Peer Review and Hoax PaperssteemCreated with Sketch.

in commentary •  6 years ago 


Credentials and even peer-review don't make something true or reliable. Just ask anyone or any team who's behind one of the many hoax papers that have made it through peer-review. Though hoax papers and fake news are nothing new or unique to America, they do expose some problems in today's peer-reviewing style. Clickbaity "papers" are making it past the screening process while I'm sure many legitimate papers and studies are getting rejected.

While hoax papers are the perfect fodder for anti-intellectuals, a certain group of hoax paper writers describe themselves as liberal and rather pro-intellectual. That means they won't support any anti-intellectual arguments, but want today's journals to be a better, more honest space for sharing educated findings. With the amount of distrust in journalism and academia, I would like to see an improvement to the vetting process for articles, studies, and journals. I don't know what that improvement necessarily entails, but it needs to be done in order to restore our trust in how information is typically presented.

One of these hoax papers is a feminist rewrite of Mein Kampf. It does not necessarily espouse fascism, anti-Semitism, or xenophobia, but uses the wording and overall structure of the book to create the paper. Structural similarities, even those that are very obvious, to previous works would be difficult and very time-consuming to screen for. However, this might be a running theme in hoax papers to come as well as studying ridiculous topics such as dog rape and fat bodybuilding. (Yes, those are actual hoax paper topics.)

The team behind this paper, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian specialize in writing hoax papers that pertain to gender, sexuality, and race. These topics are rife with politics and tension; any questions about them may be shot down as bigotry. As such, academics and especially sciences surrounding these topics tend to be fairly skewed with few sources to cross-reference. These left-wing academics are dedicated to making the study of progressive topics more reliable and for the betterment of academia in general.

Sources:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Scholar-Who-Pulled-Off/244740 DOA 10/8/18
https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/world/academic-journals-fell-for-hoax-papers-and-some-were-published-873788.html
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2018/10/dog-rape-and-mein-kampf-feminist-text-why-we-hoaxed-journals-terrible

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