Making Sokaling a routine part of the academic process would go a long way towards fixing it, I think. A few dozen Sokalings are a good start to raise awareness, but if—say—5% of all submitted papers were Sokals, reviewers and editors would become much more careful.
This would be so great! Although… I think you may have to be even smarter to explain a field well than to engage in it.
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Depends on the level. Cutting edge research? Need to be very smart. Graduate level math? Just ask around what everyone's intuitions, examples, analogies, strategies and methods are, do exercises, prove main theorems for yourself, do computations, then synthesize
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There are still huge areas of graduate level math (even some undergrad!) that lots of people know where there isn't really a single book or the best (only) book on the subject is poor quality
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How would this work in practice? A paper would have to be registered as a Sokaling before first submission, along with an explanation of what the author thinks is wrong with it. A cryptographic time-locked database could ensure honesty about this.
Fraud—invented facts—are a different problem from nonsense. In science, publishing a paper based on false, made-up data would not generally count. Either you use real data and give a bogus interpretation, or you describe a worthless data-collection process (with fake data).
This proposal is not nice. Unfortunately, it is too late for nice. Many-to-most academic fields run on a go-along-to-get-along basis, and now have large negative net value as a result.
Some fields should simply end. I suggested that for nutrition:
A tension here: academia is increasingly awful as a career. That drives away many of the best researchers. Reforms that add to the suffering risk making a bad situation even worse.
Currently, reviewing papers is unpaid scut-work. Not surprising not everyone does it well.
… and the total number of papers published might drop precipitously if reviewers were more reluctant to recommend publication.
That would be good. Everyone agrees there’s WAY too much stuff published under the current system. A 90% reduction would be great.