Wednesday, October 16, 2013

I don't know what I was thinking! This way too serious for my normal self...

When I was on vacation in China I have read this article about a guy that wrote a scientific bogus paper and submitted it. He sent it to 300 different open access  journals and despite obvious scientific errors it was accepted in more than half of them. This really makes us think about the crap that we think is accurate and we actually base our research on, and that might actually be wrong. This was actually only an experiment in which this guy (John Bohannon) was testing the peer review system and clearly the results were not very good. For more info on this:

The thing is, Bohannon's experiment is not new, in 1996 a physicist from NY University wrote a paper  that he sent to Social Text, a journal on postmodern cultural studies. He wrote the paper a) making it sound sexy and b) in obvious agreement with the editors ideological views. At the time there was no peer review system and the paper got accepted, nowadays even with that system, bad articles continue to be published... Actually the Sokal hoax, like it is called, ended up being very messy. Juicy stuff, for more:
http://www.badscience.net/2003/06/the-sokal-affair/

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