What an absolute mess. And to think there are likely to be many (hundreds? thousands?) problematic papers still out there, too. One of my concerns is how this mass of paper mill content starts to shift research - for instance, when people are doing literature searches or using aggregating tools to scope a field.
Blogs like this are very helpful in highlighting the scale of these problems, and I also appreciated your history of paper mill literature, too.
I absolutely love your bitter snarkiness. I always know your blogs are going to be a fun take-down of the ivory tower. I myself (as a bibliometrics librarian) have tried to express cynicism about university rankings and the h-index, but that fell on deaf ears. So I get a chuckle out of your withering exposés of academic publishing. Please do a piece on "Research.com": It seems to be a new type of meta-academic fraud run by a Tunisian with a PhD in biometrics. That's all the expertise you need to do bibliometrics, right? (It's like Austria/Australia...how far could they be?)
This is a very “the Emperor has no clothes” problem. All that nonsense you quoted? It sounds exactly like how liberal arts departments write nowadays. I’m sure you heard about how they accepted a joke paper about the social construct that is the male penis. This is the same. They can’t admit they don’t understand the jargon and it passes through.
I do not think this is what is happening here. The fact that these papers are nonsense is not subtle or difficult to grasp. When "ant colony" comes out as "creepy crawly kingdom" a very cursory glance will show that something is wrong. These papers were not reviewed at all: they are part of a big, profitable enterprise of deliberately farming out guest issues as profit-making endeavors, and I am sure Hindawi knew that this leads to guest issues full of nonsense but didn't care to do anything about it. After all, they attracted a nice juicy buy-out offer: why should they have cared to change?
Thanks for writing this fantastic series. The scope of the problem is mind-boggling. It's shameful that Wiley hasn't retracted the breast cancer papers yet.
What an absolute mess. And to think there are likely to be many (hundreds? thousands?) problematic papers still out there, too. One of my concerns is how this mass of paper mill content starts to shift research - for instance, when people are doing literature searches or using aggregating tools to scope a field.
Blogs like this are very helpful in highlighting the scale of these problems, and I also appreciated your history of paper mill literature, too.
I absolutely love your bitter snarkiness. I always know your blogs are going to be a fun take-down of the ivory tower. I myself (as a bibliometrics librarian) have tried to express cynicism about university rankings and the h-index, but that fell on deaf ears. So I get a chuckle out of your withering exposés of academic publishing. Please do a piece on "Research.com": It seems to be a new type of meta-academic fraud run by a Tunisian with a PhD in biometrics. That's all the expertise you need to do bibliometrics, right? (It's like Austria/Australia...how far could they be?)
This is a very “the Emperor has no clothes” problem. All that nonsense you quoted? It sounds exactly like how liberal arts departments write nowadays. I’m sure you heard about how they accepted a joke paper about the social construct that is the male penis. This is the same. They can’t admit they don’t understand the jargon and it passes through.
I do not think this is what is happening here. The fact that these papers are nonsense is not subtle or difficult to grasp. When "ant colony" comes out as "creepy crawly kingdom" a very cursory glance will show that something is wrong. These papers were not reviewed at all: they are part of a big, profitable enterprise of deliberately farming out guest issues as profit-making endeavors, and I am sure Hindawi knew that this leads to guest issues full of nonsense but didn't care to do anything about it. After all, they attracted a nice juicy buy-out offer: why should they have cared to change?
It's harder to understand why Wiley did it.
Thanks for writing this fantastic series. The scope of the problem is mind-boggling. It's shameful that Wiley hasn't retracted the breast cancer papers yet.
Great post, James!