The point of the hoax is not that it’s possible to fake data and get it published. I think everyone in academia would have agreed to that before this particular hoax.
The point is that journals in the fields they label “grievance studies” will accept ludicrous conclusions, as long as those conclusions agree with the left-wing consensus that sexism, rape culture, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, ableism, &c… &c… are everywhere.
Start with that now-famous paper about dog humping. Author “Helen Wilson” purported to have counted up thousands of instances of dogs humping each other, and based on that data, to “uncover emergent assumptions about gender, race and sexuality”. It addressed questions such as “Do dogs suffer oppression based on (perceived) gender?”. It claims to “apply Black feminist criminology categories”. All of this is in the abstract. Can we agree that this is plainly ludicrous? That in earlier times, no academic would have taken such a thing seriously, and that such stuff only gets published today because academics are required to take seriously any claims about oppression as long as the correct groups are claiming to be oppressed?
The thing is, though, as I said, that the authors carefully framed the PR about their hoax reveal to portray their faked conclusions as obviously “ludicrous”, when the actual submissions were designed to appear much more plausible.
Well, it’s not so plain if you look at the abstract itself, which claims to
That sounds to me as though the authors are investigating how human prejudices about gender, race and sexuality might affect human reactions to canine sexual behavior and consequent human behavior towards dogs. Which is not in fact inherently “ludicrous” as a subject of investigation, even though the actual article and its alleged data were of course completely fake.
The authors, and you, are cherry-picking the silliest-sounding snippets from this carefully faked research and waving them around out of context to try to make it seem as though no reasonable person could ever have fallen for that nonsense. But as I said, it is pretty easy to make almost any research item sound silly with cherry-picked snippets and paraphrases taken out of context.
Ha! If you don’t think that academics in “earlier times” ever took seriously research claims that ultimately did not stand up to scrutiny, largely due to the influence of contemporary trends, “hot topics” and prejudices, you definitely haven’t read much research from “earlier times”.
There was also a paper that was basically ‘Mein Kampf’ with the details changed.
This is a specific problem with ‘studies’ programs that lack any kind of scientific rigor at all. The reason these fake papers filled with nonsense words and bizarre claims got through peer review is that they are not exceptional - a lot of the ‘legitimate’ papers are just as bizarre and stupid.
The fact that the reviewers could not distinguish ridiculous fake papers from real ones should give you a big hint as to the quality of the ‘real’ papers in some of these fields. They are little more than radical political activism masquerading as serious scholarship.
In real sciences, you can get away with faking data, because the reviewers can’t know the data was faked. But if you write a paper that says gravity is an illusion foisted on us by the patriarchy, or that Newton’s law is false because it was ‘invented’ by a white male or some other rubbish, your submission will result in little more than a good laugh among the reviewers.
You can usually smell a bullshit paper by the jargon and thick language it uses. I once worked with a guy who would never say something in five words if he could figure out a way to say it in twenty. If you asked him to look over something, he’d say “Upon perusal of your submission, and with due consideration to its contents and meaning, I have to say that I am inclined to believe that the contents are correct.” And I’d say, “So… you read it and agree?” This person was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he compensated by speaking in circles and trying to baffle you with his ‘erudite’ speech. He didn’t fool anyone.
There are a lot of papers in the ‘studies’ fields that look like he could have written them.
I guess we just have to agree to disagree about this. It’s an article about dogs humping each other, dressed up in a bunch of ten-dollar words, and framed on the assumption that gender and sexuality must be the important thing in people’s reactions. I think the idea of any academic spending months on such a topic is ludicrous.
It raises the question, is there any topic that such journals wouldn’t take seriously, as long as gender, race, and/or queer theory were involved somehow? If dog-humping is a good topic for peer-reveiwed research, maybe also squirrels’ tendency to eat trash?
Because the same journal published an article on that topic as well:
Abstract
Eastern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), reddish-brown tree squirrels native to the eastern and southeastern United States, were introduced to and now thrive in suburban/urban California. As a result, many residents in the greater Los Angeles region are grappling with living amongst tree squirrels, particularly because the state’s native western gray squirrel (Sciurus griseus) is less tolerant of human beings and, as a result, has historically been absent from most sections of the greater Los Angeles area. ‘Easties,’ as they are colloquially referred to in the popular press, are willing to feed on trash and have an ‘appetite for everything.’ Given that the shift in tree squirrel demographics is a relatively recent phenomenon, this case presents a unique opportunity to question and re-theorize the ontological given of ‘otherness’ that manifests, in part, through a politics whereby animal food choices ‘[come] to stand in for both compliance and resistance to the dominant forces in [human] culture’. I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this research for the fields of animal geography and feminist geography.
And this one was not a hoax.
Or then again, maybe it was a hoax. How exactly is anyone supposed to tell the difference between real and phony articles in these journals?
So your saying you dont check sources? You dont ask how they did their research? You dont go “ok, now just HOW did you do this study?”. What I have seen is a researcher is supposed to go into careful detail about how they did their study (ex. I asked 50 people who’s name begins with the letter S what they felt about …). And then they are to detail where they found those 50 people and their age and so on and all so the research can be replicated. But you dont do that?
I dont know much about writing papers except about 10 years ago I helped my wife write her masters thesis and I had to learn what APA style was all about. But even then we had to be pretty careful about citing sources and detailing how she did her research. Although I will admit we BS’ed some things.
Again, that’s a carefully manipulated snippet description of a paper that was deliberately presented to appear as something very different.
Again, you seem to be falling for the authors’ schtick of portraying their fake topic in the most obviously absurd way possible after they revealed the hoax. It doesn’t really prove anything except their adeptness at spin.
Well, I can’t tell off the top of my head if that quoted abstract is a hoax. But then, I can’t tell off the top of my head whether this is a hoax abstract either:
It seems legit to me because I’ve seen a lot of similar writings and I’m familiar with the general setting of the field and the journal. But if a clever fraudster wrote something carefully crafted using the same jargon that they knew wasn’t true, that wouldn’t be immediately obvious to me.
Anyway, I don’t see why you’re so indignant at the very notion that a researcher is looking at the language used in popular news media and finding that negative rhetoric used about a newly invasive squirrel species has a lot of semantic overlap with negative rhetoric used about, say, human immigrants.
I mean, didn’t we just spend a huge chunk of a concurrent thread analyzing whether negative rhetoric used by a Congresswoman about pro-Israel political donors has a lot of semantic overlap with negative rhetoric traditionally used by anti-Semites? Why would you automatically assume that such issues must be unworthy of serious study?
If it takes multiple PhD’s almost a full year to make a bogus paper appear legitimate, doesn’t that say good things about the rigor of academic journals?
“Sources” isn’t really the right word for a science paper. I spot-check references, as sometimes people get things crossed in their reference management software.
As for “how did you do this study?”, I don’t ask that. They’re just supposed to include it. It doesn’t always end up in the main body of the paper; it’s common to have a separate file of supporting or supplemental information available on the journal website. I review this. Yes, it should be sufficiently detailed so that someone can replicate the experiment. I spent a lot of time in lab following procedures that other folks had previously published.
James O’Keefe, if he had decided to pursue a [del]career in[/del] vendetta against academia, instead of public policy?
Also, didn’t we have a Doper here a couple of years ago, who linked to a similar sting against scientific journals, the gist of which was scientific knowledge and scientific consensus are basically bullshit put forward to shove a liberal agenda down our throats-type bunkum?
“Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography” is a “prestigious journal”? What is Stossel smoking? Of course the makers of the study deserve some comendation for putting lesser publications to deserved shame, but I can see (based on a lot of replies) that another intention is clear by the likes of Stossel, to seed doubts on all science that can be inconvenient.
Not all is the same in journals, Gender and Society, ranked as a top journal in both Women’s Studies and Sociology by the Thomson Scientific Journal Citation Reports, has an impact factor of 2.400, Gender, Place & Culture has 1.180
These academics did spend months on exactly that topic. Right?
I think it’s hilarious that there are people here telling people in this thread, who actually review papers submitted to journals, that they’re doing it wrong. “Hey, you should check the sources.” “Don’t forget to look at methodology.”
Maybe some right-winger should try and create a hoax paper in favor of race realism or patriarchy and try and get it published in some climate denial journal or something.
First you should understand the reviewing papers is something most people do out of the goodness of their heart so they don’t have time to check and read every reference. Also there are page limits so there is a limit to how detailed the methods can be. Fortunately, now that everything is on line you can include supplemental methods that are as long as they want. Given that the purpose of the masters thesis is to prove the research ability of the student I would assume that they are scrutinized a good deal more than a journal publication. The same way an engineering student’s homework would be scrutinized more than a supervisor might scrutinize the report of a career engineer.
I do statistical reviews which generally means that I look through the statistical tests that they say they used to see if they are appropriate, and see if they claims they make are supported by their statistics. If there are any possible biases that they overlooked I will point them out and ask for clarification. I don’t actually reanalyze any of their data so unless there is a obvious mistake I won’t catch it if they didn’t do the test they said they did or did the statistical test wrong.
The biological reviewers will generally access the scientific significance and novelty of the result to determine whether its worthy of a particular journal, will offer any alternative explanations for the observed results that might change the conclusions of the paper, also they may ask who their findings tie into other findings in the literature, and for cases where it contradicts other studies ask why they think that might be true. But again they don’t check every last reference, although they might suggest references (often the reviewers own work) that should be added.
A reviewer doesn’t try to duplicate or recreate everything the author is supposed to have done.
Your wife was a student whose worked was being scrutinized closely to ensure she was learning how to do her work. Once she’s no longer a student, she won’t have someone overseeing her so closely. She’s supposed to oversee herself.
None of this, of course, is to claim that bad research doesn’t sometimes get published, in every field. Even a super-prestigious science journal like Nature has had retractions of some of its papers due to doubts about their results. And minor journals in relatively small fields are naturally going to be even more vulnerable to gatekeeping errors.
But I think it’s a dangerous trend to try to critique a journal or a field by engaging in deliberate academic fraud, or even by simply jeering at ludicrous paraphrases and cherry-picked snippets of its content in popular media. That kind of lazy ridicule is how we end up with, for instance, ignoramuses deriding serious medical-research animal studies as “rubbing bunny feet”.
If somebody thinks a published academic paper is defective in some way, they should read the entire paper, identify and describe what they consider to be its flaws, and get that detailed critique into publication, either in a letter to the editor of the journal or as some kind of review article in a different publication. Sitting around snickering because a paper uses words like “ontological” or “gendered”, or because some hoaxer or journalist managed to spin its subject matter as a catchy silly oversimplification like “rubbing bunny feet” or “feminist Mein Kampf”, isn’t actually doing anything to maintain or improve academic standards.
OK if I understand correctly at the time the hoax was called last summer, six months short of its planned duration, there had been 21 papers submitted, 9 had been flat out rejected, 4 had been advised to revise and resubmit, one was still under review, and seven had been accepted of which 4 published. And the hoax was called because readers and other publications were pointing out there was something wrong there, and had started asking questions which in turn made the journals turn around and ask questions of the putative authors. So that part of the publishing ecosystem in fact worked: the publication was made, the academic and lay communities looked at it, and enough said “Looks like BS to me” to make it stop.
Academic publication is supposed to put new ideas, findings or theories (while documenting the method by which these were arrived at or the sources from which they proceed) out there for* others* to learn of, evaluate, critique and put to the test. It is not the job of the journal editors or reviewers to be the ones who figure whether the writer has arrived at the “right answer”.
I know, I know – the point for the likes of Stossel is to point and laugh since ALL the papers should have been dismissed right upon sight because, of course, any right-thinking person should obviously consider them inherently ludicrous as a subject of investigation, to borrow Kimstu’s phrase. And of course, that if the Social Sciences are Not Quite Real Science, then “grievance studies” are just flat out BS that people are making up as they go along. So let’s ridicule them. It is playing a risky game because if you push in the direction of “defensive publishing” what you are going to be propitiating is a preference for orthodox or “safe” content (within whatever is the field’s “establishment” position).
BTW of the 9 flat out rejections, I can’t help but notice the title “Hegemonic Academic Bullying: The Ethics of Sokal-style Hoax Papers on Gender Studies”, which in hindsight is some mighty fine trolling.
Though to be fair to Sokal, his sting of Social Text was not exactly the same thing as we have here, since that was not a peer-reviewed research paper, it was an article handled by the editors in-house.
As far as I can see, no one has yet linked to the article actual written by the three hoaxers in Areo magazine. They make clear from the start that they are not attempting to show that academic scholarship in its entirety is bogus, only that a particular set of relatively small fields are.
We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.
I haven’t watched the Stossel video, but if he does claim that it applies to all academic research, then boo for him.
However, it’s linked in the article in the OP’s second link, and it’s where I got the link in my post #27 to the actual hoax papers that they submitted.
If I admit that there is some bullshit on the left, will you admit that it’s pretty small potatoes and has nowhere near the global impact as bullshit climate change denial or bullshit trickle-down economics on the right?