Alex WellersteinVerified account

So, about that academic hoax: I think people who are saying it's no big deal to get shoddy papers published in journals of varying quality are missing the point. The problem is that there are no objective criteria to distinguish between shoddy and sound work in this fields.

There's no doubt that shoddy science gets published in "hard" science journals, but it's usually possible at least in principle to weed it out. But when your paper is based on opinion rather than statistics or data, my guess about its merit can be as good as yours.

1) There are different standards of evidence in different fields, including different fields of science. 2) These fields aren't pretending to be science (unlike some fields...). 3) Peer review sucks for catching deliberate fraud, including in hard sciences.

And frankly... the journals under attack seem pretty small beer to me. I have a hard time caring whether their peer review standards are to snuff. There are little consequences associated with them being wrong that I can see?

The same cannot be said in many other scientific fields... I don't really get why the self-appointed stalwarts of objectivity don't spend as much time talking about how industrial funding taints scientific inquiry as they do small postmodernist studies.