Journals With High Rates of Suspicious Papers Flagged By Science-Integrity Startup (nature.com)
- Reference: 0175313197
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/10/24/0155247/journals-with-high-rates-of-suspicious-papers-flagged-by-science-integrity-startup
- Source link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03427-w?error=cookies_not_supported&code=e9e72bdd-0542-424a-a07a-d5cc40b2f3e0
> Which scientific publishers and journals are worst affected by fraudulent or dubious research papers -- and which have done least to clean up their portfolio? A technology start-up founded to help publishers spot potentially problematic papers says that it has some answers, and has shared its early findings with Nature. The science-integrity website [2]Argos , which was launched in September by Scitility, a technology firm headquartered in Sparks, Nevada, [3]gives papers a risk score on the basis of their authors' publication records , and on whether the paper heavily cites already-retracted research. A paper categorized as 'high risk' might have multiple authors whose other studies have been retracted for reasons related to misconduct, for example. Having a high score doesn't prove that a paper is low quality, but suggests that it is worth investigating.
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> Argos is one of a growing number of research-integrity tools that look for red flags in papers. These include the [4]Papermill Alarm , made by Clear Skies, and Signals, by Research Signals, both London-based firms. Because creators of such software sell their manuscript-screening tools to publishers, they are generally reluctant to name affected journals. But Argos, which is offering free accounts to individuals and fuller access to science-integrity sleuths and journalists, is the first to show public insights. "We wanted to build a piece of technology that was able to see hidden patterns and bring transparency to the industry," says Scitility co-founder Erik de Boer, who is based in Roosendaal, the Netherlands. By early October, Argos had flagged more than 40,000 high-risk and 180,000 medium-risk papers. It has also indexed more than 50,000 retracted papers.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~schwit1
[2] https://www.scitility.com/argos
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03427-w?error=cookies_not_supported&code=e9e72bdd-0542-424a-a07a-d5cc40b2f3e0
[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00733-5
Until there are consequences nothing will change (Score:5, Insightful)
Currently if you publish complete lies no in a position of power over your grants or academic career has any interest in finding out if you lied or falsified your paper. In fact they have every interest to look the other way so they can continue to say "look at the great research my grants paid for, or look at how qualified our faculty is".
Until there are consequences to the reputations of the institutions paying salaries and giving out grants nothing will change. We will continue to reward fraud more than real research. What we need is real criminal fraud charges against people who sponsor and reward bad science to further their own goals. The PHD student creating a fake paper that proves what their advisor said was publishable is just doing what they were taught in university. The student who didn't learn in first year to fake their lab results never made it to a masters.
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> The PHD student creating a fake paper that proves what their advisor said was publishable is just doing what they were taught in university. The student who didn't learn in first year to fake their lab results never made it to a masters.
That PHD students degree literally culminated with the intense creation of a thesis paper, presented to a panel for a religious amount of scrutiny and approval.
Somehow, I do not feel THAT degree, teaches you how to “fake papers”. The profession is FAR more corrupt than the education, which has a FAR more limited profit motive by comparison.
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Mod parent up.
Increasing integrity by sorting chains-of-authority increases value, cuts noise, rewards those who actually do the work, and cuts wheat from chaff.
So long as their methods are exposed and open to criticism, I'm behind their efforts 100%.
Hard to Separate Fraud vs Mistake (Score:2)
> In fact they have every interest to look the other way so they can continue to say "look at the great research my grants paid for, or look at how qualified our faculty is".
That's not really true because the more you let this carry on the worse the reputational damage will be for you when it gets found out, and believe me it will get found out eventually even if that's after the researcher has retired. The problem is that the people most able to find out what is going on are resarchers at other institutes and often these things start out as academic disagreements with one or more researchers pointing out flaws or serious questions about results.
At this stage it is not alwa
A few things (Score:3)
The publish or perish culture needs reworked. At present, it lends itself to putting out dreck and instills bad practices.
A retraction can happen - sometimes there are mistakes.
However, institutions that have a large number of retractions probably have something in their culture that needs addressed - possibly by bans for a certain amount of time. Same with individual researchers.
If egregious enough, permanent bans would be in order. An example is Andrew Jeremy Wakefield, disgraced researcher who initiated the whole modern anti-vaxx movement, and had a direct conflict of interest to make money off his "findings" He's been struck off the registry in GB, and is not licensed in the USA. That dude deserved what he got. Having made some political connections, he is still able to work a bit of mischief.
His is an unusually egregious example, and for individual researchers, an anomaly.
There is a certain amount of money in research. Money often leads to fraud. The question however, is who is making the money? There is where you look for the cause, and there is where the fix lies.
High trust social mechanisms (Score:2)
...can't work when frauds, liars, and imposters get involved. A basic rule of the game.
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It's even worse when everyone involved is under personal financial pressure to be corrupt. "Publish or perish" pollutes the system with low quality, mostly irrelevant works from otherwise decent researchers. Reputation concerns motivate organizations to bury 'mistakes' rather than out low quality or fraudulent works.
There is no check mechanism with a sustainable motive to catch and punish bad actors in the system.
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Just imagine when the President of your country would be a prodigious and proven liar...
So does this start from the bottom up or top down?
publish or perish + to many locked into the ivory (Score:1)
publish or perish + to many locked into the ivory tower is leading to this.
The low pay and big loans does not help as well.
Now how much real job skills do some of people publishing this really have? vs ivory tower skills?
Startup??? (Score:1)
Is this a money-making scam^w scheme?
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In theory... Build a reputation for integrity, and eventually people will pay for your certification.
In practice, I expect these things to evolve into extortion schemes where you can buy reputation.
You can only fight the financial motives for so long, and they're almost all on the 'corrupt' side of things.
Okay, I guess (Score:3)
But you don't need AI to tell you a journal called Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine is junk. It tells you it is right there in the title.
A 7% retraction rate only means it's failed to retract the other 93%.
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I have no problems with the title, as I had better results with SOME alternative medicines than I had with now traditional pharmaceutical-based treatments.
As a former hardliner skeptic (of the James Randi variety), itâ(TM)s too easy to fall into our own version of Dogma.
Unfortunately, the alt scenes attracts more than its fair share of quacks by its fundamental nature, so it wouldnâ(TM)t surprise me if the journal is junk status.
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I won't pretend to know you well enough to know what changed your mind.
But I do know enough about alt-med to say it wasn't "Robust, high-quality, scientific evidence, with both a clearly understanding of method of action and strong clinical results."
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Sure, a few hundred years ago is was in many places totally acceptable to burn witches, of course all based on proof.
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Not in Europe and European-influenced cultures. Until about 450 years ago, "medicine" meant following the teachings of Galen, many of which relied on assertion. The defining feature of the Renaissance is that it became permissible to question the accuracy of ancient Greek and Roman "science", and it took time for research to replace inherited wisdom. Bloodletting was still recommended as a treatment in at least one textbook published a mere century ago.
Now, if you want to talk about folk medicine, that's a
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As we saw during the covid hype, studies can be easily gamed. Your "strong clinical results" are a outcome of goal seeking and rigging. In the famous "95% efficacy" touted by the covid vaccine, they excluded anyone thought to have covid but not confirmed by a test. They apparently just didn't test people they thought had covid, so as to get the results they wanted. If suspected cases were included, more people died in the vaccine group, leading to the conclusion the vaccine increases the likelyhood of dying
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The problem with junk science is at the same time very serious, and overblown. It's overblown because it's pretty obvious, to anyone working with science, that "Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine" from Hindawi is going to be junk not worth your time reading it, citing it, or consider publishing with them. Hindawi is junk (and thankfully defunct), it's the one that tanks the stats, and their choices of journal names invariably give them away.
Junk publishers keep making up these pompous jou