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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising that these kind of things happen in social studies and it's easy to make fun of.

However, lots of junk is also published in science and engineering, it's just not as egregious and apparent.

There are much more egregious examples in computer science publishing. A paper that just repeated the words "get me off your fucking mailing list" over and over [1] was published in a journal. I also remember there being some automatic paper generators that resulted in several publications several years back. This is 100% an issue with bogus for-profit publishing, not with any particular area of study.

[1] http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf

That’s not a fair comparison.

That’s not a peer reviewed journal — it’s a publication that will publish anything for a fee.

All of the papers in the original article are peer reviewed.

The papers in the article were published in journals that will publish anything for a fee. The "get me off your fucking mailing list" paper was also peer reviewed. The reviewer asked for formatting changes and citations, very similar to the reviews that these other hoax papers got.

No, that’s completely incorrect. The papers in the article above were published in top (or close to top) journals in their respective fields.

The back story I heard is that the authors submitted to the top journals, were rejected, and kept going downward in perceived impact until the article was accepted. That is, that most of the articles (with perhaps one exception?) did not appear in the close-to-top journals. And they had many papers in the works at one time, and some of them did not get in at all despite the above "just-good-enough" optimization technique.

Although I kind of enjoyed the original Sokal paper - I was a subscriber to Lingua Franca, where Sokal announced the hoax in the first place - I think the message of this iteration is more that: "if you work hard to game the system, you can indeed find a hole and game the system". This finding is not that interesting.

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Specifically (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Sokal-Squared-Is-Huge/2447...):

"Three scholars [...] spent 10 months writing 20 hoax papers [...] and submitted them to "the best journals in the relevant fields." Of the 20, seven papers were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors [stopped].

I have never seen someone claim that before. Can you back that up?

We approached this new effort by asking two central questions: Are we correct in our claim that highly regarded peer-reviewed journals in gender studies and related fields will publish obvious hoaxes? (...) And, if not, what will they publish?

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 (...)

https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...

"Gender, Place and Culture" ( https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cgpc20/current ) has an impact factor of 1.594. No idea whether that's enough to make it a top journal in feminist geography or not.

The retraction notice for the "Dog Park" paper is currently the most recent publication on that site.

That certainly contradicts what I've heard about these papers before. Gender, Place and Culture does seem to be a top journal. Thanks.

The difference was that this was not a reputable publication, but a predatory scam.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/nov/25/journ...

These were "real" publication, with peer- and/or editorial-review. Not the same thing by a long shot.

It's my understanding that the hoax papers in the article were also published by predatory scam journals. Even the "get me off your fucking mailing list" paper went through peer review.

> “They told me to add some more recent references and do a bit of reformatting,” he said.

> It's my understanding that the hoax papers in the article were also published by predatory scam journals.

If the hoax papers were published in "predatory scam journals," they're engaged in an entirely different type of predatory scam than the "get me off your fucking mailing list" computer science journal. Sort of like the difference between fake news and herbal Viagra spam/scams.

> Even the "get me off your fucking mailing list" paper went through peer review.

>> “They told me to add some more recent references and do a bit of reformatting,” he said.

Obviously not any peer review process that deserves the name. That must have been an entirely automatic (or even automated) bit of feedback.

What makes the journals the hoax papers were published in different?

Figure 1 really drives the point home

Not a journal of anybody cares about in any way whatsoever, just a scam journal that attempts to extract fees from desperate to publish researchers.

Which is why they were spamming people.

The same is true of the journals that published the hoax papers mentioned in the article.

I find it phenomenally interesting that people simply say what they want to be true with no consideration for whether it is or not. We are indeed moving into a post-fact world aren't we? [1] Here is the wiki page on the 'get me off your mailing list' paper. Here [2] is the page on the journal that chose to accept (after revisions) the Mein Kampf paper. You might notice certain differences. The other journals that accepted the fake papers are part of the T&F/Springer publishing networks, and some responded in this [3] article. They were not scam journals by any means of the word, just journals blinded by ideological bias.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Journal_of_Advan...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia

[3] - https://reason.com/blog/2018/10/03/dog-rape-hoax-papers-pluc...

It looks like I may have been misinformed or working off of old information. I'll look into this some more, thanks.

Witness this classic complaint from Peter Elias: https://oikosjournal.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/elias1958ir...

published in 1958 when he was editor of the IRE (now IEEE) Transactions on Information Theory.

Thanks, that's gold, apparently things don't change as much or fast as we think they do.

Engineering and science have an advantage, however, in that they are empirical and readily tested. Things evaluate to true or false, even if doing the evaluation is difficult. In the humanities, things often come down to value judgements and mere assertions, which cannot be validated one way or another.

not to mention a ridiculously high percentage of humanities papers are never cited once. Never. Cited. Once. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/aca... Who can see this and not admit the field is in crisis?

Depends on what you mean by crisis. If you have a student that really needs to graduate soon, this condition is a boon.

yeah, it's not limited to social sciences, but it gets more media attention when it is because it feeds the narrative that the humanities are useless: https://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-12...

The real meat depends on the publisher. There are always publication mills that accept basically anything or push objectively wrong agendas like AIDS denialism. It is when the bellwethers publish absolute crap that it is a sign of true rot in the field and not just a publication.

Why do you say "social studies" when the sociology journals didn't fall for it?

Yeah, I didn't quite know what umbrella term to use for the fields of study they hoaxed.

> Yeah, I didn't quite know what umbrella term to use for the fields of study they hoaxed.

Gender and Identity Studies?

Also, that junk is not as likely to trickle down to the news and the broader population.

At least there's a standard for junk science -- it replicates or it doesn't.

it obviously skips the third option, which is the standard in most fields: nobody ever tries to replicate it.

Plenty of people try to replicate, in trying to build on work from other labs. What they don’t do is publish when replication fails, but the failure to replicate usually becomes known in the community.

If people don't publish failures to replicate, how do you know how frequently replication failures become known in the community?

The 2nd part of academia that isn't being talked about here is citations. Getting published can be huge, but if your paper is actually garbage no one is going to cite it. That's a far better measure of the impact of a paper - who's using the data in it.

The same way you know that you walked out of your front door this morning without it having to be published in a scientific journal.

To be clear, my question is how you know how many failed replications there are that you never find out about.

Indeed, "audacious" is not word I'd use for these kind of games, "lazy", "shooting fish in a barrel" would be closer.

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