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In an effort to show how politically correct nonsense and evil (but I repeat myself) can get through academic peer review and be published, some academics did just that with seven papers. More are partly through the process.
A particularly funny and horrifying case is the Gender Studies journal Affilia. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf only needed to be translated with wording in the typical style of intersectionality theory, and it passed muster.
Another published paper, considered exemplary scholarship by the journal that published it, contains this whopper: "Dog parks are microcosms where hegemonic masculinist norms governing queering behavior and compulsory heterosexuality can be observed in a cross-species environment."
The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond
Now, three academics have submitted twenty spoof manuscripts to journals chosen for respectability in their various disciplines. Seven papers were accepted before the experiment stopped; more are surviving peer review. This new raid on screamingly barmy pseudo-scholarship is the Alan Sokal Opening, weaponised. Like dedicated traceurs in a Parkour-fest, the trio scrambled over the terrain of what they call Grievance Studies. And they dropped fire-crackers. One published paper proposed that dog parks are "rape-condoning spaces." Another, entitled "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism" reworked, and substantially altered, part of Mein Kampf. The most shocking, (not published, its status is "revise and resubmit") is a "Feminist Approach to Pedagogy." It proposes "experiential reparations" as a corrective for privileged students. These include sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or being purposely spoken over. Reviewers have commented that the authors risk exploiting underprivileged students by burdening them with an expectation to teach about privilege.
Also at WSJ.
Related: Publishing Stings Find Shoddy Peer Review
Absurd Paper Accepted by Open-Access Computer Science Journal
Media World Fooled with Bogus Chocolate Diet Story
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @03:36PM (8 children)
Looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.
First: They wrote 20 hoax papers. All 20 got rejected by all the top journals. Just seven managed to get published by obscure, less reputable journals. The "best" journal to accept any of their hoax papers was ranked 20th (out of 50) in the field by impact factor. [scimagojr.com] But they don't mention any of that in their paper. If you aren't already familiar with the field they were targeting, you'd think these were some of the most respected journals when the reality is that they are some of the most marginal journals. That's a sign their target audience was the reactionary right who would (and have) run with the conveniently decontextualized version of the facts that supports their ideology.
Second: Anyone could have told you that there are problems with the peer review process, namely that peer reviewers are overworked and unpaid. So yes, bad research slips through. This is true in all fields. But their conclusion isn't "pay peer reviewers."
Third: At the very most, this is an indictment of the editorial standards of those particular journals. It says absolutely nothing about any of the real research done by other people. That's because, and this is key, he did not use any controls, there were no submissions of hoax papers to journals in other fields. Its the height of hypocrisy to "prove" a lack of rigor by running an experiment that fails to follow the most basic experimental protocol.
Fourth: Corporations just straight-up hire professors to produce pro-monopoly research, [propublica.org] but no, that's not the problem with academia. Gender studies is the problem. The difference, of course, being that all this bad research SUPPORTS the status quo, so it passes without comment. But as soon as a field of study starts CRITIQUING the status quo, then suddenly bad research is a huge problem. What a coincidence.
Fifth: Yes, academia is predicated on the base assumption that everyone involved is operating in good faith, and it tends to break down when someone just straight-up makes shit up. How is that a fault of academia? How is that a fault of anyone but the hoaxers?
I am so utterly unimpressed by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it. In 2014, IEEE has had to retract 120 computer generated nonsense papers. [nature.com] These three Ph.D.s spent 10 months doing what a computer could have done in minutes. They aren't that bright.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @04:21PM
Then it's a duck. If it just does the walk, it could be a nazi. Do you have video evidence of this team goosestepping? Well known right wing journal Mother Jones [motherjones.com] did not mention any funny walking.
It's not just the entirely fictional postmodernist disciplines, all the social sciences. [slate.com] At least according to that well known right wing site, Slate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @05:32PM
Well said indeed!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @07:05PM (2 children)
Sixth, there should be better ways of making these determinations without resorting to unethical fraud. Any other fields than law enforcement or politicians say, "Yes, we resorted to lying and deceit as part of bringing you these results but...." would promptly find themselves before an ethics committee defending whether they should be continued to work at their institution and/or part of their professional board.
Ends do not justify means, however titillating, interesting, or in fact useful.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by qzm on Thursday October 04 2018, @10:12PM (1 child)
Umm.. no.
It's actually a very get standard part of police work.
And local government enforcement.
That is why they send underage looking kids in to bars to try and order alcohol, the police have undercover agents trying to buy drugs, etc.
So no. You are completely wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @11:57PM
Yeah, because what we are talking about here are police actions. Way to use decontextualized facts to argue in bad faith.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @11:38PM (1 child)
The reason this is a problem is because as soon as anything is published in the humanities the existence of a citation is as good as a mathematical proof in the eyes of the many students who go to humanities because it's a subject you can pass by going through the motions. These are the sorts of people who could never be taught to think critically.
Imagine a person who could never think critically. I'll let you choose the guy who can be talked into a new position on the most flimsy of arguments or the guy who never changes his mind, maybe your dad, maybe your ex-wife, maybe Trump. They're not even mutually exclusive traits if you put that guy in the right situations.
Ok so you have this imaginary person. Now imagine that you have some authority and you've convinced this person that they've been given the tools to think critically, logically, etc. They may have doubted themselves mentally before but now you've given them confidence. You give them a massive pile of debt and send them off into the world to find work. Do you think such a person is going to have a positive social impact?
The desperate are easy to manipulate, the dumb are easy to manipulate now you have someone who is dumb, desperate, and bullheaded and these people all hire their own, taking over whole industries. When they're challenged they become crazy and form mobs.
Fuck man that's not good.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @11:54PM
What you've described is a fundamental misunderstanding of humanities academia. If anything, it sounds like an outsider's assumption of how the humanities work based on his own theories rather than actual experience in the field.
Academic publishing in the humanities is often less "we made a study to find" and more, "Okay, I argue that so and so..." It then gets argued about for months, years, even decades. A lot of these very contentious critical "x" fields are very new and a lot of ideas and theories are tossed around with little basis in fact or proof and are also culturally based hence their fluid nature (ex. 2nd wave vs. 3rd wave feminism).
The nature of these fields is closer to a philosophers forum than say a poli-sci convention or historians' conference. Yet, because of the issues they deal with, people jump on these arguments because there is a heavy emotional investment in them not only from the people working in them, but from reactionary elements that are trying to counter their arguments and things like this are making the natural evolution to a more academic system harder.
Reactionary elements with bad intentions are trying to smother these fields in their cradle before they can evolve, and any smart observer can see that these fake articles serve their purposes better than self-interested criticism. A lot of things that come out of these fields run counter to basic principles of psychology, anthropology, sociology, even hard science. They're little more than verbose ramblings and sophistry and deserve to be countered. But then along comes Jordan fucking Peterson...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 05 2018, @07:10AM
Sorry at work at the moment so no time to go into this in detail but want to address this blatant misrepresentation quickly as I am familiar with these data:
1. The mentioned journal is 20 out of 128 Gender Studies (not 50) journals indexed in Scopus (where this is from) - the UI only displays 50 on one page.
2. The Scopus index is not humanities focused and this is already a heavily curated selection of them.
3. This is a false comparison with IEEE Xplore which is discipline specific and much more exhaustive, and in addition those publications are conference papers not journal articles.
4. Minor point this is listing SJR not Impact Factor (related but not the same).