Author: Scotty Hendricks / Source: Big Think
- A trio of academics have just admitted to writing nonsense articles and getting several of them published in scholarly journals.
- The articles were created to have phony data, absurd arguments, and conclusions that the journals’ review boards would accept.
- It raises questions about academic rigor in some journals, but claims that this debunks entire branches of the humanities are unfounded.
If you’ve been reading the papers lately, you might have heard about a group of academics who have just fessed up to having written fake scholarly articles with obviously absurd subject matter and getting them published in journals of dubious quality. The phony articles included several papers consisting of lines of Mein Kampf with modern jargon thrown in, an essay celebrating morbid obesity as a healthy life-choice, and a study of table conversations at Hooters restaurants in an attempt to understand why some people like eating there among other fashionable nonsense.
Of their 20 faux articles, seven had been accepted with four already published and three being reviewed when the authors had to step in and announce that they had been conning the journals as the result of some journalists getting close to the truth. A great debate is already raging on what their stunt proves and if they are to be commended or shunned for it. It is a debate we’ve had before.
The strange history of academic stings
This kind of thing isn’t new. Purposefully ridiculous articles are often submitted to journals and conferences with questionable standards or a pay to play system to demonstrate these poor practices to the world.
Some of the more amusing examples include a paper rated excellent by a vanity press journal that consisted of a single, strongly worded sentence repeated again and again and one that alleged the social construct of the male reproductive system is a “driver behind much of climate change.”In a similar vein, many diploma mills have been exposed by having animals apply to them with semi-accurate resumes and being granted degrees. Several dogs and cats in the United States currently hold degrees as a result of these stings.
The Sokal Affair, the mother of all stings.
(JOEL ROBINE/AFP/Getty Images)
The French postmodernist Jacques Derrida as he appeared in 1982. He was drawn into the Sokal affair and criticized the whole thing as a distraction form real debate.
The most famous of these stings was carried out by physicist Alan Sokal on the publication Social Text in 1996. His article Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity is a fantastic hodgepodge of jargon, quotes from postmodernist thinkers, and nonsense lines such as “It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”
Dr. Sokal was motivated by the so called science wars between some postmodern thinkers and scientific realists about the nature of science. He hoped to demonstrate by the article’s acceptance that some journals would publish utter nonsense so long as it agreed with them.
When the article was published, he immediately revealed the hoax. Most of the criticism towards his actions seemed to ignore the fact that…
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