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‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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I started noticing this trend about 15 years ago. There was this point where I suddenly started receiving solicitation spam from pay to publish Chinese journals. It was obvious they didn’t know who I was or what my work consisted of. It was very easy to jump to the conclusion that this was a huge push on the part of China to get their national pub counts boosted, and on the part of a large number of academics who were totally just looking to get their papers in print.
Whenever I see a pub in a journal I don’t know, and I’m interested enough to bother, I’ll check the impact factor (imperfect but established) and the other papers published by the author(s).
I think I’ve paid to publish all of my papers to make them open access - I’d always build that into my budgets. But this is on a whole other level. I always think of this when a paper like the NYT compares Chinese to US science using publication counts.
There are brilliant Chinese scientists and research institutions, but there’s also a lot of gaming the system. We need a better quality metric for publications and papers.
The whole system is so messed up on multiple levels. You not only have to publish some result that is correct (true) but it also has to be positive (support your hypothesis) and sufficiently "important " to your field or else your whole career is at risk.
I'm posting this while running an experiment at 11pm on a Saturday night trying to collect data for a grant application. Of course I'm going to lose if I'm competing against people who just make shit up.
The publication or reproduction crises comes for a reason.
In my opinion, the flaws of the current system are well-documented and even understand to a degree. The actuall problem is to come up with a new system. This system has to be objectiv and fair and must measure the quality of scientists' work.