Posted on 05/15/2024 1:19:01 PM PDT by Governor Dinwiddie
The problem lays with the institutions. There’s plenty of “I’ll put you down as co-author on mine if you put me down as co-author on yours.”
I’m not aware of the journals getting in on it.
That is to say, I have not known of a case where a journal would add a co-author on a paper that they were considering publishing or had decided to publish.
I’ve never known that decision to be made by anyone other than the senior author.
Maybe some institutions are different. I know there are cases where the scientist exploits the technician, programmer, graduate student, et al. unmercifully and never gives co-authorship. As far as I know, there is no recourse.
I know of another case where the unit’s boss got an automatic co-authorship on every paper coming out of the unit.
Fauxci Science!
At the same time, I have gotten e-mails from journals urging me to submit.
What exactly is a “predatory” journal? Is it one that publishes results we don’t like?
The journals rely on reviewers — as another poster said they are proofreaders more than reviewers nowadays.
I’ve encountered this several times durign my career but I had no idea it had gotten so bad. 11,300 retractions in 2 years is devastating. I worked in industry and we had a guy caught faking his data and he was disappeared overnight. Office locked, name removed from the door, ID cancelled, no one in management would talk about him. It’s more difficult to fake your results in industry because you are mostly working in teams. What you develop is applied to the larger project and if it doesn’t work as reported it’s quickly discovered.
“The problem lays with the institutions. There’s plenty of “I’ll put you down as co-author on mine if you put me down as co-author on yours.””
Padding the list of authors is not nearly the same as faking data. In my experience people try to minimize the number of authors on their papers which creates hard feelings among colleagues.
Yes, the head of the lab always gets authorship when grant money is supporting the work and he/she brought in the grant and it’s part of the lab’s program.
The Wiley situation may be different. It looks like they are saying mills write the paper and give authorship to someone who is willing to buy it. That’s hard to believe but I’m sure there are people out there willing to do it.
Research is expensive.
There should be a government or corporate grant that enabled the research to be done.
I assume government grants can be traced.
“I assume government grants can be traced.”
That might be the key to stopping fake papers. The grant provider suing the authors or University for fraud and The authors get blacklisted. If that was the case you can bet the authors would make darn sure their results were reproducible.
My university lists the e-mail addresses of the professors of research department I worked for.
That’s Laina, the Overly Attached Girlfriend. She had a YouTube channel but quit because of an actual mental breakdown. Some of her videos are very funny.
“Trust the science” has been fatally compromised and many will never trust them again.
The fact that “trans” is a thing and not stopped cold proves that “big” science is now a joke.
One way to stop much of this is to make all government funded grants final reports and data used to produce those reports completely available to the public. Make the repots and data downloadable. Why not? The public paid for it why should they have an opportunity to see what they got for their taxpayer dollars. If one has the knowledge, skill, etc. one could then download it. Learn something if there’s something to be learned but more importantly be another eyes & brain on the subject. A lot of the fraud and bad science would go away if anyone could examine it.
I’m borrowing that.
But, I’ve been assured by a science believer that peer review is the gold standard and it would catch fraudulent *studies*.
You get the $cience you pay for.
Published and perished.
“But, I’ve been assured by a science believer that peer review is the gold standard and it would catch fraudulent *studies*.”
Good luck with that. Peer review is usually just a check that the methods used and the conclusions drawn from the data are appropriate and reasonable. It’s not going to do anything to detect fake data.
I’ve been a research scientist for 50 years so I’ve got a little insight into this. There are way too many journals and way too many articles published. Even most legitimate and honest publications aren’t really worth publishing or reading. Back in the day, the good stuff got published and the second rate stuff didn’t. Nowadays, you can’t even find the good stuff for all the second and third rate stuff, not to mention the fraud. It’s the downside of electronic publishing. And who wants to review when it’s mostly just garbage? The publish or perish paradigm has run its course. We’re drowning in it. Let’s get rid of some more journals. Let’s promote people based on the quality of their work and not the weight of their publication list.
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