Peer review under attack
December 19, 2014 8:16 AM   Subscribe

The peer-review system is under attack. Today, the Committee on Publication Ethics announced that there have been a large number of apparent "manipulations" of the peer-review process that "...appear to have been orchestrated by a number of third-party agencies...." Though they don't say so in the statement, the agencies appear to be located in China.

The story behind the story is that paper mills[subscription req.] in China have learned how to game the scientific publication process on an industrial scale. They are producing vast quantities of dubious scientific papers -- meta-analyses as well as experiments -- and, it appears, in many cases creating phony peer-reviewers to help get the articles accepted.

More shocking still... the funding for this operation comes, in part, from the Chinese government. (Still more below....)
posted by cgs06 (4 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: This post feels like a roudabout way to link to your own study in the first comment and is probably a subject too close to your own work for a post, even if it's an interesting story. -- mathowie



 
Self-link alert. In an investigation for Scientific American, I uncovered more than 100 papers in the peer-reviewed literature that bear many of the hallmarks of being produced by paper mills. Roughly 40% had received funding from the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China or from provincial government sources. This government funding is likely why so many people seem to be willing to pay the equivalent of $15,000 to one of these paper mills to get their name on a scientific publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
posted by cgs06 at 8:20 AM on December 19, 2014 [1 favorite]


T-minus 0 seconds until climate change deniers jump on this like a hungry dog on a steak.
posted by dudemanlives at 8:22 AM on December 19, 2014


Elsevier is retracting 16 other papers (in economics, this time) because one of the authors submitted suggested reviewers with faked contact information. Seems like it's an epidemic.

I am very glad that retraction watch just got a bunch of money. They are doing good work.
posted by quaking fajita at 8:28 AM on December 19, 2014


cgs06: Thank you for this. I'm noticing that a lot of these papers concern cancer research. Is there a reason why the Chinese government would want these published? Is this a case of researches gaming the system to gain more funding from the Chinese government, the Chinese government gaming the system to get money out of US charities, or is there another angle I'm currently not seeing?
posted by enamon at 8:30 AM on December 19, 2014


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