If the people at the top of your discipline can't tell the difference between quality and inane garbage, what do you really have?
Not a discipline.
An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax
21–30 of 165 posts
Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shouldn't the default presupposition of any research be a lack of novelty?
I think generally people tend to assume that colleagues aren't dishonest, and mostly peer-review is supposed to catch honest mistakes. You could try working without any faith in your colleagues of course, but you are probably better of switching workplace if that sounds like reasonable behaviour to you.
What your describing sounds nothing like rigor.
Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax
#23This wasn't a hoax it was social commentary and an experiment in prejudice. That nazi language can be published under a progressive guise should be chilling to anyone who is a vehicle for these ideals.
It wasn't a hoax. It's a confounding detail that a meta-commentary article is employing.
Sorry, I can't parse that at all. Could you be a bit clearer on what you're trying to say here?
Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax
#24If the people at the top of your discipline can't tell the difference between quality and inane garbage, what do you really have?
[deleted]
Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax
#25I've been more disturbed by the response to this than the papers themselves. Saying,well of course we were duped, you really expected the peer review system to not to utterly fail in the presence of a few bad actors? does not inspire my faith in the system.
That's what stuck out to me as well. This quote: "I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, "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." Isn't the ability to separate out the quality work from the garbage the poin…
The point of the peer review system is to advance careers, not to produce high quality scholarship.
There are two separate issues here. One is that peer review fails in disciplines that are largely bogus and based on mimicry and posturing.
IMO this absolutely applies to a lot of academic social sciences - but it also applies equally, allowing for changes in tone, convention and social register, to their ideological equivalents on the right.
The other is that we really have a crisis of authority and competence in general. Between fake news, fake reviews, more and less professional trolls and manipulators, empty academic tribal signalling, wilfully dishonest fraud in professional science, the entire PR and thinktank industry of spin, manipulation, and lies for influence, and the slightly milder but still toxic ad industry, there's far too little useful signal now among the tsunami of noise that we have to sift through every day.
Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax
#26I've been more disturbed by the response to this than the papers themselves. Saying,well of course we were duped, you really expected the peer review system to not to utterly fail in the presence of a few bad actors? does not inspire my faith in the system.
That's what stuck out to me as well. This quote: "I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, "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." Isn't the ability to separate out the quality work from the garbage the poin…
Separating out the quality work from the garbage is different than setting out the work done in good faith from the work done in bad faith by people who are otherwise capable of producing good work.
Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax
#27Can someone comment on whether these are respectable journals or not, within their fields? Every few years someone will do a Sokal-hoax-esque thing in scientific fields, but usually they're just getting a paper into very-low-quality predatory journals that have only a nominal peer review process. I'm wondering if that's what happened here. Do humanities fields even have the same set of incentives leading to a prolife…
"We set out with three basic rules: (1) we’ll focus almost exclusively upon ranked peer-reviewed journals in the field, the higher the better and at the top of their subdisciplines whenever possible; (2) we will not pay to publish any paper; and (3) if we are asked at any point by a journal editor or reviewer (but not a journalist!) if any paper we wrote is an attempted hoax, we will admit it. These rules were meant to ensure that any conclusions we derived from the field came from the field itself, not the unrelated but significant problem that also corrupts academic pursuits: the proliferation of predatory and quasi-predatory journals with extremely low standards. With these rules guiding us, we committed to transparently reporting the results, whether we succeeded or failed."
https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...
I'm not qualified to say if these truly were considered respectable journals in their fields but the authors had that as an explicit aim.
Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax
#28This isn't simply a case of poor quality control. Sure, hoax articles have made it through some (largely pay-to-publish) journals in other fields from time to time. And yes those incidents should inspire reflection and correction, as well as a hit to the reputations of such journals.
But this is much more. This is about a set of ideas that pass for expert scholarship despite having lost any tethering to to the real world. Just look at this reaction to the hoax:
> Some of the pieces were indeed outlandish (and not all were accepted). But it appears that some were simply based in premises (e.g. social constructionism) or political principles (e.g trans equality) that the hoax authors find problematic but we do not.
https://twitter.com/alisonphipps/status/1047421076509261824
Note that word "problematic." I don't want to know whether social constructionism is considered "problematic", I want to know whether it is true.
There is an actual real world out there that scholars are purporting to study. But when science and empiricism are considered oppressive, all we are left with is posturing and grandstanding over ideology.
Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax
#29[deleted]
Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax
#30It's not just the humanities, computer science is also susceptible to hoaxes built from jargon. SCIgen works like an academic "Mad Libs" of sorts, arbitrarily slotting in computer-science buzzwords like "distributed hash tables" and "Byzantine fault tolerance." http://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scien...
That paper was accepted as a non-reviewed paper. There was no peer-review process.
Which one? Both that article and this one lists multiple cases where SCIgen-generated papers were waved through: