Faking Peer Review

[_Maksutov]

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/faking-peer-review/

From the article:

Peer-review is one of the pillars of the institutions of science. The idea is simple – have relevant experts review a submission for quality, thoroughness, and errors prior to opening up that submission to the world through publication. This concept, however, is only as good as its execution.

Recently Springer, the publisher of Tumor Biology, retracted 107 papers published in that journal between 2012 and 2016 because of falsified peer-review. This is the largest retraction to date, and clearly represents a systemic problem. This brings the total retractions by Springer for fake reviews to 450. An exploration of what happened here provides some insight into the issue.

[_The CCC]

Deliberate deception has always been a problem in science. The only cure I know is more better science.

[_Maksutov]

Deliberate deception has always been a problem in science. The only cure I know is more better science.

It's a problem in any human enterprise.

[_The CCC]

True.

[_Maksutov]

True.

It's a natural survival strategy many organisms have adopted. So I think the tendency is innate. But like many other organic impulses, some social mediation seems appropriate.

[_The CCC]

I don't know that it is innate, but we do learn it very early in childhood.

[_Res Ipsa]

There are a number of improvements that can be made in the area of scientific publishing. One is recognizing the importance of post-publication peer review. Too often, scientists are not rewarded for testing a study by reproducing it. Yet, reproducing a study is one of the cornerstones of science. There was a project to reproduce a number of studies in psychology (I think) recently. The reproducibility rate was discouragingly low. We need to shift the emphasis away from publishing a paper with something new and toward testing the results of previous studies. That is probably the most effective way of catching scientific fraud.

The other is the publication of studies that do not produce a statistically significant result. Doing so would give us a better chance at spotting false positive results in the papers that are published. Finding a statistically significant association between X and Y is lots lets meaningful if 100 prior experiments have found no such relationship.

[_subgenius]

Deliberate deception has always been a problem in science. The only cure I know is more better science.

It's a problem in any human enterprise.

Except for magic shows...and theater...and VR goggles...

[_MeDotOrg]

'Publish or perish'. The academic version of 'Sell or hit the bricks.'

[_moksha]

The obvious reason to avoid suggested reviewers is that they are hand-picked to be favorable to the research or the researchers. In the worst case, friends could trade favorable reviews of each-other’s research.

This in itself would be a good reason for the Mormon Interpreter to not bother having a peer review process.