This is a guest post by contributing editor Mike Hearn.
Last August, a cluster of fake scientific papers appeared in the journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. Each paper now carries a notice saying that it’s been been retracted “because the content of this article is nonsensical”.
This cluster appears to be created by the same group or person whom Daily Sceptic readers previously encountered in October. The papers are scientific-sounding gibberish spliced together with something about sports, hobbies or local economic development:
- “The conversion of traditional arts and crafts to modern art design under the background of 5G mobile communication network”, Linlin Niu
- “The application of twin network target tracking and support tensor machine in the evaluation of orienteering teaching”, Shenrong Wei
- “Application of heterogeneous execution body scheduling and VR technology for mimic cloud services in urban landscape design”, Liyuan Zhao
- “Application of deep and robust resource allocation for uncertain CSI in English distance teaching”, Li Junsheng
Therefore, the combination of LDPC and Polar codes has become the mainstream direction of the two technologies in the 5G scenario. This has further inspired and prompted a large number of researchers and scholars to start exploring and researching the two. In the development of Chinese modern art design culture, traditional art design culture is an important content…
Linlin Niu
This sudden lurch from 5G to Chinese modern art is the sort of text that cannot have been written by humans. Other clues are how the titles are obviously templated (“Application of A and B for X in Y”), how the citations are all on computing or electronics related subjects even when they appear in parts of the text related to Chinese art and packaging design, and of course the combination of extremely precise technical terms inserted into uselessly vague and ungrammatical statements about “the mainstream direction” of technology and how it’s “inspired and prompted” researchers.
An explanation surfaces when examining the affiliations of the authors. Linlin Niu (if she exists at all) is affiliated with the Academy of Arts, Zhengzhou Business University. Shenrong Wei works at the Department of Physical Education, Chang’an University. Li Junsheng is from the School of Foreign Studies, Weinan Normal University. Although the journal is a Western journal with Western editors, all the authors are Chinese, the non-computer related text is often to do with local Chinese issues and they are affiliated with departments you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be publishing in a foreign language.
The papers themselves appear to have been generated by a relatively sophisticated algorithm that’s got a large library of template paragraphs, terms, automated diagram and table generators and so on. At first I thought the program must be buggy to generate such sudden topic switches, but in reality it appears to be designed to create papers on two different topics at once. The first part is on whatever topic the targeted journal is about, and is designed to pass cursory inspection by editors. The second part is related to whatever the professor buying the paper actually “studies”. Once published the author can point colleagues to a paper published in a prestigious Western journal and perhaps cite it themselves in more normal papers, as ‘evidence’ of the relevance of whatever they’re doing to the high-tech world.
Prior events
If you’re a long-time reader of the Daily Sceptic, computer-generated gibberish being presented as peer-reviewed science won’t come as a surprise because this has happened several times before. Last year Springer had to retract 463 papers, but the problem isn’t restricted to one publisher. In July it was discovered that Elsevier had published a stream of papers in the journal Microprocessors and microsystems that were using nonsensical phrases generated from a thesaurus, e.g. automatically replacing the term artificial intelligence with “counterfeit consciousness”. This was not a unique event either, merely the first time the problem was noticed – searching Google Scholar for “counterfeit consciousness” returns hundreds of results spanning the last decade.
Computer-generated text is itself only the most extreme form of fake scientific paper. A remarkable number of medical research papers appear to contain Photoshopped images, and may well be reporting on experiments that never happened. Fake drug trials are even more concerning yet apparently prevalent, with a former editor of the BMJ asserting that the problem has become large-scale enough that it may be time to assume drug trials are fraudulent unless it can be proven otherwise. And of course, this is on top of the problem of claims by researchers that are nonsensical for methodological, statistical or logical reasons, which we encounter frequently when reviewing (especially) the Covid literature.
Zombie journals
Each time this happens, we take the opportunity to analyse the problem from a new angle. Last time we observed that journals appear to be increasingly automated, with the ‘fixes’ publishers propose for this problem being a form of automated spam filtering.
But why don’t these papers get caught by human editors? Scientific publishers like Springer and Elsevier appear to tolerate zombie journals: publications that look superficially real but which are in fact brain dead. They’re not being read by anyone, not even by their own editors, and where meaningful language should be there’s only rambling nonsense. The last round of papers published by this tech+sports group in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences lasted months before anyone noticed, strongly implying that the journal doesn’t have any readers at all. Instead they have become write-only media that exist purely so academics can publish things.
Publishers go to great lengths to imply otherwise. This particular journal’s Editor-in-Chief is Professor Peter Thomas, an academic with his own Wikipedia page. He’s currently affiliated with the “Manifesto Group”. Ironically, the content on the website for Manifesto Group consists exclusively of the following quote from a famous advertising executive:
People won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.
Bill Bernbach
This quote looks a bit odd given the flood of auto-generated ‘original’ papers Professor Thomas’s journal has signed-off on.
Clearly, he has never read the retracted articles given he later stated they were nonsensical. Instead, he blamed the volunteer peer reviewers for not complying with policy. And yet he isn’t on his own in editing this journal: the website lists a staggering 14 editors and 30 members of its international editorial board, which leads to the question of how not just one guy failed to notice they were signing off on garbage but all 45 of them failed to notice. For posterity, here are the people claiming to be editors yet who don’t appear to be reading the articles they publish:
Editors
Emilia Barakova, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Email: e.i.barakova@tue.nl
Alan Chamberlain, University of Nottingham, UK
Email: alan.chamberlain@nottingham.ac.uk
Mark Dunlop, University of Strathclyde, UK
Email: mark.dunlop@strath.ac.uk
Bin Guo, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
Email: guobin.keio@gmail.com
Matt Jones, Swansea University, UK
Email: matt.jones@swansea.ac.uk
Eija Kaasinen, VTT, Finland
Email: eija.kaasinen@vtt.fi
Jofish Kaye, Mozilla, USA
Email: puc@jofish.com
Bo Li, Yunnan University, China
Email: boliphd@outlook.com
Robert D. Macredie, Brunel University, UK
Email: robert.macredie@brunel.ac.uk
Gabriela Marcu, University of Michigan, USA
Email: gmarcu@umich.edu
Yunchuan Sun, Beijing Normal University, China
Email: yunch@bnu.edu.cn
Alexandra Weilenmann, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Email: weila@ituniv.se
Mikael Wiberg, Umea University, Sweden
Email: mwiberg@informatik.umu.se
Zhiwen Yu, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
Email: zhiwenyu@nwpu.edu.cnInternational Editorial Board
Bert Arnrich, Bogazici University, Turkey
Tilde Bekker, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Victoria Bellotti, Palo Alto Research Center, USA
Rongfang Bie, Beijing Normal University, China
Mark Billinghurst, University of South Australia, Australia
José Bravo, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
Luca Chittaro, HCI Lab, University of Udine, Italy
Paul Dourish, University of California, USA
Damianos Gavalas, University of the Aegean, Greece
Gheorghita Ghinea, Brunel University, UK
Karamjit S. Gill, University of Brighton, UK
Gillian Hayes, UC Irvine, USA
Kostas Karpouzis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
James Katz, Boston University, USA
Rich Ling, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Patti Maes, MIT Media Laboratory, USA
Tom Martin, Virginia Tech, USA
Friedemann Mattern, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
John McCarthy, University College Cork, Ireland
José M. Noguera, University of Jaen, Spain
Jong Hyuk Park, Seoul National University of Science and Technology (SeoulTech), Korea
Francesco Piccialli, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy
Reza Rawassizadeh, Dartmouth College, USA
Enrico Rukzio, Ulm University, Germany
Boon-Chong Seet, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Elhadi M. Shakshuki, Acadia University, Canada
Phil Stenton, BBC R&D, UK
Chia-Wen Tsai, Ming Chuan University, Taiwan
Jean Vanderdonckt, LSM, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Bieke Zaman, Meaningful Interactions Lab (Mintlab), KU Leuven, Belgium
What are academic outsiders meant to think when faced with such a large list of people yet also evidence that none of them appear to be reading their own journal? Does editorship of a scientific journal mean anything, or is this just like the Chinese papers – another way to pad resumés with fake work?
We may be tempted for a moment to think that as the papers were after all retracted, perhaps at least some of them are checking? But putting aside for a moment that an editor is meant to do editing work before publishing, from a quick flick through their most recent papers, we can see that nonsensical and irrelevant work is still getting through. For example:
- “Analysis of investment effect in Xinjiang from the perspective of nontraditional security“, which has nothing to do with personal computing. Instead it’s about China’s efforts to crack down on the ethnic Muslim population in Xinjiang. Abstract: “Terrorism poses a huge threat to economic development. Based on the data of terrorist activities provided by the Global Terrorism Database, this paper analyzes the temporal and spatial characteristics of terrorist activities in Xinjiang”. Amusingly, one of the author’s affiliations is literally stated as the “Research Center On Fictitious Economy and Data Science”.
- “Synergic deep learning model-based automated detection and classification of brain intracranial hemorrhage images in wearable networks“, which briefly mentions “wearable technology products” (e.g. Apple Watch) before going on to talk about automatically classifying CT scans in hospitals. The latter has nothing to do with the former.
Perhaps inevitably, this journal has also published “Can the crowd judge truthfulness? A longitudinal study on recent misinformation about COVID-19“. This is one of a series of studies that asks pay-per-task workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (defined as “the crowd”) to answer questions about Covid and U.S. politics. Their answers are then compared to the “ground truth” of “expert judgements” found on … Politifact (see chart below). As well as being irrelevant to the journal, this exemplar of good science had a sample size of just 10 survey takers despite requiring a team of nine academics and support “by a Facebook Research award, by the Australian Research Council, by a MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives Seed Fund and by the project HEaD – Higher Education and Development – (Region Friuli – Venezia Giulia)”. The worthlessness of their effort is, naturally, used as a justification for doing it again in another paper – “having a single statement evaluated by 10 distinct workers only does not guarantee a strong statistical power, and thus an experiment with a larger worker sample might be required to draw definitive conclusions”.
Root causes
The goal of a scientific journal is, theoretically, to communicate new scientific discoveries. The goal of peer review is to create quality through having people (and especially competitors) carefully check a piece of work. And rightly so – many fields rely heavily on peer review of various kinds, including my own field of software engineering. We do it because it finds lots of mistakes.
Given these goals, why does Springer tolerate the existence of journals within their fold that repeatedly publish auto-generated or irrelevant articles? Put simply, because they can. Journals like these aren’t really read by normal people looking for knowledge. Their customers are universities that need a way to define what success means in a planned reputation economy. Their function has been changing – no longer communication but, rather, being a source of artificial scarcity useful for establishing substitute price-like signals such as h-indexes and impact factors, which serve to bolster the reputations and credentials of academics and institutions.
This need can result in absurd outcomes. After a long campaign to make publishing open access (i.e., to allow taxpayers to read the articles they’ve already funded) – to its credit largely by scientists themselves – even that giant of science publishing Nature has announced that it will finally allow open access to its articles. The catch? Scientists have to pay them $10,000 for the privilege of their own work being made available as a PDF download. In the upside down world of science, publishers can demand scientists pay them for doing little beyond picking the coolest sounding claims. The actual review of the article will still be done by volunteer peer reviewers. Yet some of them will pay because the money comes from the public via Government funding of research, and because being published in Nature is a career-defining highlight. In the absence of genuine market economics tying research to utility, how else are they meant to rank themselves?
Meanwhile, peer review seems to have become a mere rubber stamp. The label can well mean a genuinely serious and critical review by professionals was done, but it might also mean nothing at all, and it’s not obvious how anyone is meant to quickly determine which it is. The steady decay of science into random claim generation is the inevitable consequence.
The author wishes to thank Will Jones and MTF for their careful peer review.
Mike Hearn is a former Google software engineer and author of this code review of Neil Ferguson’s pandemic modelling.
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Looks like they have a good career ahead of them advising SAGE, the CDC, or Greta Thunberg.
Green hypocrisy hurts the poorest
https://unherd.com/2022/02/green-hypocrisy-hurts-the-poorest/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=9f42731ecd
The West’s war on energy is crippling Africa
BY JOEL KOTKIN
Don’t get complacent. Let’s keep getting the message out with our friendly resistance.
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‘rook how many papers I lote, now give me that vely lesponsiber job so I can indoctlinate your Blitish youth about the grories of China’
Of course, writing it in this way is merely for dramatic effect, not to offend the good Chinese in China and across the world.
It is meant as a criticism of the very obvious strategy of the Chinese ruling party to spread Communist ideology, a soft invasion.
*EDIT and it isn’t restricted to China, of course. ICL is just as guilty.
Have you seen some of the product reviews on Amazon?
But if you point out they are very clumsy ‘Chinglish’ your own review is blocked.
I believe you misspelled ‘the grolies of China’.
The real concern should be that this is the tip of a mega iceberg in supposed science.
Ferguson et Al are 110% certain that this is not the case..
Day-job hat on here, I was involved in running a student programming competition last year where we asked them to create automated celebrity gossip content by scraping headlines, content and images from existing[*] sources, performing sentiment analysis, and stitching it back together with custom or open source language generators.
Over the course of a long weekend, most teams were able to produce something that churned out superficially plausible looking stories. Sure, there were some absolute “nonsensical” howlers in there, and we had a good laugh at those. But it wouldn’t have taken much more training to weed out the worst of the non sequiturs comparing apples to boob jobs.
So I’m not at all surprised to see this being applied to publishing “academic” papers, given the perverse incentives now on offer to churn out sheer quantity over any sort of quality.
[*] Note that I don’t say “real”.
[UPDATE] https://retractionwatch.com does a great job of tracking the seedier side of science and academia. Be warned that you might not like some of the recent retractions and challenges concerning ivermectin, but that’s rather the point of science: the more you’re inclined to believe something, the harder you should challenge it.
Who remembers the Random Bullshit Generator?
(ps. It’s now called “the media”)
It was only viable until ‘news’ morphed into bullshit, followed shortly by ‘government announcements’.
Science only exists because it’s more often wrong than right. Otherwise, there would be no need for experiments, one would simply hypothesise, then publish.
From billwoods at Off Guardian:
I’m having trouble picking the best one of 3 here:
Breathing too much
Shaking duvets
Whistles
It’s funny but also incredibly sinister, especially the refs whistle one as it specifically says ignore the link to vaccination. It’s really quite chilling to know these people exist and will stop at nothing to spread their propaganda.
It’s Living that is the problem. If you go in living for too long, eventually your heart just stops.
Solution?
Kill yourself early?
Just keep getting your boosters.
The’ve already got that covered.
The problem is clearly possessing a body of some sort. But we have a two-fold solution. Current mass experimental medical interventions are causing infertility and death. This stops reincarnation and starts decarnation.
Hold on a sec, I’ll whip up an ’emergency vaccine’
Authorised.
Don’t have a heart. Many people have proved you can get to very lofty positions without one. In fact in certain quarters it appears to be a necessary qualification for the job. An acceptable alternative is to have one made of stone.
As an aside, I run several web sites under a different name…. As the WebMaster, I track incomming connections to find out which sites are linking to mine – they are likely to be covering items which are of interest to me.
Over the last year or two I have noticed odd connections coming into my sites. I get a connection from an odd random address, look it up, and find that it is a jumble of random text with my web-site adress embeded in it. And someone, or something. has clicked on that link.
I suspect that this is some kind of scam for raising the Google ranking of sites – people can pay money to get such a rise – but I can’t fathom out how it works…..
On the face of it, that would improve the ranking of YOUR sites.
That used to be the case and gave rise to the phenomenon of link spamming in comments, but I seem to recall that the Chocolate Factory changed their algorithms to penalise that method of site promotion.
I want to thank Mike for giving me the chance to review this and I think it is an impressive, well researched, significant article with no obvious factual errors. That doesn’t mean I agree with his conclusions. Peer review could be greatly improved but it is far from useless.
I don’t think of peer review as a guarantee of quality research but the chances of it being done well are good enough to make it an important sign of a paper worth taking seriously. A lot depends on the journal. If you are asked to do a peer review for Nature you tend to take it seriously. There are, of course, other controls. After papers are published they continue to be subject to critical comment and, as we all know, are sometimes retracted. On the other side if a paper has not been reviewed then it might be high quality but it merits even more scepticism.
“Climate change” and the Climategate emails demonstrate clearly that peer review no longer works and is now in many cases “pal review”. Online review is surely the way forward.
Climategate is the result of quoting emails out of context and misunderstanding them. I have lost count of the enquiries that have cleared the participants. See https://skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm
This page also discusses specific quotes that are supposed to be damning. E.g.
The most quoted email is from Phil Jones discussing paleo-data used to reconstruct past temperatures (emphasis mine):
“Mike’s Nature trick” refers to a technique (aka “trick of the trade”) used in a paper published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann (Mann 1998). The “trick” is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.
The most common misconception regarding this email is the assumption that “decline” refers to declining temperatures. It actually refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960. This is known as the “divergence problem” where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as 1995, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone’s email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature
The problem with Michael Mann’s trick is that he devised a technique for correlating temperature records with tree rings pre-1960 which gave him the result he wanted (consistent low temperatures, eliminating the medieval warm period); but he then insisted that the same technique can no longer be trusted post-1960, because the technique fails to generate temperatures corresponding to post-1960 thermometer measurements.
Can you not see the problem with this? If Mann’s technique doesn’t work against accurate temperature records from recent decades, then it has no credibility at all when used to infer temperatures in the pre-thermometer age.
His insistence that temperatures were uniformly low in the pre-industrial age has no credibility. It goes against all the anecdotal and archaeological evidence from medieval times which suggested warmer temperatures. And with that goes all evidence that modern temperatures are a unique aberration.
Mann’s hokey stick only ‘demonstrated’ the MWP didn’t occur in North America, the evidence for it in Europe is irrefutable.
Even were that the case, it demonstrates that not only can mankind exist in higher temperatures, it flourishes. Most of Europe’s Cathedrals were built during that period, which was only possible because favourable growing seasons released men from subsistence survival and allowed them to seek gainful employment building said Cathedrals.
It’s also demonstrable that during every warm period in history, mankind has progressed with entire societies like the Minoan and Roman failing as temperatures fell.
Where would mankind be today were we all enjoying the temperatures the Romans were.
It’s also food for thought that as many predict a cooling planet over the next few hundred years, global society seems to be falling apart.
His “trick” may or may not be sound. The point is that nothing was being hidden. The e-mail did not expose any kind of fraud or conspiracy. The technique was well-known and there was no reason to suppose he was going to pretend he wasn’t using it.
If you don’t like it, there are many other papers now that have superseded Mann’s papers and come to similar conclusions.
How did I know that link was to skepticalscience?
The subject under discussion is fraudulent scientific practices and right on cue you begin posting John Cook’s nonsense.
“Nothing was being hidden”
The creator of Hockey Stick temperature graph used in the 2001 IPCC report was American Professor Michael Mann; whereas the creator of the temperature charts used in previous IPCC reports, which showed the MWP and Little Ice Age, was Canadian scientist Dr.Tim Ball. Following the Climatgate scandal of 2009, where Mann was shown to be manipulating research, Ball said Mann should be locked up for misrepresenting data.
Mann sued Ball for libel. The case dragged on for eight years, cost millions of dollars, took a toll on 80 year old Dr Ball’s health and finally concluded on 22th August 2019. Only two outcomes were possible. The court would vindicate Professor Mann’s scientific findings, and Dr Ball would be found guilty of libel and be made to pay all the costs plus damages; or Dr. Ball had correctly stated that Professor Mann had manipulated data and Mann would be instructed to pay Ball’s costs.
Shorty after the Supreme Court of British Columbia issued its ruling, Dr Ball emailed the following message to Anthony Watts of the ‘What’s Up With That?’ website:
“Hi Anthony, Michael Mann’s case against me was dismissed this morning by the BC Supreme Court and they awarded me [court] costs. Tim Ball.”
Mann lost the case because he consistently refused to comply with the court direction to hand over the data he used to compile the disputed Hockey Stick graph – which has been relied upon by the UN’s IPCC and western governments as crucial evidence for the science of ‘man-made global warming.’
Real scientific advancement requires open access to data sets, so that sceptics (who play a vital role in science) can see if a proposed theory is based on accurate data using reproducible processes. Because Mann has consistently refused to reveal all his data sources, and thus render it open to critical analysis, his findings, and the resultant graph, remain unproven – and that isn’t how science is supposed to work.
There are of course other descriptions of why the case was dismissed. But in any case it has little to do with the climategate e-mails.
LOL
You blew it the moment you mentioned skepticalscience.
A blog, dressed as a scientific website, dreamed up by a professional cartoonist who enjoys dressing as a Nazi, and who concocted a “study” demonstrating 97% of scientists agreed that mankind was causing climate change, when on proper analysis the number was 0.3%.
You could try addressing the content of what was written.
I did:
“The subject under discussion is fraudulent scientific practices and right on cue you begin posting John Cook’s nonsense.”
I mean the content of the material in my link. It is not as though John Cook was the only person making these points.
Am I allowed to say bollox on here?
All I can see here is that MTF has simply quoted from ( the link to )
a known Climate Change Propaganda website – a forerunner of the odious fact checkers. I have kept a full copy of the climate gate emails and a significant number cannot be explained by anything other than conspiracy.
I am sure you know that there are many other people and groups making similar points – including of course Steve Mosher who at the time was a sceptic and was the person who originally selected which e-mails would be most damaging.
Perhaps you could provide a couple of examples of emails that cannot be explained by anything other than conspiracy?
I think the email in question is actually this one:
i.e. they are stating clearly that they will manipulate the peer review process to keep dissenting voices out.
There’s a long discussion of the context surrounding the ClimateGate emails here. They argue quite persuasively that the emails weren’t really taken out of context. For example, in this email Michael Mann states quite clearly that he has data that he wants suppressed in order to stop people who disagree with his over-arching aims:
Thanks for that – lots of reading there.
I have always mistrusted Ross McKitrick since he demonstrated an amazing lack of understanding of averages for someone with his credentials. However, I will play the ball not the man and look at the discussion in detail.
Is there anything involving medical research on this earth which has not now been corrupted by Fauci and GAVI?
That may have been the case back in the mists of time, but these days peer review is little more than a circle jerk. It is also a highly effective way of protecting your academic turf and all that goes with it by preventing competing theories and perspectives from ever reaching the light of day, irrespective of their potential validity.
‘A thick Lynne Truss could cock up in Russia’
Oooops!!!! sorry that is a genuine paper wot was rit in January
‘A pentangular study of the enforcement of Covid 19 restrictions in Wales, with particular referwnce to bouncy castles’, by Yu Hoo Annie..
Or
A pentangular study of bouncy castles with particular reference to the enforcement of Covid 19 restrictions in Wales
by WHO flung dung
That ‘science’ is broken irreparably will not surprise readers here. But this is arguably the comedy end of the spectrum. “Ooh, look, a journal approved and printed word soup from the CCP. How funny that all these editors and clever profs didn’t notice, just waved it through. Not to worry, I don’t suppose many deaths were occasioned by these multiple derelictions of duty.”
However… Robert F Kennedy’s book The Real Anthony Fauci lays out in great detail the eye-poppingly corrupt interaction between academia and big pharma. If you want to observe this truth exemplified in just one early section of the book, in fact in one devastating phone call transcript look at Chapter One Part III Ivermectin (see pages 46-52) in which the transcript of a phone call between Dr Tess Lawrie and Liverpool Uni virologist & WHO researcher Andrew Hill is reported. Just read the four page transcript.
You may think that Andrew Hill’s explanation of being ‘in a tricky situation’ is an extraordinary statement. Its inappropriate banality is breathtaking.
How many thousands more ‘scientists’ have found themselves in such ‘tricky situations’ in the last 2 years? Have these ‘tricky situations’ resulted in thousands of deaths?
Almost certainly.
I’m reading Kennedy’s book at the moment. It’s grim stuff, and the reactions to the snippets I read aloud to Mrs Dee only confirm that they’ve Killed Science.
What happened to ‘peer review’?
Just a guess: Bought out by Gates (like everything else to do with medical science and regulation)?
I’m surprised that Billy didn’t buy all copies of the RFK Jr. book and have some nazis burn them for him.
It’s just great to see real Progress in action, and the Typewriting Chimps can now return to their true vocation of writing, inter alia, Barbara Cartland bodice-rippers, politicians’ speeches and Imperial predictions.
RIP Academia.
Academia is a bad joke. Literally.
Chinese fake papers are only pointing out the vacuity of much of academic research. In this they are merely facetious dry humour.
When truth seeking gives way to the three Ps: politicisation, political correctness, and projection, this is the logical outcome. Money making and identity politics are not conducive to objectivity and rigour either.
Peter James Thomas is not only the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Nature journal, among other things, he is also the creative director of Medicine Unboxed.
This is a quote from handwiki.org that tells of the eureka moment that led to the setting up of this “not-for-profit”:
What a word salad of total BS.
Imagine you went to your local garage to get new brake pads fitted on your car. You tell the garage owner what you want, and he announces to you that his staff have enough technical expertise to fit the correct brake pads on your car, and that they have the ethical judgement to realise the pads they fit will have to be capable of stopping the vehicle as and when the driver wants it to stop.
The owner then goes on to tell you that his staff understands the car experience; they know that you’ll want your vehicle back in working order. Then he informs you that his staff also have enough empathy to not bash in the side panels on your vehicle, or smear the interior with grease, as they fit the new brakes.
The owner then finishes off by telling you that the people that will be working on your car are all professional mechanical engineers, and, for good measure, he also informs you that they are wise.
I think that any reasonable motorist would be very suspicious of this garage owner, and by implication, his staff. And go looking elsewhere to get their vehicle serviced.
As regards not-for-profits like Medicine Unboxed and Springer Nature journal, Left-wing rags like the Guardian and BBC latch onto the inane research articles published in them, and use them to spin BS to their gullible readers and viewers. What better way to build-up trust in Big Pharma than for the likes of the Guardian to publish quasi medical articles with links to the Springer Nature journal?
Search Google for this journal and the top result is this:
“Springer Nature is the publisher of the world’s most influential journals and a pioneer in the field of open research. … Across our three platforms we publish thousands of articles that help the research community to advance discovery for all of us”.
The Guardian can spin fatuous yarns to its slackjawed readers with nuggets of gold like this:
And link it to the above search result to back up their lying proselytising.
When the slackjawed Guardian readers are then advised to run along and get their umpteen COVID-19 booster shots, they do so on the recommendation of the right-on Guardian with the back-up of the worlds’ most prestigious journal, and the belief they are doing their bit for the arts and humanities. For the gullible, the arts and humanities makes the acceptance of the COVID-19 booster shots a full-on virtue signalling event – what Guardian reader or BBC viewer would not see themselves as highly gifted creative types and protectors of all that is good and beautiful?
As for Peter James Thomas, when you see a middle-aged man with a teenybopper haircut be very careful of his ethics. When a man this age can’t see that a teenybopper haircut makes him look a fool, then he probably is a fool. As for non-profits, they are most likely the most profitable businesses anyone could start. Gates and Soros pump billions into them each year.
Thanks for that, Fireweasel – you brightened tonight’s imprisonment Downunder!
(No restaurants or entertainment venues for the wicked ones …)
Unless you’re halfway through life and have a teenybopper haircut. This haircut automatically denotes the wearer to have had all the gene therapy shots and booster backups.
And that you are a big fan of Bill Gates, and eternally grateful to Gates for being there to give you financial and societal status when your talent could not.
Some of those papers make more sense than a Chris Whitty slide show.
As the holder of a PhD in heterogeneous execution body scheduling and VR technology, I find this article extremely insulting.
Pantocratic syllogism refractologies synchopate covid-19 cisgender strategies!
You have confirmed what I have long suspected.
Lol! (Lollard oralities…. you get the picture ;-))
There are two ways to expose bullshit, by not publishing it in the first place or by retracting it if it does get published, if it does get published then retracted, good journals would not use those reviewers again.In that manner useless journals are exposed and relegated.
I’ve peer reviewed many articles in my time, and I took it seriously, but these examples are so egregiously ridiculous, the only right reaction is to put the journal and its editor on the shit list. Hell’s bells guys in what world would Personal and Ubiquitous Computing be regarded as a trusted journal? Hence this article’s title is suspect it does not matter if the publisher of a rubbish journal retracts 24 or 10000 Scientific Papers for Being “Nonsensical”, it would arguably matter if they do not retract the rubbish, the journal is already on the shit list for publishing such rubbish. But by retracting, they show a willingness to raise their game, the best journals are the best because of their willingness to expose bullshit.
I wouldn’t be too sure that they’re fake. I have seem many MSc dissertations that read along the same lines.
Plenty of government policy documents read much the same.
The way this works is that some new postdoc or postgrad, without much experience, will receive a flattering e-mail invitation to an editorial committee of an “up-and-coming journal”. Many accept and then the ‘journal’ never troubles them again. There is little to no actual editorial process or peer review. It’s just a list of some minor, early-career academics that were easily buttered up by unsolicited e-mail but which carries the name and reputation of their host institutions.
In the 1990s a parallel phenomenon of “fake conferences” started up but it was entirely motivated by people wanting to fill empty hotels. They’d find a hot-topic like bird-flu, cold-fusion, AI or graphene, put together an ‘organising committee’ sucker list as above, and then advertise the conference to sell hotel rooms. These things still exist with variations on a theme:
https://www.technologynetworks.com/tn/articles/inside-a-fake-conference-a-journey-into-predatory-science-321619
Then again peer review doesn’t work because few people attempt to reproduce the work as part of the review process. Peer review, even when done by capable scientists is largely a test of plausibility. It is merely a ‘sniff test’.
Even if they had the time and resources, there’s the so-called reproducibility crisis:
“More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a
If that wasn’t enough there’s the Bogdanov affair, the Sokal affair etc. etc.
Scientists are just human beings and you will find amongst them, the full spectrum of human failings including liars, frauds, egotists and thick layers of self-importance and self-delusion. You won’t find it in everyone or even in some people all the time but the failings are there as in any other profession like lawyers or airline pilots.
Science isn’t dead but it is heavily compromised. The emergence of the “noble liars” as Bret Weinstein has called them is just the latest spasm in the corpus, if you pardon the pun.
Great comment! Interesting to hear how this process works. Thank you for the article link.
Does this include all the trash which the UN climate lies are based?
I tried looking at the research of Alan Chamberlain, University of Nottingham (the first UK academic on the list) (https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/computerscience/people/alan.chamberlain). Lots of big research fumding but very few of the links work, he often is not named on those that do, and the titles make no more sense than the above papers.
Yes, good point. I should probably stress this more in these articles – the auto-generated papers get through at such high rates because there are so many papers written (presumably) by real Western academics that are meandering nonsensical gibberish as well. The abstract to the first paper of the guy you just linked (so, first paper of first UK editor) says:
This reads like a joke paper, or something that might be auto-generated, even though it’s probably not (the grammar here is OK). But what has this got to do with computer science? What does studying the “unremarkable” even mean? Scientific research is ultimately meant to be applied by people outside the academy but who on earth would read this abstract and then think, this is a paper I simply must purchase?
‘Peer Review’ – Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet.
“Peer review to the public is portrayed as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller, but we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong”
Big Pharma has immense resources to game the system. Big Pharma creates its own journals, with editorial teams and ‘peer reviewers’ to push their products. Naive real researchers may be encouraged to publish in the same journals to give them greater credence.