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East of Broken Bow | I read an article a while back where people were trying to demonstrate how 'science' was hijacked by writing so called scientific papers filled with empty phrases and gobbeltygook. They went from the point of view that as long as it parroted the scientific whim of the day and used the right catchphrases that it would make it through the peer review process largely unquestioned. They wound up writing some papers that the average person with average common sense would question its accuracy, but for the most part they sailed right through the peer review process. The scary thing is I remember reading their papers, or at least excerpts from their papers, and was thinking to myself that if that got through peer review, what other inaccuracies are floating around out there that are supposedly 'right'?
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/sokal-iii
Are you a young academic haunted by the fateful axiom “publish or perish”? If so, I have great news for you. It’s quite easy to get a paper published in an elite academic journal, as it turns out. It doesn’t matter if no one responded to your survey or agreed to be interviewed for your study. Your findings are entirely irreplicable and unverifiable? Not a problem. In fact, your research can even be riddled with factual inaccuracies if you’d like. As an added bonus, you can also bolster your credentials by adding an extra title to your name or perhaps inventing a university position, just for fun.
What’s the catch, you ask? (Or perhaps, why would I want to publish shoddy work, in an “elite” journal or elsewhere?) To get a paper published, you just have to meet one criterion: your conclusions have to align with the orthodoxy of the day. That is, you need to make it clear that you dislike the right people. As long as you say what the editors want to hear, you can get away with just about anything.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/academics-expose-grievance-studi...
In one particularly telling example, the academics submitted a paper to the feminist geography journal Gender, Place & Culture detailing the“rape culture” supposedly prevalent within dark parks.
The paper — which argues that dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’” — issues “a call for awareness into the different ways dogs are treated on the basis of their gender and queering behaviors, and the chronic and perennial rape emergency dog parks pose to female dogs.” The data for the study “was constructed to look outlandish on purpose. So asking us for the data would not have been out of sorts. It would have been appropriate, and we would have been exposed immediately,” Lindsay said.
Afilia, a peer-reviewed feminist journal, also accepted one of their papers, “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism,” which is a rewrite of one chapter of “Mein Kampf.” | |
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Please believe in science.
