not sure about medical pubs but 20% of almost every acm/ieee journal are garbage. perhaps it’s not technically fraudulent, there are no wrong theorems or proofs or whatever. but it’s garbage nevertheless.
I had a very polite 20 post exchange with the yoga guy. Maybe made some headway. Freaking third way bros. I know this guy is a good person and not stupid or a racist Trumper or anything, so I’m putting in the effort.
He gave me this list of 30 points of nonsense.
I debunked #1-4 and #7 then told him I wasn’t doing any more homework
.
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Yeah a lot, but I’d argue that the incentive to outright fabricate results probably isn’t as high. That’s my first hand experience with it anyway from watching people manipulate data to sneak in under 0.05.
It must be way worse in many fields, especially ones where no pre-registration is required or the stakes of being wrong aren’t as high (specifically social sciences). I remember sitting in on a paper talk that tested ~20 hypotheses. I think three were narrowly “supported” at an alpha=0.05. Not even a thought about it possibly being due to chance, and one faculty member suggested cutting the submitted paper to include 4 to 5 hypotheses total since that looked more believable than 3/3. But then you have to “reposition” the paper create a narrative that matches this pruned set of hypotheses that don’t really make sense together. Seems super rampant.
Publish or perish obv but also bigly rewards for prestigious journal hits, so big incentive from the author side. Novelty / surprising / viral / media headline incentive from the publisher side. At least in most social sciences, it’s not really possible to rapid fire publish. The review process can take several years with reviewers and AEs often being completely inane assholes.
The most ridiculous case I personally know of involved an AE asking authors (whom I know) to completely reconduct one of several studies in a paper they submitted. They did, which tacked about another year on, but in the process the journal’s AE changed. When they resubmitted, the new AE demanded that they not change that particular study but a different one that s(he) had issues with. So they did because that carrot dangle of the top journal saying “suck our dicks from the back and we’ll probably put your paper in” has the power of a thousand Poke balls. It ran the tenure clock out on one of the authors even though the paper was eventually accepted.
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I think it depends on how fraudulent is defined. What mostly comes to mind for me is p-hacking and related practices as opposed to fabricating data or whatever people generally envision as fraud. P-hacking is something I’d describe as “rampant” in the social sciences at American R1 universities having observed it first hand, and sometimes it’s extremely subtle (that’s the point). Are you including that in your definition of fraudulent? I only read a few small areas of medicine and don’t have a good feel for it overall. However, it’s exactly what some of the big pharmas are accused of in trial manipulations and the specific thing PhD horse pasters I know latch onto (e.g., strategic data removal) when attempting to discredit vaccines.
No we’re taking about straight up fraud caught by things like looking at the last digit and replicated patients. There’s an article about it today I read earlier. I’ll find it in a bit
CDC approves boosters for 65 plus or severe risk that have received Pfizer. Everyone else no boosters (no mixing yet recommended)
Still seems very likely we all need boosters, j and j in particular, but not enough data yet so will revisit again in a few months
Not clear what it means for vaccine requirements guess 65 with Pfizer or high risk now need three.
Surprisingly looks like they voted against boosting healthcare workers, which i thought was a meaningful reason for accelerating boosters
There’s a massive sea of complete garbage journals for reasons I’ve never fully understood. It’s not hard to suss out which ones are legit, esp if you work in the field.
Publish or perish bro. You want that research assistant job? You want that assistant professorship? Gotta have some bullshit to put on your CV.
I can’t deny that it happens, but it seems pretty ridiculous that the people making these hiring decisions look only at the presence of entries on the CV without reading any.
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I won’t say that it works well, but there’s a lot of thirsty GAs, med students, assistant profs, etc
Yeah, you’re only fooling so many people with garbage publications.
In economics there are disreputable pay-to-publish journals with names that are very similar to legitimate journals. Probably widespread in other disciplines.
lol oh great.
Any chance you could post your debunkings here. It would save us (definitely me) from having to reinvent the wheel when the topic comes up.
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You’re not fooling anyone experienced who is in the field. You can basically just look at title of journal and that will tell you 95% of the story. However, there is a skill involved in getting relative garbage published in reputable journals. And I could definitely see that being a skill that some would value. It’s different from being able to produce high-quality work, but it’s valuable nonetheless.
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Dawg I got u and will do one better by debunking all 30 of them using a top secret technique called internet magic:
United States Seizes 27 Additional Domain Names Used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to Further a Global, Covert Influence Campaign
In addition, four of the 27 domain names, “rpfront.com,” “ahtribune.com,” “awdnews.com,” and “criticalstudies.org,” were also seized pursuant to FARA.
Your super cool homeboy literally fell for an Iranian state-sanctioned propaganda campaign. Boom roasted. Now please tell your bro to log the fuck off and go back to school.
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2 more than the covid hoax so far
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Damn - nice work.
Looks like he deleted the whole post. I didn’t check back today to see if anyone else was calling him out or if things got ugly.
Why are the Iranians pushing anti-vax stuff on us?