Posted by:
anybody
(
)
Date: December 21, 2023 11:38AM
https://phys.org/news/2018-10-real-fake-hoodwinks-journals.html##########
Three US researchers have pulled off a sophisticated hoax by publishing fake research with ridiculous conclusions in sociology journals to expose what they see as ideological bias and a lack of rigorous vetting at these publications.
Seven of the 20 fake articles written by the trio were accepted by journals after being approved by peer-review committees tasked with checking the authors' research.
A faux study claiming that "Dog parks are Petri dishes for canine 'rape culture'" by one "Helen Wilson" was published in May in the journal Gender, Place and Culture.
The article suggests that training men like dogs could reduce cases of sexual abuse.
Faux research articles are not new: one of the most notable examples is physicist Alan Sokal, who in a 1996 article for a cultural studies journal wrote about cultural and philosophical issues concerning aspects of physics and math.
This time the fake research aims at mocking weak vetting of articles on hot-button social issues such as gender, race and sexuality.
The authors, writing under pseudonyms, intended to prove that academics in these fields are ready to embrace any thesis, no matter how outrageous, so long as it contributes to denouncing domination by white men.
"Making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest level of academic grievance studies," said one of the authors, James Lindsay, in a video revealing the project.
Lindsay—that is his real name—obtained a doctorate in mathematics in 2010 from the University of Tennessee and has been fully dedicated to this project for a year and a half.
One of the published journal articles analyzes why a man masturbating while thinking of a woman without her consent commits a sexual assault.
Another is a feminist rewrite of a chapter of "Mein Kampf."
Some articles—such as a study of the impact of the use of an anal dildo by heterosexual men on their transphobia —even claimed to rely on data such as interviews, which could have been verified by the journal gatekeepers.
For that "study" the authors claimed to have interviewed 13 men. In the dog article, the authors claimed to have examined the genitals of nearly 10,000 canines.
"If our project shows anything, it shows that what's coming out of these disciplines cannot currently be trusted," Lindsay told AFP.
Their goal however is not to destroy or defund the disciplines. "We think they should be reformed," he said.
#############
https://www.sciencealert.com/cultural-studies-sokal-squared-hoax-20-fake-papers#############
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a physicist, a philosopher, and a medievalist got together and decided to hoax cultural studies journals with a score of fake research papers.
The story is familiar, but this time the joke is far bigger. Their intention was to expose the shoddy standards that count for publishing in certain academic fields - but not everybody is convinced this is the solution we all need.
It's fair to say that Portland State University assistant professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay aren't exactly fans of the emerging fields of cultural and identity studies.
Last year they wrote a paper on the 'conceptual penis' as a social construct and successfully saw it published in a social science journal.
The research was a complete sham, and the paper's wording reflected the convoluted, dense language they associated with the field. Its publication – the pair argued – showed these journals will accept just about anything that seems to fit.
The conceptual penis hoax was far from the first to make a statement about the lack of critical review in certain 'critical' cultural research fields.
Just over 20 years ago, New York University mathematician Alan Sokal famously had his nonsense paper Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity published in an academic journal of postmodern studies.
An occasional hoax paper here and there stirs heated debate, but Boghossian and Lindsay saw a need to cast a wider net.
Last year, the two joined forces with Helen Pluckrose, the editor-in-chief of the current affairs magazine, Areo, and "exile from the humanities", and produced what one journalist referred to as Sokal Squared.
#############
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/21/2023 11:41AM by anybody.