Science gets its own Sokal hoax?

[Voyager]

@dasmoocher

My adviser was a section editor of a decent journal. I would be instructed to email our manuscripts to his colleagues (such as previous co-authors/collaborators) in similar positions with other journals instead of submitting to the journal website itself. When I asked why, he said they also send their manuscripts to him directly and because “it’s quicker and easier” to get it accepted. It was about cherry-picking soft reviewers for each other–maybe two friendly reviewers instead of three impartial ones.

Humph. My first reaction is - how do they track submissions if some don’t go through the website? Short circuiting the process makes it obvious.

As bullshit as this is, I’ve reviewed papers and the shit that gets rejected outright can be atrocious. My first real review was a total softball–text descriptions of figures didn’t actually match the figures, 1ml of a 2x master mix solution diluted in 5ml, misused statistical tests…unbelievably sloppy manuscript.

I saw one from Russia explaining what a microprocessor is - five years ago.

[Voyager]

@Hector_St_Clare

I’ve only reviewed one paper (I just finished my graduate degree last May) but it was a hell of a paper. It was so terrible I wondered if it was a joke. It read like something that two not particularly bright college students in a freshman biology class thought up as a class project after too many bong hits.

Someone was starting you off easy.

[dasmoocher]

@Voyager

Humph. My first reaction is - how do they track submissions if some don’t go through the website? Short circuiting the process makes it obvious.

Yeah, I don’t know. I suspect it might have been a way of getting everybody on board and all the reviews in row before making the formal submission. Now that you mention it and I think about, this might explain how a second multiple submission got published in four weeks.

Scientific logrolling, if you will.

I thought this lab was shady about the science, and publication was the goal.

It was all about quantity, not quality. If they were willing to cheat* on actually doing the science, I don’t think there was much qualms about the publication process.

*And since I know some might be interested in what I consider cheating on the science, one small example:

We worked with rare cancer tumors and once I mentioned I wished I had at least three samples of one particular tumor type instead of two so I could get a legitimate mean and SD. A postdoc then said “What are you talking about? You run the sample in three wells.” This was when I realized some weren’t running multiple samples but measuring the same sample multiple times and reporting that as replication–using technical replicates as biological replicates but saying they were biological in the papers.

I got lots more. That example could be chalked up to ignorance, but in other examples, I suspected outright fraud.

[Voyager]

@dasmoocher

Yeah, I don’t know. I suspect it might have been a way of getting everybody on board and all the reviews in row before making the formal submission. Now that you mention it and I think about, this might explain how a second multiple submission got published in four weeks.

Scientific logrolling, if you will.

I blame the editor in chief. Lots of papers by one person not using the process should be a warning sign. Ditto for same reviewers. Ditto for a consistently short review process.

Anyhow, enough war stories. I wonder if ITR is still so outraged.

[wolfpup]

@John_Mace

And the other thing we should keep in mind is that nobody who knows science is going to say that the peer review system is perfect. But it’s better than the alternative, which is either folk science or The Bible.

Don’t forget the most reliable authoritative source of scientific information we have today: Internet blogs. Especially the ones that are bereft of relevant citations and are peppered with grammatical and spelling mistakes, often accompanied by an admirably unrestrained copious application of exclamation marks so that the attention of the scientific readership is appropriately drawn to the inescapable conclusions.