An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

I read over a couple of the papers. The descriptions of them by the authors did not match the content of the papers.

For instance, the one they call "Hooters" is described as "A gender scholar goes to Hooters to try to figure out why it exists." The actual paper is written as a record of transcripts of visits to a restaurant and an extraction of particular conversation themes. At no point did I see the paper questioning why Hooters exists -- the (apparently totally faked) data seems pretty stereotypically motivated, which I think may be their point, but I'm not sure short of a fraud investigation how reviewers are supposed to know that the particular group this author claims to have visited Hooters with didn't say the things supposedly directly recorded. That's a really dramatic claim for a reviewer to make: "This conversation which the author claims is a direct transcription from a recording couldn't possibly have happened because it seems too stereotypical."

Yes, the methodology isn't that great, and the paper was rejected.

More generally, the "study" isn't selecting random journals to see if they could defraud -- it is instead aimed at specific academic targets and a "test to failure" scattershot mechanism is used. Thus we have no idea whether these journals are any more discriminating than, say, PLOS or Nature.

Ultimately, I had some sympathy for the Sokal experiment in that it seemed to say something about the interaction of literary theory and physics. I don't get the same sense that there's much here other than "confirmation bias exists, even among gender studies folks!!!" which seems like it wouldn't take 3 people 10 months to figure out, and could be done in a much more direct way, and honestly isn't that shocking or rattling a conclusion.

> and the "grievance scholars" are slowly convincing the rest of academia that real scholarship consists not of neutral methods and honest argument, but agreeing with the grievance scholars in all things, and finding ways to inject it whether it's relevant or not.

What degrees or disciplines would you characterise as "grievance scholars", and what evidence do you have that suggests the influence those disciplines have over scholarship is increasing?

The amount of degrees awarded in women's studies over the last 10 years has significantly dropped.

> I read over a couple of the papers. The descriptions of them by the authors did not match the content of the papers.

So did I. The dog park paper more or less matches its description. The fat bodybuilding paper is exactly as described. The dildos paper is as described. Do you have any descriptions aside from the Hooters one that you take issue with?

> Yes, the methodology isn't that great, and the paper was rejected.

Sure, but lots of them were not. I'm not sure why you would focus on a paper that was rejected when they had 7 that were accepted.

> More generally, the "study" isn't selecting random journals to see if they could defraud -- it is instead aimed at specific academic targets and a "test to failure" scattershot mechanism is used. Thus we have no idea whether these journals are any more discriminating than, say, PLOS or Nature.

True, though I have a hard time believing you could get the same result in any STEM discipline, though i'm certainly open to data to the contrary.

> Ultimately, I had some sympathy for the Sokal experiment in that it seemed to say something about the interaction of literary theory and physics. I don't get the same sense that there's much here other than "confirmation bias exists, even among gender studies folks!!!" which seems like it wouldn't take 3 people 10 months to figure out, and could be done in a much more direct way, and honestly isn't that shocking or rattling a conclusion.

I think the point of all this is that the epistemology of the field is intellectually bankrupt. It's not just confirmation bias. It's that within the epistemology of gender studies, they aren't even wrong.

[throw away account as I am a recovering academic and wouldn't want to impact colleagues who have not been able to escape]

Everyone is distracted by the politics here when the real story is the effort.

Three people layman to these fields achieved a near tenure track publication list/ratio in a little over a year. I have a STEM PhD and I know that me and three of my friends couldn't do the same if we tried in a closely related STEM discipline much less an entirely different field.

Hypatia is the journal of record for feminist philosophy (and one of the few respected feminist journals in general). It should not be possible to go from 0 to published in a "real" top tier journal. If the paper is "not too crazy" that's even more damning! They produced a "real" paper as a joke? Do you really think that these same authors could get a paper published in The International Journal of Computer Vision in a little less than a year even if they were using fraudulent data? It would take them two years to know what they could and couldn't fake without being caught.

If the liberal arts don't want the sneering dismissal of their fields as low effort to become culturally entrenched they need to dump or reform the "X studies" departments and journals.

A filter that does filter out the vast majority of obvious noise is very useful even if it lets something through. And the current peer-review does that, it throws out almost all of the spam; it pushes useful work of lower quality/impact down to less selective venues (generally with more specific subfields, so that I can read impactful work of domain X and less impactful work of subdomain X.2 but not X.1 and X.3); and even for accepted papers the process often results in significant improvements to them as a result of the reviews.

Explicit fraud isn't that common, since it does have risks to the submitter that far outweigh the (limited) benefits of getting an extra publication on your CV.