The Problems Only Start with Plagiarism
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/opinion/plagiarism-academia-claudine-gay.html
Charles Seife notes:
“… an academic gets credit for the research she performs when she publishes the results in a scholarly journal. For the most part, these journals will do a quick assessment of a paper’s worthiness and then send the manuscript out to a small number of subject-matter experts (often three) to gauge the quality and importance of the work. But peer reviewers have little incentive to do a thorough job. While universities richly reward a professor’s own research output, they care almost nothing about their professors’ role in checking others’ work. Nor are academics typically paid by the journals (which make money from publishing researchers’ work), and given the imperfect anonymity of the process, a thorough, critical review can even damage the researcher’s relationship with other scientists. As a result, countless professors, when asked to perform a peer review for a journal, fob the work off to their hapless grad students, so it’s often not the seasoned academic judging the quality of research but the greenest in the field. And given the proliferation of academic journals — and the increase in the number of academic papers published each year — the academic review process is getting more threadbare by the year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/opinion/plagiarism-academia-claudine-gay.html
Charles Seife notes:
“… an academic gets credit for the research she performs when she publishes the results in a scholarly journal. For the most part, these journals will do a quick assessment of a paper’s worthiness and then send the manuscript out to a small number of subject-matter experts (often three) to gauge the quality and importance of the work. But peer reviewers have little incentive to do a thorough job. While universities richly reward a professor’s own research output, they care almost nothing about their professors’ role in checking others’ work. Nor are academics typically paid by the journals (which make money from publishing researchers’ work), and given the imperfect anonymity of the process, a thorough, critical review can even damage the researcher’s relationship with other scientists. As a result, countless professors, when asked to perform a peer review for a journal, fob the work off to their hapless grad students, so it’s often not the seasoned academic judging the quality of research but the greenest in the field. And given the proliferation of academic journals — and the increase in the number of academic papers published each year — the academic review process is getting more threadbare by the year.
Related:
Alan Sokal’s Joke Is on Us as Postmoderism Comes to
Science
https://www.wsj.com/articles/alan-sokals-joke-is-on-us-as-postmoderism-comes-to-science-23a9383c
Articles in hard-science journals increasingly read like the 1996 hoax, and dissenters are suppressed.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/alan-sokals-joke-is-on-us-as-postmoderism-comes-to-science-23a9383c
Articles in hard-science journals increasingly read like the 1996 hoax, and dissenters are suppressed.