10 Reasons Academic Journals Are Filled With Junk Science

Science is held in unique esteem in our society. When we see the words “a study shows” in a newspaper, most people will just accept that whatever follows is the truth. When we see that an article cites an academic journal, we step back and applaud that finally, somebody is giving us the facts.

And that’s actually a good thing—or, at least, it should be. We should be able to trust that these studies and papers were created by people dedicated to the pursuit of the truth.

But there are a few dirty secrets behind the studies we like to trumpet as the truth. Because the reality is that the academic journals that publish these studies are running rampant with bad science—and there are a few things in place that allow it to continue happening. The Deliberate Corrupt... Tim Ball Best Price: $13.74 Buy New $16.64 (as of 11:20 UTC - Details)

10 Fake Academic Journals Are Becoming Common

Anyone who went to a university knows how much academic journals are held in high esteem. They are treated like the holy grail of sources. Whatever is written in an academic journal is usually accepted as an absolute truth because the papers within them are written by professors and diligently reviewed by highly respected colleagues.

Well, some of them are anyway. Other journals, though, will just publish anything you send them as long as you slip them a $100 bill.

As the Internet has boomed, it has become easier and easier to make your own academic journal—even if you don’t have any qualifications. And people do it. There has been a growing number of pay-for-publication magazines that don’t review the articles they’re sent but label themselves as academic journals anyway.

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The number of these fake journals has been on the rise since the Internet began. In fact, from 2010 to 2013, the list of fake journals ballooned from 20 to 4,000.

People can’t tell the difference between the real ones and the fake ones, either. These journals look like peer-reviewed journals. They’re shelved in the same spaces, organized in the same categories, and repeated by the same sources. Ideas printed in these things will get reprinted in the popular media just as easily as ideas in prestigious journals. And even those prestigious ones will repeat these findings as if they’re fact.

But they’re not. These magazines will publish anything you send them without taking as long as one second to review what you’ve written. ”A Disgrace to t... Mark Steyn (editor) Best Price: $9.41 Buy New $12.85 (as of 10:30 UTC - Details)

9 You Can Get Literally Anything Published

You can write literally anything at all and get it published in an academic journal. And when we say “literally” here, we mean literally.

A pair of computer scientists, frustrated with unwanted spam from a pay-for-publication journal, submitted a joke article. It was 10 pages of the same seven words repeated over and over: “Get me off your f—king mailing list.”

They formatted it like a real journal article. It was splashed with charts and tables, all of which just read “get me off your f—king mailing list.” It had those seven words patterned across every page, but it was an article that anybody would have recognized as a joke if they had so much as glanced at it.

The thing is, nobody ever looked at it. Instead, the journal’s computer just sent them an automated response telling them that they’d written a masterpiece and asking them to send $150 to get it published.

The pair, curious to see what would happen, sent the $150. Sure enough, the journal sent out its next issue a short while later with a 10-page article entitled “Get Me Off Your F—king Mailing List” proudly printed within its pages.

So, yes. When we say they will publish “literally anything,” we’re definitely being literal.

8 Newspapers Will Repeat Anything From A Journal

Once you’ve paid your $150 and put your article into an academic journal, the world will accept whatever you said as fact. Even if you don’t believe it yourself. Roosters of the Apocal... Isaac, Rael Jean Best Price: $3.55 Buy New $6.39 (as of 01:15 UTC - Details)

One journalist put this to the test by conducting an absolutely terrible experiment. He wanted to see what would happen if he gave newspapers weak proof that eating chocolate makes you lose weight—something that should be obviously untrue.

He gathered together 15 people, gave chocolate to five of them, and measured their health in as many categories as he could. He believed that if he tested a small enough group of people on enough different things, the people eating chocolate would have to become healthier in at least one way just by sheer random chance.

Sure enough, his results let him say that chocolate was a weight loss tool. He paid to have his terrible science put into a journal and then sent his conclusions to newspapers.

The response was incredible. His faked findings were reprinted or reported on byCosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, news networks, and morning talk shows. And not a single person talking about them mentioned his deliberately bad methodology.

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