SYSTEMIC OR DISCRETE?

For years we were hearing about the replication crisis in the world of psychology; how so much accepted work in the field had never been properly peer reviewed and revealed itself as fraudulent. Then, back in the middle of the pandemic, while everyone was busy with other things, a team wrote a paper exposing a new phenomenon they’d uncovered in science publishing. 

In their paper, the team showed how the use of artificial intelligence and online thesaurus tools was being employed for academic fraud. They showed how careless use of these tools, the lack of editorial oversight, and a totally absent peer review mechanism, were all exposed by huge numbers of published papers offering silly and otherwise-unused convolutions of common phrases, things like 'counterfeit consciousness' in place of 'artificial intelligence.’ And once one of these errors was identified, the most straightforward searches suddenly delivered these anomalies plaguing entire journals. And, along with this tortured writing style, the team also commonly found the unacknowledged reuse of images and citations for non-existent works.

In 2022 and 2023, many more revelations came to light. Originally 511 retractions were announced from 16 academic journals for containing manipulated peer review. And then another 501 fraudulent papers were found published in 23 more journals. And by August of 2023 one publisher, Hindawi, was busily retracting almost 4,000 papers from its many science, math, and engineering journals, citing combinations of peer-review manipulation, inappropriate citation, discrepancies in scope, the availability of data and research described and, my favourite, incoherent, meaningless, and/or irrelevant content. Hindawi journals most impacted by fraud at that time included:

• Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience  [585 paper retractions]

• Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine  [459]

• Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing  [437]

• Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine  [423]

• Journal of Healthcare Engineering  [396]

• Security and Communication Networks  [241]

• Journal of Environmental and Public Health  [216]

• Mathematical Problems in Engineering  [210]

• Mobile Information Systems  [190]

• BioMed Research International  [142]

• Contrast Media & Molecular Imaging  [138]

• Disease Markers  [120]

• Scientific Programming  [84]

• Scanning  [46]

• Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity [45]

• Journal of Nanomaterials [42]

And then this week, The Wall Street Journal reported Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures. They covered the announcement that Wiley, the academic publishing company, was shuttering 19 science journals following 11,300 retractions.

Unlike some are suggesting, I don’t think this is indicative of the rot in academia or suggestive of the need for some kind of overhaul. My sense is that the above was frauds inventing fraudulent journals where they could freely engage in industrial scale fraud. This was not the system of academic publishing and peer review working as intended.

That said, simultaneous with this we are seeing a spate of folks, many high-profile, being outed for their flagrant plagiarism in documents as significant as their PhD dissertations. I also pointed out rampant plagiarism and self-plagiarism, in many books and articles, from a leading figure in the field I studied, which was dismissed by a whole range of folks as probably not something worth bothering people about. Too, at some point someone may read my own thesis and discover that an entire field and half a century of work has been built upon what amounts to an unverified rumour. So, you know, maybe the whole thing needs to experience a very significant overhaul.