Comment by impendia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by impendia | Hacker News Reader

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> a journal called Vaccines

I'm an academic mathematician. Your pointing out the name of the journal is an interesting point.

Pop quiz: out of the journals Aequationes mathematicae, Indagationes mathematicae, Inventiones mathematicae, Quaestiones mathematicae, three are mediocre and one is absolutely top-notch. Without googling can you guess which?

MDPI is a publisher that was started recently, has apparently tried to grow very fast, and engages in questionable practices. I peer-reviewed for one of their journals once and had a very negative experience. Never. Again.

They've also started journals with good sounding names. For example there was no mathematics journal with the title "Mathematics" so they started one.

I've instructed my mail client that *@mdpi.com is to go straight to spam. I got invited to be on the editorial board of one of their journals, and I felt no guilt about not responding. Not too surprised to see them publish crackpottery.

I think this is a fascinating question. There does seem to be an association between 'better' names and higher quality, and I've been wondering why that might be. Older journals have a wider range of available names so choose better? Association only in our heads between the journal quality and its name subsequent to reading the content? (I got your pop quiz completely wrong; would a junior mathematician who hadn't read or heard of any of them think that 'inventiones' was inherently a better name?) Or is a 'better' name likely, ceteribus paribus, to attract better manuscripts - starting a feedback loop that drives it up? I can't help thinking that a journal called 'Mathematics' has to have better prospects than the average questionable new journal.

My own field is political communication. One of our leading journals is 'Political Communication', which could exemplify any of the above. But another is 'The International Journal of Press/Politics', which should by its name be complete shit and turns out to be excellent.

Gosh, I'm tired of MDPI emails asking for reviews in 10 days, or asking for papers, etc. They are terrible.

I also made the mistake of reviewing for them once. It was a very easy review, as the paper (also mathematics) was absolute crap, and I said as much. It was published anyway, and now I'm definitely on a list. My spam box slowly accumulates more and more MDPI emails.

Hm, Science describes it as a "reputable open-access journal" which based on your account I now must assume to be low key gloating.

Certainly this debacle should lower their rating to "low repute journal".

I think mostly journals like this claim to be "reputable" based on their impact factor rather than based on any particular claims to accuracy or quality of published research.

> Pop quiz: out of the journals Aequationes mathematicae, Indagationes mathematicae, Inventiones mathematicae, Quaestiones mathematicae, three are mediocre and one is absolutely top-notch. Without googling can you guess which?

Is the good one Indagationes ?

(Edit: looks likely. I picked it because it seemed the better name)

Bzzzt. :)

Yeah, that's the only one whose meaning you can't guess if you don't read Latin. Inventiones, as it turns out.

Native Portuguese speaker here - "indagações" (pronounced pretty close to the Latin), is an infrequently used word meaning asking questions ;-)

Seems the Italians kept it around in the original spelling, too.

P.S. Hey, it's English, just barely: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indagate

Out of curiosity, are there notable journals for mathematics that are published by MDPI?

Not to my knowledge, no.

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