| Title | Publishing Stings Find Shoddy Peer Review | |
| Date | Wednesday April 23 2014, @05:20AM | |
| Author | n1 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the who-can-you-trust-now dept. | ||
Ars Technica has an article on investigations performed by Science magazine and the Ottawa Citizen.
Peer-reviewed scientific papers are the gold standard for research. Although the review system has its limitations, it ostensibly ensures that some qualified individuals have looked over the science of the paper and found that it's solid. But lately there have been a number of cases that raise questions about just how reliable at least some of that research is.
The first issue was highlighted by a couple of sting operations performed by Science magazine and the Ottawa Citizen. In both cases, a staff writer made up some obviously incoherent research. In the Citizen's example, the writer randomly merged plagiarized material from previously published papers in geology and hematology. The sting paper's graphs came out of a separate paper on Mars, while its references came from one on wine chemistry. Neither the named author nor the institution he ostensibly worked at existed.
Unfortunately, by attempting to highlight the problem of lax review procedures, some computer scientists may have exacerbated the problem. Suspecting that some reviewers weren't doing a thorough job on some conference papers, they put together a random gibberish paper generator for anyone who wanted to test whether reviewers were paying attention. Unfortunately, that software has since been used to get 120 pieces of gibberish published.
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printed from SoylentNews, Publishing Stings Find Shoddy Peer Review on 2024-04-24 06:57:36