfolio of publications from an Egyptian publishing house Wiley bought. Shades of Taylor and Francis!
Most of these fabrications were in Wiley’s science journals. But, but—peer review! Why was there apparently none—or at least none that was serious?
Red State's Streiff joins the pile-on.
Academic publishing is a major industry for two reasons. The publishing industry generates about $30 billion in revenue, approximately 40% of which comes from within the United States. These publications don't make their money from advertisers. To have a research paper published in a top-tier journal will cost the research team several thousand dollars. That money typically is an authorized expense of the grant or contract the laboratory has received.That passage conflates three different phenomena at work. First, there is such a thing as the vanity press. Arguably Cold Spring Shops is in that category, although it's my own (F.U.) money, and I make no claim to respecting the discourse practices of academic economics. There are journals, including any number of on-line journals (a pain in the tuchus for personnel and promotion committees to evaluate) that operate on a pay-to-publish basis, and the validity of any Minimal Publishable Units in such outlets ought be given the most serious, and the most skeptical, attention. Second, there is the Nature business model, which might charitably be seen as using public money to provide access, or more cynically might be good old rent-seeking. "The difference is that when an article is accepted for publication, the author/s or funder/s pay an Article Processing Charge (APC). The final version of the published article is then free to read for everyone." Thereafter, the article as approved for publication is open-access.It's in the interest of the National Science Foundation or the MacArthur Foundation, or the Heartland Institute if they could get something through Nature's peer review, to have their sponsored writers getting that Mr Chips imprimatur. Otherwise, take out a subscription. If you're interested in the content, better get a J-STOR subscription. (For most accepted articles, the tenure committee, deans, and provosts will note the acceptance and trust that the external reviewers have done their job. Well, maybe, as we will see.)
Why, you might add, would anyone pay $12,000 to have their paper published in one of Nature's 156 titles? The way you win grants, acquire and maintain academic tenure, and move from the underpaid gypsy status of a post-doctoral researcher is by publishing. Nearly all the problems associated with academic publishing — fraudulent data, insipid and irrelevant subjects, and incoherent writing being top among them — stem from the role publishing in academic journals plays in scientific research. Paradoxically, the business model of academic journals is based on selling space to needy scientists, and so there is a tension between academic integrity and the bottom line that technology, especially the emergence of large language models, has exacerbated.
There is a third phenomenon, called the page charge, which can be a way for an academic organization to confer benefits on its members. Belong to the Scholarly Association, you might pay to have your work reviewed (yes, it happens) but if accepted, the Association publishes it. Don't belong to the Association, you might have to pay more. But if accepted, you might be asked to help defray the publication expenses. Sometimes those are nominal.
Now, if all we had was pay-to-play-the Glass Bead Game with phony articles that nobody reads, that would not be a Good Thing, but it would not be destructive of the academy's credibility. You were warned. "[O]nce academicians lose sight of the distinction between the positive and normative and attempt to make the world on the basis of will alone, or, worse, the latest fads and fashions suggest that anything goes, the academy is done for."
The academy isn't doing itself any favors, either. Columbia's law school, as if that university doesn't have enough problems, has published an article that allegedly circumvented conventional standards of peer review (such as that is with law reviews).
Law reviews are typically sleepy, student-edited journals that publish turgid scholarship. The articles may be read by specialists, and they are often read by no one beyond the author and editors. But Columbia University law school’s law review has received a rare burst of public attention this week.I'll let the legal scholars elsewhere sort out what happened. When I grouse about incoherence, not Sophisticated Thinking, being the consequence of denying coherent beliefs, that complaint applies with equal force to what appears to have happened at Columbia: nobody can distinguish proper scholarly vetting from censorship.
According to various media outlets, the law review’s board of directors, composed of faculty and alumni, tried to censor an article critical of Israel. Except that’s not what happened at all. The true story involves a faction of the law review secretly breaking all procedural rules and customs to publish a piece of ideologically driven claptrap.
The claptrap in question is an article by graduate student Rabea Eghbariah, "Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept." To say that the article is of poor quality not worthy of an elite law review like Columbia’s, considered one of the three or four most prestigious legal journals in the United States, would be an understatement. The article reads as if one asked ChatGPT to disguise a lengthy, biased, inaccurate propaganda piece as legitimate scholarship, making it a dull read and throwing in hundreds of footnotes to dubious sources.
But the article’s poor quality is not the nub of the problem. Elite law reviews publish bad articles all the time. This is especially true in recent years, when law reviews have announced a commitment to social justice. This affects both the staff they select, such as four DEI editors at the Columbia Law Review, and the articles they decide to publish. The result is that ideological and diversity considerations trump a commitment to trying to publish leading scholarship—something that the second- and third-year law students that staff law reviews are generally unqualified to do even when they try.
So while the law review should be embarrassed to publish Eghbariah’s arrant nonsense, the real problem is that a cabal of editors, apparently including the former editor in chief, Margaret Hassel, under whose leadership the piece was commissioned, conspired to ensure that anyone who might have objected to publishing the article was kept out of the process.
Dear reader, it gets worse. Today, news of what the Populist Right characterizes as the Most Significant Scientific Retraction Ever also crossed my screen. It's not good, even if the Pajamas Media types are dialing up the heat.
Authors of a landmark Alzheimer’s disease research paper published in Nature in 2006 have agreed to retract the study in response to allegations of image manipulation. University of Minnesota (UMN) Twin Cities neuroscientist Karen Ashe, the paper’s senior author, acknowledged in a post on the journal discussion site PubPeer that the paper contains doctored images. The study has been cited nearly 2500 times, and would be the most cited paper ever to be retracted, according to Retraction Watch data.We're only talking about a major therapeutic dead end here.
“Although I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago,” Ashe wrote on PubPeer, “it is clear that several of the figures in Lesné et al. (2006) have been manipulated … for which I as the senior and corresponding author take ultimate responsibility.”
After initially arguing the paper’s problems could be addressed with a correction, Ashe said in another post last week that all of the authors had agreed to a retraction—with the exception of its first author, UMN neuro-scientist Sylvain Lesné, a protégé of Ashe’s who was the focus of a 2022 investigation byScience. A Nature spokesperson would not comment on the journal’s plans.
For years researchers had tried to improve Alzheimer’s outcomes by stripping amyloid proteins from the brain, but the experimental drugs all failed. Aβ*56 seemed to offer a more specific and promising therapeutic target, and many embraced the finding. Funding for related work rose sharply.Hot Air's David Strom concludes,
If it turns out that the entirety of the work was fraudulent--and there appears to be some dispute--I can imagine no punishment harsh enough for Lesné. Alzheimer's is a horrible disease. Creating fraudulent research to enhance one's career when the stakes are so high is sociopathic.It's easy enough to fake research, particularly because only a few people understand what you're working on in most cases, and because nobody is watching. I hope that an investigation based on coherent beliefs and sound research principles follows, and that if nothing else, the failed funded research identifies dead ends not worth pursuing further.
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