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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

It takes a special kind of sociopath to fake research on something with such potentially massive life/death consequences. This could have caused doctors to avoid a treatment; or, even worse in the grand scheme of things, prevented another researcher from entering into an area and making a big breakthrough.

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It's important to note that this is about fake reviews; not necessarily "fake research". There is an important difference. Fake research (eg. people fabricating measurements) often passes real peer review and is a different problem.

The authors committing review fraud probably are not trying to publish fabricated research; it's more likely they were attempting to make it more likely that their research is published.

Most articles are not rejected by reviewers because the research is "wrong"; rather because they are not significant enough, or other papers are better.

Where there is a whiff of smoke we often look for fire, no? Without a deep dive into a statistically significant amount of the research how could you say that those papers were probably not fabricated?

It seems that part of the publishing apparatus discovered this flaw as the journal was undergoing a shift in publication models. In that all parties have an interest in the ongoing viability and prestige of the journal, and most often institutions respond to scandals by either coverup or diminishment, who benefits from the news and which party wants to contain the scandal to the review process only?

There may be an intersection between fabricated research and fraudulently reviewed research but I understand that at least some of the papers retracted for reviewer fraud could have been published legitimately.

Grandparent has it right. This is all about the pressure on authors to publish, and publish quickly.

Cancer Biology is a journal with an impact factor of 3.1 or thereabouts, that's the equivalent of wrapping paper. People in the sciences know whose work is solid and whose isn't, with stuff like that you just go "Oh, it's XY again, with their usual rubbish", you don't even try to follow up. Broad & Wade called the phenomenon "the invisible boot". Required reading: https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0192818899

A sociopath looks like the Sames-Sezen affair: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2011/07/08/the...

Even there a certain blogger said that he knew "Dali Sames not to be a nice person", whoever went there knew exactly what he was getting into.

Just out of curiosity, how did you find this journal's impact factor?

The publisher lists it right on the homepage: https://link.springer.com/journal/13277

It's an important metric, of course they'd list it.

> It takes a special kind of sociopath to fake research on something with such potentially massive life/death consequences.

Theranos ring a bell?

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