And what did the scientific community do to the fraudsters who wrote the fake articles?
a.) Hire them, honor them, respect them
b.) Fire them, humiliate them and refer them to legal authorities for criminal fraud just like they would do to anyone else.
And what did the scientific community do to the chosen pals who peer reviewed that trash?
And what did the scientific community do to the assigned referees who reviewed that trash?
And what did the scientific community do to the people who knowingly hired and or promoted those fraudsters who published at papermills?
And what did the scientific community do to the esteemed college professors who run and edit the paper mills? Keep them employed at universities? or fire them and humiliate them etc.?
When you submit a paper, always look at the first and last 2 authors of a paper. The reason? When there is a search for the article or if it goes into the bibliography of another paper only the first and last 2 authors get included. Meaning, if you want to pad your CV you have to get on those coveted 4 spots. The paper can have a dozen authors but only those 4 spots “count”.
You don’t have to write a single word to get one of those 4 spots, you don’t even have to be aware of the paper at all or contribute one idea to it. The real author will often want to include a prominent name to his paper just so it will be published. You see, that more noted author has sway with editors. If his or her name is on the paper it is more likely to be published. In a better journal. There is no way on God’s green earth I can get a paper into the NEJM or Heart without someone famous backing the paper and getting the coveted last name on the author list. And that is the trick to seeing who the famous author of the paper is, it’s not the first name on the paper, it’s the last. The first name on the paper is the poor sucker that did all the work.
So you can see a prominent scientist saying they have 1000 articles published in 20 years, one a week on average! And they make have actually taken part or contributed meaningfully in less than 10 percent of them.
so you and apparently every porfessor knows about thee disreputable papermills (It seems they are quite common)
How does the world of academia respond
a. “You published at a papermill you are dishonest. Get out of here. Dishonesty ≠ science”
or
b. “You published at a papermill. You are dishonest. Guess what? So am I. So are lots of us. We love dishonest people. We give them lifetime 6-figure jobs and if any truth-teller reveals dishonest people as dishonest we attack them instead of the dishonest person.”
I feel the same way about
corporate accountants who lie
used car salesmen who lie
driveway repavers who lie etc…
Difference is I do not put a circle around one group of liars, give them a free pass and them recommend gov’t policy based on the lies those lying liars are spewing.
Should we let Enron accountants write US policy?
If people don’t want Enron accountants to write US policy should we defend those accountants and accuse the whistle-blowers of being “anti-math?”
Easy, Tiger. I was agreeing with you but just providing context. The paper mills aren’t that big of a problem in the grand scheme of things. The bigger problem is the author’s list on peer reviewed and accepted papers in prominent journals. No one cites “The Nebraska Journal of Interventional Cardiology”, they cite the NEJM or Heart. But getting a paper published there means you have to know someone and that person is going to want the last name rights.
And that goes for epidemiology journals, infectious disease journals or internal medicine journals.
What drives bad research and bad science is the barrier between sound research and good journals. You have entrenched editors who only approve papers from friends (who are also editors). And those friends will also blanket approve the editors’ papers. If you are on the outs, nothing you can do will help you. And if you are in, anything you want published gets published no matter how crappy it is put together.
That poses a much greater threat to the general public than some fake AI paper generated in some fake journal that no one reads.
What concerns me is not so much the fake AI papers themselves,
it is the fact that the universities are hiring and protecting blatant and obvious liars.
(Post 7 above)
Dr Jayati Sinha has had three papers retracted.
(her CV lists only 16)
Each one was written with one or more co-authors.
Each one had one or more “pal reviewers.”
Each one had one or more assigned referees.
(That’s at least ten guilty parties in all).
And yet Dr Sinha is not only firmly protected, she has been rewarded with becoming Dept Chair at Florida International University. Her laying-ass co-liars are also still employed and still treated as decent honorable authorities on their topics.
Maybe she should be fired and brought up on charges, face possible jail time and be required to return 100% of every dollar she made since telling her first lie. (Whatever would happen to someone who lied in the the accounting industry, the car repair industry etc. should happen to her.)
LOL nice word choice.
:bona fide: means honest, accurate or in good faith.
What the industry has is thousands and thousands of people with mala fides, and they won’t police themselves effectively. The lying fraudsters, even when revealed, almost never face charges, firing etc…
My guess? They won’t punish the liars because lying is so widespread in academia they are afraid the public will see how bad the industry is: no better than a collection of Enron accountants trying to set government policy.
It’s the bigger problem, to be sure. Lots of folks talk about AI or fake journals as somehow that is the existential threat, but no one cares about those papers. They drive nothing in the real world and only cater to the schlubs that aren’t connected. Do you think that Fauci needs journals like that? He doesn’t. He gets NEJM or Nature approval just with his name recognition. And those are the big journals, the ones that move the narrative.
Hell, I know Docs who have several textbooks published where they didn’t write a single damn word of it, they get assistants, fellows, students etc. to write it. But they get the checks from the publisher. Hell, I have written a few chapters of books and never saw a dime for it, some other Doc did. And writing medical book chapters SUCKS. Hell of a lotta work.
This is the real dark world of academia. Prominent scientists do almost nothing but get all the credit while real scientists with novel ideas get struck down or die in anonymity unless they find a prominent scientist to “sponsor” their work and allow them to take credit for their work.
They should care about the pattern of fraudulent behavior of the people who “wrote” them and the people who “refereed” them etc…
Every Dr who wrote a fraudulent paper should be stripped of his degree, stripped of his job and brought up on charges.
Every “reviewer and referee” should be investigated as to
"Why do you a have a lifetime pattern of using your position as a co-conspirator, in a fake fraudulent manner pretending to referee things and then not actually doing it?
“Since you obviously cover-up fraud, why should you ever have a position of trust? Ever be employed again? Ever receive pubic money again?”
As you may have noticed, I am less concerned about the studies themselves and more concerned with the fact that those lying con artists are getting jobs and promotions based on their known acts of fraud.
The m/l random case I have been using, Dr Jayna Sinha of FIU published some bogus studies about such things as ambient temperatures during in-person auctions and its effect on price.
Who cares what the right temperature is? I don’t.
I am more concerned with the fact that this known and proven liar got a job, became department head etc., where she presumably continues to lie to her students, her colleagues and in her role as a public policy advocate.