This Is Why We Can’t Trust ‘the Science’
It doesn’t matter if you’re a journalist, a health nut, or the average American trying to make a winning point in an argument; you’ve likely uttered the words: “There’s a study that says…”
Even those of us who harbor doubts about the modern scientific process tend to use studies the way we use statistics. If they support our argument, we employ them — and we don’t always take our time to ensure those studies aren’t fake. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: Could We Endow AI With Reason? Meta and OpenAI Think So.)
Well, we should.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Wiley, a 217-year-old publishing company, is closing 19 journals. In the last four years, the company has had to retract 11,300 papers and close four journals — and Wiley certainly isn’t the only publisher being forced to clean house.
WSJ assured its readers that “this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions.” Still, it simultaneously accepted that it “threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.”
You don’t say.
There are many problems with the system, not the least of which is that incentives for scientific research are badly designed. If incentives are problematic, you should expect fraud. (READ MORE: Boycotts Betray the Ethos of Science)
Everyone who receives his Ph.D. is under pressure to publish research, and to do so regularly — after all, part of the responsibility of having the Ph.D. in the first place is to advance that field of study. If you, as a professor, want to win research grants, receive tenure, or get a promotion, you have to invest a substantial amount of time and effort into publishing papers in established journals.
The problem is that humans are lazy, and lazy humans tend to find any loopholes they can to make their jobs easier.
So, a professor could take the time and effort to invest in years of research, write his own paper, edit it, and go through the hassle of submitting it to multiple journals until one accepts it; or he could pay for a paper mill (whether that’s a business or individual) to affix his name to a partially or entirely fabricated article and then get that article published in a journal.
The latter, it turns out, is more common than scientists would like to admit. A neuropsychologist named Bernhard Sabel actually designed a program to detect fake papers and quickly discovered that, out of 5,000 papers he screened, “up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%.” (READ MORE: The ‘Panic-demic’ Is Over; Time to Go Back to the Office)
That’s not exactly “a small percentage.”
To be sure, the primary party at fault is the paper mill fabricating scientific papers. But the editors at these journals, who should be carefully reading and fact-checking every paper they publish, evidently missed the fact that paper mills had swapped out recognizable terms like “breast cancer” and “fluid dynamics” for “bosom peril” and “gooey stream” to avoid plagiarism detection. WSJ reported that there are, of course, undercover paper mill agents on some of these journals’ editorial boards.
I guess the scientific publishing world is just as exciting as a James Bond film. Who knew? But until Bond shows up to save the day, it’s probably worth reading studies thoroughly before citing them — since academic journals aren’t.
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