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This seems to be one of the biggest cases of scientific misconduct ever:
On July 8, scientific publisher SAGE announced that it was retracting a whopping 60 scientific papers connected to Taiwanese researcher Peter Chen, in what appears to be an elaborate work of fraud.
This case is one of what appears to be a recent spate of scientific malfeasance. So what's going on here? Is this just a uniquely bad run? Or does the recent spate of scientific misconduct point to a flaw in the peer-review process? Vox.com provides a rundown.
The Chen case is quite astounding. Publisher SAGE announced it was retracting 60 papers from 2010-2014 in the Journal of Vibration and Control, which covers acoustics, all connected to Peter Chen of National Pingtung University of Education, Taiwan.
Chen allegedly created up to 130 fake email accounts to create a 'peer review and citation ring'.
(Score: 2) by e_armadillo on Tuesday July 15 2014, @09:19PM
Publish or perish probably does apply. But, this doesn't appear to be a case of shortcuts. It sounds like a whole lot of work went into creating the fake accounts and writing the fake reviews. This wasn't tripping over some line that one is skating along. This appears to be running headlong at the line and leaping as far over it as humanly possible -- hoping nobody will notice. This seems to be simple fraud, passing off bad-science that no amount of honest effort could fix.
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
(Score: 1) by looorg on Tuesday July 15 2014, @09:42PM
I agree that in this specific case it seem quite obvious that it is a matter of deliberate cheating. Setting up lots of emailaddresses etc is not a misstake or done by accident.