Announcement

Collapse

Natural Science 301 Guidelines

This is an open forum area for all members for discussions on all issues of science and origins. This area will and does get volatile at times, but we ask that it be kept to a dull roar, and moderators will intervene to keep the peace if necessary. This means obvious trolling and flaming that becomes a problem will be dealt with, and you might find yourself in the doghouse.

As usual, Tweb rules apply. If you haven't read them now would be a good time.

Forum Rules: Here
See more
See less

Fake journals

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Fake journals

    An amusing cautionary take has come to light.

    Anna O. Szust is a young polish researcher, starting out her academic career, and she has made a great start. She has been accepted as an editor in some 40 journals, and indeed became editor in chief at four journals. All this despite having no publications herself indexed in the major academic databases such as Web Of Science, no publications listed in any academic journals, and no citations to her work from any other publications. She had no prior experience as an editor or even a reviewer.

    Her C.V. does include various publications, but none in academic journals; and some book chapters. And even those publications listed were actually fakes.... as was her degree.

    And her name, in Polish, is unfortunate... Anna O. Szust. "Oszust" is the Polish word for fraud.

    Anna is, in fact, an entirely fictitious individual, created specifically for an investigation of predatory "scientific" journals. The results were written up in nature. See: Predatory Journals Recruit Fake Editor. (Nature, v 543, no 7646, 2 March 2017, by P. Sorokowski, E. Kulczycki, A. Sorokowska, and K. Pisanski)

    There have also been a couple of reports of this in the regular news. For example, in the Sydney Morning Herald: Scientists outwit predatory publishers by tricking them into appointing a fake editor. Or read an interview with one of the authors at the blog "Retraction Watch" interview with Katarzyna Pisanski. (Retraction Watch tracks and reports on retractions in scientific literature.)

    Reading the links will give a bit more background to the state of play in which predatory journals exist. When I was working as an academic (long ago) I often received invitations myself to be an editor at some obscure journal which I generally binned without further ado.

    I'm sure other TWeb members working academia can say the same.

    Cheers -- sylas

  • #2
    C.v. ?
    Watch your links! http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/fa...corumetiquette

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by DesertBerean View Post
      C.v. ?
      Curriculum vitae. Kind of like a résumé for academics but generally longer.

      I'm always still in trouble again

      "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
      "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
      "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by sylas View Post
        An amusing cautionary take has come to light.

        Anna O. Szust is a young polish researcher, starting out her academic career, and she has made a great start. She has been accepted as an editor in some 40 journals, and indeed became editor in chief at four journals. All this despite having no publications herself indexed in the major academic databases such as Web Of Science, no publications listed in any academic journals, and no citations to her work from any other publications. She had no prior experience as an editor or even a reviewer.

        Her C.V. does include various publications, but none in academic journals; and some book chapters. And even those publications listed were actually fakes.... as was her degree.

        And her name, in Polish, is unfortunate... Anna O. Szust. "Oszust" is the Polish word for fraud.

        Anna is, in fact, an entirely fictitious individual, created specifically for an investigation of predatory "scientific" journals. The results were written up in nature. See: Predatory Journals Recruit Fake Editor. (Nature, v 543, no 7646, 2 March 2017, by P. Sorokowski, E. Kulczycki, A. Sorokowska, and K. Pisanski)

        There have also been a couple of reports of this in the regular news. For example, in the Sydney Morning Herald: Scientists outwit predatory publishers by tricking them into appointing a fake editor. Or read an interview with one of the authors at the blog "Retraction Watch" interview with Katarzyna Pisanski. (Retraction Watch tracks and reports on retractions in scientific literature.)

        Reading the links will give a bit more background to the state of play in which predatory journals exist. When I was working as an academic (long ago) I often received invitations myself to be an editor at some obscure journal which I generally binned without further ado.

        I'm sure other TWeb members working academia can say the same.

        Cheers -- sylas
        Roughly a year ago I posted something that seems pertinent to this that I'm going to re-post here
        Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
        Medical research is currently a mess. One problem is that there are a bunch of fake, legitimate sounding journals that keep popping up which will print your "research" if you pay them from which you can use that to push for everything from grant money to getting the results picked up and covered by the media.

        The TV show "Adam Ruins Everything" covered this in an episode on nutrition where they reported on a journalist who had a fictitious study claiming that eating chocolate helps you lose weight (“Chocolate with high cocoa content as a weight-loss accelerator”) published in the International Archives of Medicine for 600 Euros. It was picked up by multiple news outlets often getting front page coverage.

        The entire affair can be read about here: I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How as well as here: How the "chocolate diet" hoax fooled millions.

        The host of the aforementioned TV show, Adam Conover, had his own fraudulent study "The Possible Irritating Effects of Nutritional Facts" published in a faux journal called Advances In Nutrition And Food Technology to confirm that this does indeed happen. It was pretty obvious that the publisher never read it for it is a blatant spoof.

        The problem seems to be especially bad in medical research journals.

        I'm always still in trouble again

        "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
        "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
        "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

        Comment


        • #5
          Thanks for that one rogue! I hadn't seen it before.

          There have been quite a number of spoof articles and the like over the years, as a kind of tweak the nose of the fake journal exercise. Another famous one is the Sokal hoax article.

          This one is a bit different. It was done as a research exercise. The authors have deliberately not named any of the journals that accepted the fake editor (as fake journals often use names that sound a bit like some existing legitimate journal and they did not want to spread confusion). All journals accepting the Schust as an editor were later informed of the study and invited to respond. But you can google for Szust and still see her listed as being on the editorial board of several journals.

          The article states:
          Source: Sorokowski et al

          The aim of our study was to help academics to understand how bogus versus legitimate journals operate, not to trick journals into accepting our editor. For this reason, Szust was not a persistent applicant. If journals did not respond to her application, we did not e-mail them again, but coded them as 'No response'. Journals that responded initially but failed to follow up were coded as 'Rejected'. Any attempt by a journal to verify Szust's qualifications (for example, through a trial review of a manuscript or through an interview) was also considered a rejection, as were explicit rejections. We coded journals as 'Accepted' only if a reply to our e-mail explicitly accepted Szust as editor (in some cases contingent on financial contribution) or if Szust's name appeared as an editorial board member on the journal's website.

          [...]

          Our study, approved by an institutional ethics review board, necessitated deception. However, we made every effort to maintain a high standard of ethical conduct and transparency. We also resigned from the editorial boards that accepted Szust. We thank all editorial boards for their time.

          In February 2017, we e-mailed the 49 journals originally coded as accepting Szust as an editor to inform them of our study and offer them a chance to respond. Nine replied. ...

          [...]

          It is difficult to predict the future editorial career of Anna O. Szust. Although journals that accepted our fraud were informed that Szust “kindly withdraws her application”, her name still appears on the editorial boards listed by at least 11 journals' websites. In fact, she is listed as an editor of at least one journal to which we did not apply. She is also listed as management staff, a member of conference organizing committees, and ironically, a member of the Advisory Board of the Journals Open Access Indexing Agency whose mission it is to “increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals”.

          © Copyright Original Source



          Results can be summarized in the following figure:
          nature-editorial-sting-23-mar-17-online.jpg

          Comment


          • #6
            Further followon.

            Rogue, your example of the study showing benefits of chocolate is really interesting. It's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. It wasn't a hoax article so much as an article using deliberately shoddy science with a real study and real investigation... all geared in advance to give a dubious result of benefits for chocolate. It's part of the whole debate about using "p values" as a measure of significance for some result. We've had some threads on that also!

            Comment


            • #7
              You can even generate fake papers.


              Amphibious Epistemologies
              Rogue06 and Sparko
              Abstract
              In recent years, much research has been devoted to the emulation of the transistor; on the other hand, few have analyzed the construction of lambda calculus. In fact, few cyberinformaticians would disagree with the analysis of von Neumann machines. BITO, our new approach for event-driven modalities, is the solution to all of these challenges.
              Table of Contents
              1 Introduction

              Authenticated technology and courseware have garnered tremendous interest from both cyberinformaticians and futurists in the last several years. An essential issue in cryptography is the study of A* search. Further, a typical question in symbiotic e-voting technology is the understanding of certifiable modalities. Nevertheless, the partition table alone can fulfill the need for "smart" models.

              Motivated by these observations, virtual communication and randomized algorithms have been extensively enabled by computational biologists. For example, many applications provide amphibious information. For example, many methodologies prevent distributed communication [7]. The shortcoming of this type of solution, however, is that the foremost relational algorithm for the simulation of kernels by Raman et al. is recursively enumerable. This combination of properties has not yet been analyzed in related work.

              To our knowledge, our work here marks the first framework harnessed specifically for the construction of the Turing machine. Two properties make this method optimal: our methodology is not able to be improved to allow introspective models, and also our solution is in Co-NP. The basic tenet of this approach is the improvement of checksums. Thus, BITO is copied from the principles of algorithms.

              In this position paper, we concentrate our efforts on showing that the partition table and superpages are usually incompatible. Nevertheless, the development of extreme programming might not be the panacea that scholars expected. Predictably, our heuristic manages the refinement of forward-error correction. As a result, we demonstrate that the foremost highly-available algorithm for the synthesis of I/O automata runs in Ω(n) time.

              The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We motivate the need for SCSI disks. Further, to overcome this question, we verify that the Ethernet and superpages can interfere to surmount this obstacle. Our mission here is to set the record straight. We validate the analysis of I/O automata. This result might seem counterintuitive but has ample historical precedence. In the end, we conclude.
              http://scigen.csail.mit.edu/scicache...o.Rogue06.html


              from https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/

              Comment


              • #8
                There's a very interesting followup to that, Sparko. The program you used "SCIgen", has since been reverse engineered with a program to detect papers written by SCIgen. Investigators have discovered a surprising number of nonsense papers written by SCIgen which have been accepted for publication at conferences.

                It is reported in Nature. See Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers, as a news brief in Nature 24 Feb 2014, by Richard Van Noorden.

                Cheers -- sylas

                Comment


                • #9
                  I follow Derek Lowe's pharma industry blog In The Pipeline (his "things I won't work with" posts are brilliant) and he has been talking a lot about this topic, both fake journals and faked research/results and/or shoddy reseach getting through and how they are getting more problematic (including the case in the OP)

                  http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline.../the-dark-side
                  Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.
                  1 Corinthians 16:13

                  "...he [Doherty] is no historian and he is not even conversant with the historical discussions of the very matters he wants to pontificate on."
                  -Ben Witherington III

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Wow.
                    Watch your links! http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/fa...corumetiquette

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by sylas View Post
                      There's a very interesting followup to that, Sparko. The program you used "SCIgen", has since been reverse engineered with a program to detect papers written by SCIgen. Investigators have discovered a surprising number of nonsense papers written by SCIgen which have been accepted for publication at conferences.

                      It is reported in Nature. See Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers, as a news brief in Nature 24 Feb 2014, by Richard Van Noorden.

                      Cheers -- sylas
                      That proves that they were not even read. Even a cursory reading of a scigen paper would tip off even a layman. Unless you are Shunya. I fooled him in a post with one.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                        That proves that they were not even read. Even a cursory reading of a scigen paper would tip off even a layman.
                        Quite so. The point of the reverse engineering was not to tell if it was gibberish or not.... but to be able to do an automated search, and also identify the use of a specific tool for producing gibberish. SCIgen gibberish has some specific features that allow a confident identification of tool used.

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by sylas View Post
                          Quite so. The point of the reverse engineering was not to tell if it was gibberish or not.... but to be able to do an automated search, and also identify the use of a specific tool for producing gibberish. SCIgen gibberish has some specific features that allow a confident identification of tool used.
                          so much for "peer reviewed" journals.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                            so much for "peer reviewed" journals.
                            Wait a minute! There are certainly some journals (and more often, conferences) which claim to have peer review but pretty obviously have no review at all. That would be the case to publish a SCIgen paper, I think.

                            I presume and hope that you are not going over the extreme of saying that there's no such thing as a peer reviewed journal!

                            The predatory journals phenomenon seems exists in part because there's a lot of pressure to get published, but that it's hard work to get into the professional peer reviewed literature, so there's a niche for the fake journals and conferences. Doesn't mean that ALL journals are fake, or that any claim to peer review is meaningless.

                            Cheers -- sylas

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Originally posted by sylas View Post
                              Wait a minute! There are certainly some journals (and more often, conferences) which claim to have peer review but pretty obviously have no review at all. That would be the case to publish a SCIgen paper, I think.

                              I presume and hope that you are not going over the extreme of saying that there's no such thing as a peer reviewed journal!
                              of course not. I am talking about these phony "peer reviewed" journals. They claim they are peer reviewed but in fact they just publish anything. Probably charge a fee too.

                              Comment

                              Related Threads

                              Collapse

                              Topics Statistics Last Post
                              Started by Hypatia_Alexandria, 03-18-2024, 12:15 PM
                              48 responses
                              135 views
                              0 likes
                              Last Post Sparko
                              by Sparko
                               
                              Started by Sparko, 03-07-2024, 08:52 AM
                              16 responses
                              74 views
                              0 likes
                              Last Post shunyadragon  
                              Started by rogue06, 02-28-2024, 11:06 AM
                              6 responses
                              48 views
                              0 likes
                              Last Post shunyadragon  
                              Working...
                              X