… [The research articles] are so obviously fake that nobody who has any business being within 10 feet of a computer science journal would fail to spot them with even the most careless examination. A technological solution is completely unnecessary. The answer to that question exposes the dirty secret of modern scientific publishing.
It is that secret, not the occasional publication of fake papers, that the scientific publishing world should be mortified about, for it is damaging the underpinnings of the whole scientific endeavor.
Fake peer review: Scientific journals publish fraudulent, plagiarized, or nonsense papers..
Here’s the thing. Peer review is not perfect. It’s not a panacea. It’s simply the basic level of due diligence. By submitting work for peer review, a scientist has allowed people outside her own team to critique her work. And the journal might require some changes to the paper based on the critique — anything from edits for clarity to requesting that the scientist perform another experiment in a different way. If a paper hasn’t gone through peer review, you should be more skeptical of it. Avoiding peer review means that the researcher decided to show the public her results before allowing those results to be critiqued by independent experts.
But, at the same time, just because something has gone through peer review doesn’t mean it’s been certified to be accurate. It just means that roughly three other experts have looked at the paper before publication. There’s still a lot of room for things to go wrong. Peer review is like the bouncer at the door. The bouncer doesn’t guarantee that every person in the bar would be a good person for you to date. Even if a paper gets through, you still have to think about it critically and evaluate it on its own merits.
Of GM corn and rat tumors: Why peer reviewed doesn’t mean “accurate” – Boing Boing.
A look at the news and events happening in the Libraries at Waubonsee Community College