Peer Review Ring Broken - 60 Articles Retracted 178
blackbeak (1227080) writes The Washington Post reports that the Journal of Vibration and Control's review system was hijacked by a ring of reviewers. 60 articles have been retracted as a result. "After a 14-month investigation, JVC determined the ring involved “aliases” and fake e-mail addresses of reviewers — up to 130 of them — in an apparently successful effort to get friendly reviews of submissions and as many articles published as possible by Chen and his friends.'On at least one occasion, the author Peter Chen reviewed his own paper under one of the aliases he created,' according to the SAGE announcement."
The Good News? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Good News? (Score:4, Funny)
Amazingly articles can get released on the same day as submission with this method.
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Besides, who's more peer with respect to the author than the author itself? I tell you, it can't get more peery than this.
Re:The Good News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Peter holds a very high standard for himself, I'm sure.
The standard practice is to form a unspoken agreement between several reviewers that they will all favorably review each others papers.
Peter couldn't find his circle and created a self-circle.
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Peter holds a very high standard for himself, I'm sure.
The standard practice is to form a unspoken agreement between several reviewers that they will all favorably review each others papers.
Peter couldn't find his circle and created a self-circle.
Otherwise known as a circle jerk.
Wish I could say I was surprised (Score:3, Interesting)
We live in a day and age where you can make a pretty decent living as a scientist without actually advancing science, or doing very much technologically related labor, only natural people would game the system. While science should be immune to this sort of thing, just how many unimportant not particularly interesting results do people actually try to reproduce ?
Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
You have it backwards. the fault is not that not every scientist has a breakthrough.
the fault is that in academia its pretty much "publish or die". The incentive to publish over anything else pushes the unscrupulous to do things like this.
the system itself creates this sort of situation.
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Wrong. The issue is that publishing is considered sufficient.
It should be publish or die. How do you know they're doing anything if they don't publish? they could be watching tv all day for all you know otherwise.
But as is made clear here, simply publishing and getting it through peer review is clearly not good enough. We need to increase what they have to do to avoid this situation.
For example... maybe one scientist pays another scientist to reproduce his work.
Maybe you have big collections of graduate stu
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It should be publish or die. How do you know they're doing anything if they don't publish?
Dude, seriously? Look up Hendrik Schön; he published... a LOT.
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...and I skipped over a bit you posted, my bad.
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We need to increase what they have to do to avoid this situation.
Alternatively (or in addition), we could increase the penalties for those caught cheating.
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we could increase the penalties for those caught cheating
No thanks, keep the lawyers out of it unless a genuine crime has been commited, the last thing we want is politicians regulating peer-review. There is no system that is totally incorruptable, the fact that these frauds were exposed means the system is working in this case. The fact that the scientific and academic communities will ostrasize the fauds for the rest of their lives is natural justice, anything more crosses the line between natural justice and revenge
Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
If you pay scientists to do science and they are contracted to do it... they fraudulently do not do science yet continue to cash your checks... that is a crime.
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That's fine so long as their fraud doesn't have additional damages to the institutions that employ them.
It is in the interest of such organizations to be harsh with people that take their coin and then try to cheat them.
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Is something special about science?
If you pay someone to do a job and they don't do it... you fire them. That's it, no worrying about crime and so on. If they're really contracting, then at worst it's a breach of contract and you could sue to get your money back.
Agreed. One small point to add though is that the people they are working for put a lot of pressure on them to publish.
This is just stage one of a process. It's been known that the "publish or perish" culture has produced some problems. Self plagiarism is a biggie, but they are weeding out the fraud at the same time.
So while the more politically inclined might wring their hands and moan "we have to do something!" this is all happening because we are doing something The system is working. Tools are in p
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Are you 12 or just naturally obnoxious?
Probably
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Alternatively (or in addition), we could increase the penalties for those caught cheating.
FYI, cheating like this is already a guaranteed career-ender. People who do things like this aren't rationally weighing the cost of getting caught against the career advancement that comes from publishing; they simply don't expect to get caught.
Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, "publish or perish" really dis-incentivizes novel research because guess what, often times really novel research fails. All "publish or perish" really does is incentivize either cheating or the lowest risk research imaginable. There are other mechanisms for making sure a researcher is actually doing their work, punishing them for taking risks shouldn't be among them.
If novel research is failing peer-review, I don't see that not publishing is a good answer to that. A convenient one, no doubt.
Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score:5, Informative)
Scientifically useful negative results don't merely fail peer review, they are simply unpublishable in a major journal.
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The solution would seem to be the university publishing all the unpublished a
Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone starts doing some novel research that's going to take five years to possibly produce results and nothing pans out, they aren't going to get anyone to publish the findings.
Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
And this is part of why all the drug development work ends up happening in private industry.
A scientist will come up with a molecule that inhibits some enzyme and get some publishable result. At that point they issue the typical "possible cure for cancer" press release and move on to the next thing. 5 years and $10M later a pharma company figures out that it causes heart valve degeneration or that inhibiting the enzyme isn't the magic bullet everybody hoped for. They don't bother publishing it, but none of their scientists get paid by the publication anyway. The companies interest is that if it eventually works out they make billions.
So, in that sense you actually have an example of a way in which industrial research is actually less risk-averse than academia, which should be shocking.
That said, when it comes to the basic research side of things pharma companies do tend to let the academics do the work for them.
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For example, a study in that journal is entitled "Predicting blast-induced ground vibration using general regression neural network." The abstract is
Blasting is still an economical and viable method for rock excavation in mining and civil works projects. Ground vibration generated due to blasting is an undesirable phenomenon which is harmful for the nearby inhabitants and dwellings and should be prevented. In this study, an attempt has been made to predict the blast-induced ground vibration and frequency by incorporating rock properties, blast design and explosive parameters using the general regression neural network (GRNN) technique. To validate this methodology, the predictions obtained were compared with those obtained using the artificial neural network (ANN) model as well as by multivariate regression analysis (MVRA). Among all the methods, GRNN provides excellent predictions with a high degree of correlation.
Emphasis mine: they're testing if they can pr
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I think what the poster you quoted wanted to say is that often to make major contributions you have to do something that has never been done before, and not just follow up on previous research. Pushing on current trends is not difficult, at all, and is basically guaranteed to get you a publication in a decent journal. A lab head can do several dozens of these papers a year if he has a few handfuls of people in his group and decides to have his focus on this. Now doing this more than guarantees a comfortable
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I forgot to add this recent article [scientificamerican.com] to my post. It goes to show that the problems I am talking about are not just my personal anecdotes or limited to my field.
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I think I answered this point in this post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
In summary, my point is not a defense of any specific method of auditing work and ensuring people aren't just screwing around.
Rather, my point is a defense of auditing in general.
If you don't like publish or perish then please suggest an alternative that doesn't just let scientists wake up at the crack of 4pm, drink until they pass out, and then do the same tomorrow.
I'm not saying they would do that or they are doing it... I'm sayin
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So until your utopian society comes along I should just accept bullshit?
No. When you hire people, you set up mechanisms to monitor their work and if they're not doing their jobs you fire them.
Otherwise why am I paying these people?
Same deal in pretty much everything.
Your solution is to completely re-engineer the entire society to correct this one issue.
Great plan... totally practical...
You call me a dullard? Do you have a plan that isn't completely halfbaked and impractical or is that all you're good for?
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No. When you hire people, you set up mechanisms to monitor their work
And the best mechanism you could come up with is "wait around a few years to see if their name shows up at the top of a journal article"?
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Which is why there is a growing movement of scientists who promote publishing failed research results.
Scientists, out of anybody, should know that failure is when you learn the most.
See also Dr. David Goodstein's 1990s predictions (Score:2)
You make good points. See also: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... [caltech.edu]
"The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also
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It should be publish or die (...)
You might want to read this:
http://www.theguardian.com/sci... [theguardian.com]
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I read it. Do you care what I thought about it or did you just want me to read it?
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I presume he expected you to gain some insight from the article. It's a shame he didn't know that your beliefs are unshakable.
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For example... maybe one scientist pays another scientist to reproduce his work. Maybe you have big collections of graduate students that as part of their process of getting a degree get assigned some random papers submitted by scientists in their field and they have to reproduce the work.
You don't work in science do you? Being paid for reproducing someone else's work means you are not producing anything original of your own. It doesn't advance your career. Then with respect to your second point, being a graduate student means to perform original research. If your PhD is about reproducing someone else's work, you won't be able to publish anything of significance.
The problem is the system globally: journals, which push for high impact sexy stories; promotion committees, which only look at how
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I thought they weren't good enough anyway, that a paper in a peer-reviewed journal didn't prove anything by itself. There's been plenty that turned out to be wrong.
After the publication, people are likely to want to build on that work (if it's interesting), and they'll wind up replicating parts of it. If it isn't solid, for whatever reasons, it'll get found then. If it holds up, there will soon
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I was quoting someone else... please correct them instead... *yawn*
Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score:4, Funny)
I was quoting someone else... please correct them instead... *yawn*
So you plagiarize too?
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Okay... I am going to assume you're reasonable and not a loony... and that what we have here is a failure to communicate.
Here is what I want... please throw out your existing notions of what is currently going on or whatever talking point score card you're reading from here...
1. It is reasonable for scientists in the pay of the public to be required at intervals to publish the results or at least what they were currently doing over the past few months or year or whatever interval is deemed reasonable.
2. Wor
Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
1. It is reasonable for scientists in the pay of the public to be required at intervals to publish the results or at least what they were currently doing over the past few months or year or whatever interval is deemed reasonable.
The basic problem here is that you seem to have at best a shaky grasp of what "publish" means in academia. No journal is going to just publish "what they were currently doing over the past few months" unless that includes a significant result. I'm honestly not sure of where to recommend that you go to get a better understanding of how academic journals work, but I suppose the Wiki article [wikipedia.org] couldn't be the worst place to start.
2. Works thus published should be subjected to reasonable audits to detect fraud, laziness, waste, or incompetence.
Using what money? Peer review currently is done on a voluntary basis; no journal that I'm aware of pays its reviewers. You seem to think that just because it would be nice if all published research was reproduced that it *should* be reproduced, without concern for where the researcher-time and money will come from to accomplish this. The current reality is that any professor or research scientist who devoted significant amounts of time to reproducing already-published science would quickly find himself out on his ass, because publishing *original* research is the first and foremost factor in maintaining/advancing a career in academia. To put it in software development terms, it would be like expecting a programmer to spend a large chunk of his time on the clock refactoring code while his bosses are telling him to leave it alone and work on implementing new features.
3. The nature of audits should make it difficult or impossible for conflicts of interest to corrupt the auditing process.
Agreed, the journal from this article should absolutely have done a better job of verifying the identities of its peer reviewers.
4. The auditing process should be sufficient to determine what is and is not valid science.
In what sense? If someone publishes a paper based on years of astronomical observations, is the peer reviewer obligated to spend years making his own observations to see if he can find (more or less) the same result? If "Yes", then the simple reality is that no one will volunteer to peer review such work, and you'll end up in a situation worse than the present one. If "No", then you're back to admitting that at some point the reviewer has to trust the article's author(s).
5. Reproduction of work obviously cannot be done with all papers however, they should be done with all significant work deemed significant.
I would argue that, certainly in my own field, "significant results" intrinsically draw more attention once published, and thus any mistake or malfeasance is more likely to be caught.
6. The deeming of significant or insignificant work could be down to collective or crowd sourced choices made by other scientists to cite a given work or say they found it interesting or significant. When X number of scientists say its significant then someone in the community should be tasked with verifying it through reproduction.
And, again, whence comes the money and time to reproduce it? This is a point that most scientists, I believe, would agree with -- but no one is going to sacrifice their own career to help accomplish it. And the "publish or perish" mentality contributes to this problem, as journals do not publish articles which simply say "yes, this other article seems to be good science".
Overall, I don't see anything too objectionable in what you want -- but it is basically a list of demands without any suggestion of how they could be accomplished or any understanding of why they are *not* being accomplished (to the extent that they aren't) in the current syst
Someone mod this up (Score:2)
Re:Wish I could say I was surprised (Score:4, Informative)
Jeez, pot meet kettle.
To top it off, he addressed your points quite well and it appears that it's you that seems intent upon winning an argument with your long-winded reply, which, of course, doesn't specifically and concretely address the issues raised by the person you're replying to.
Funding to reproduce coming from same institution? So they'll have half the money for original research then. And the suckers tasked with the reproduction won't be advancing their own careers under the Publish (original, ground breaking work) Or Perish model used today.
Like it was stated, in a fairly appropriate analogy, reproducing others' work is akin to re-writing a new software project - in software dev, it's a losing game.
In science it's important, but like in software dev, the boss isn't interested. And while the result may be beneficial, it's hard to convince people that it's a rewarding career move to play catch-up to others' work.
Having said all that, I think we all agree that reproducibility is important -- question is, how to go about it as the current system kinda disfavours it in all but the most important projects.
We need to implement specific, concrete changes -- having grad students do some of that is a good idea, but not sure if it'll completely solve the issue.
Laymen will never understand cutting edge science (unless they're quite keen on the topic at hand - a miniscule minority), and any layman that thinks they understand the law as well as lawyers generally get their arses handed to them should they attempt pro se representation.
Specialization in complex fields is natural.
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Look at the moderation your posts have received. Nobody likes you; nobody thinks you're right.
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I'm often ranked pretty highly... my score is excellent and has been for a long time... does that mean anything to you or does this sort of thing only mean something when it is in your favor?
What is more, lets say I said something horrible... but lots of people up voted me... would you then conclude that my argument was good or that for some reason there were just a lot of sick people upvoting me?
Son, what you just threw at me was a logical fallacy. Look it up...
And it is ironic that in a discussion about s
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Again... this is probably the tenth time I've said this...
Read it, asshole.
If you don't want to reproduce the work. FINE. Don't have anything verified.
Hell, I don't even care if you get it peer reviewed. Have the whole thing written up by a bipolar crackhead for all I care.
All I want is that you specify all the things you have not done to back up your work.
if you've not been peer reviewed, say that.
if your work has not been reproduced, say that.
if the people that did the work were not actually scientists, s
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Well, when it comes to doing browbeating, you're doing a bang up job. You are assuming that your solution is right and will not accept any criticism of it no matter how much of a bad idea it is. Your solution is unfortunately unworkable.
Is the current system perfect? No, not even slightly? Is your solution actually a solution? No, yours is a cure worse than the disease, or at least unworkable.
The point is that money goes to scientists and the people that provide that money have a right to expect something b
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Actually I said repeatedly that I'd accept criticism. However, not reading my post before commenting, taking me out of context, using various straw man arguments, etc is not constructive or valid.
So yeah... i'm going to flame, turn it to ash, and crush the ashes under my boot.
No mercy. No hesitation. No remorse.
As to the point of red asterisk, I pointed out that this was mostly for the lay community that gets a lot of their science news from the media that is full of a lot of people that don't know any bett
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However, not reading my post before commenting, taking me out of context, using various straw man arguments, etc is not constructive or valid.
I don't believe I have. I can only go on what you've written in each individual post. You seem to take offence awfully easily and jump straight from holding forth to flaming everyone who has criticised you. Come to think of it, now I've read the whole thread, there have been many carefully thoughtout critiques of your post and you've jumped straight to flaming and ad
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.It is reasonable for scientists in the pay of the public to be required at intervals to publish tts or at least what they were currently doing over the past few months or year or whatever interval is deemed reasonable.
Dear NEJM: For the last six months, I mostly sat around in my office, read Slashdot, and mined Bitcoin on the cluster.
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Here is what I want...
OK, you can want what you like. Hoewver for it to be a practical solution it has to be better than what we currently have and if more expensive, then the money has to be raised from somewhere. It also has to produce usefult results. I do not think your solution meets those criteria.
Therefore I think that what you want is counterproductive.
1. It is reasonable for scientists in the pay of the public to be required at intervals to publish the results or at least what they were currently d
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Okay, why is your program acceptable when clearly we could do something even cheaper.
Why have journals at all? It would be cheaper not to have them.
Why use trained scientists? It would be cheaper not to have them. We could have everything done by robots or trained sea monkeys. What could possibly go wrong?
Look, the bullshit science is not acceptable. You want to talk about money? This shit means you get less money. It creates the impression that many of you are selling bullshit on a regular basis... do not
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The auditing process should be sufficient to determine what is and is not valid science.
Do you know how I know you haven't heard of the demarcation problem?
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A progress report TO the public that is audit-able is what we've always wanted.
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The public doesn't know enough to read the progress report. Much less would they have the time to read all of them.
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Reproducing work is often a good thing to set for first-year PhD students to do. If they reproduce something successfully, then they've learned about the state of the art and are in a good position to start original research. If they can't reproduce it, then they've got a paper for one of the debunking workshops that are increasingly attached to major conferences and that's their first publication done...
In many fields there's no way a first year PhD student is going to be able to reproduce anything, and the cost can be very prohibitive. If a lab doesn't already have the expensive infrastructure that's necessary and have it configured to replicate the desired experiment, then it's going to be $$$$ and take a long time. And then the expensive equipment is tied up doing work that's relatively low value (replication).
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Yeah that's what I was advocating captain strawman... everyone that ever stumbles should be shot in the face with a chainsawgun.
*yawn*
Either read what people write before coming up with a opinion about it or don't press send.
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I swear to god... were are there so many fucking illiterate people commenting on this thread?
I already said... and at this point it is four times... "if its impractical to reproduce the research then it gets a red asterisk to a little disclaimer that says "no reproduced"."
Read, motherfucker.
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But as you keep saying, the scientists already assume this stuff. So for them, the red asterisk is redundant.
My point is that it is not for the laymen. Telling them that something has or has not been reproduced is important information that either might not occur to them or they might assume one way or the other.
Its good for people to be careful with science that has not been reproduced. Laypeople clearly need some help with that.
If the works had a disclaimer on them when they were unverified it would make
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If the works had a disclaimer on them when they were unverified it would make it less likely and less forgivable when a newspaper went off half cocked with a report.
Journalists are reporting from press releases, not published articles.
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But as you keep saying, the scientists already assume this stuff. So for them, the red asterisk is redundant.
My point is that it is not for the laymen. Telling them that something has or has not been reproduced is important information that either might not occur to them or they might assume one way or the other.
Its good for people to be careful with science that has not been reproduced. Laypeople clearly need some help with that.
At risk of entering a mild flamewar...
You keep advocating a thing (your red asterisk) and people keep telling you it's already there. You're asking for the wrong thing. After reading a bunch of your replies, it sounds like what you really want is better science reporting. The red asterisk is (as described by many other commenters) already there. Actually putting a note on it that says "this is unverified *red star*" you add a whole bunch of problems without actually addressing the real issue. Problems
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I'll just leave this here... :)
I <3 Tom Lehrer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I've never perceived scientists as all that well-paid, given their education and the amount of work that they appear to be put in. If somebody is smart enough to become a scientist, there's got to be more lucrative things they could do.
I remember Journal of Vibration and Control! (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think "peer review" means what WaPo thinks it means...
.
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[Citation needed]
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In other news, (Score:2)
Dildos and bondage! (Score:2, Funny)
Yay!
Chen-Yuan Chen (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a lot of weirdness about this story. Firstly, guy's name is Chen-Yuan Chen, not "Peter". Secondly, he works at a teachers' college. Thirdly, he's supposed to be a researcher in methods for using electronics to help people learn, so why would he suddenly start writing a bunch of papers about mechanical systems? In addition to spamming 60 fraudulent papers in a few years, he also had each of the 60 papers cite all the other papers!
And the weirdest thing is that a bunch of right-wing crackpots are comi
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What's also weird is none of the "official" artifacts used the name "Peter" anywhere (always Chen, C-Y).
Where did "Peter" so prominently paraded by the lynch mob come from?
If anything, any official release should have used the name that's splashed all over offending articles listed.
Unrelated problem is, you can't get anything published in the trashiest tabloids without a figurative full cavity search.
JVC is suppose to be a proper academic journal, but they seem to have nobody with bullshit radar on the edit
Web of Trust (Score:4, Interesting)
People should cryptographically sign peer reviews (and their papers). And journals should only trust signing keys that themselves have been signed by respected experts. The more respected you get, the more signatures your keys and papers get.
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That sounds more like a popularity contest than a peer review system.
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Another ring: Method Engineering (Score:2)
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Equally true if you use the British definition of 'ring'.
And a large cache of hockey sticks was seized (Score:2)
No, wait - that's a different peer review ring.
no different than many stories here (Score:2)
No reference checks (Score:2)
If only the journals could run some kind of check to determine if "peers" are who they claim to be.... and only them.
Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
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So this shouldn't surprise you at all. The Chinese are always cheating the system, bribing people, etc.
He is from Taiwan, not China.
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You sure about that? Maybe he lied on that also. Hell, maybe he's not even Asian, or a "he".
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And what about Hendrik Schön, where was he from?
Or maybe it's not just the Chinese, your brain locks onto fake patterns.
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Go say that in China. See if they agree with the distinction.
Lisa, soon you'll have a Chinese baby sister who will surpass you academically!
I don't know about that, I'm considered preeeetty smart.
Well Tibet was considered pretty independent, how'd that work out?
s/Tibet/Taiwan
China won't even let MS push out the Taiwanese IME unless you have a specially-flagged build of Windows (which I've never been able to find).
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China won't even let MS push out the Taiwanese IME unless you have a specially-flagged build of Windows (which I've never been able to find).
What's the difference between the Taiwanese IME and the Chinese one (assuming you can select Traditional)?
And Taiwan is "protected" by the US, so they'll likely do better than Tibet did.
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Ukraine, next time you have the chance, lease out a navel base to the USA.
Would have changed everything, but too late now. If you take Crimea back, least the navel base to the US navy, day 1, hour 1.
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The equivalent is if the English had backed the South, and the US Civil War ended with Louisiana being the Confederacy, under the protectorate of the English. Louisiana isn't going to win an "inv
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Well, feel free to not use any of the things developed from scientific advances. I hear that caves are comfortable year round, and herbs and grasses picked from the mountainside can make a fine salad!
Scientific advances happened long before peer review and scientific advances are happening in spite of peer review.
Peer review is just a fancy concept invented to make it look like scientific publication is blind to "politics". It is quire the opposite. Scientists are asked to volunteer their time to review peer papers without pay or compensation. The hidden compensation is that they get to push their friends and colleague's work ahead of the pack and the favor is returned.
If you check journals and publ
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Change something and watch what happens, It'll be gone in five minutes. Same with the Blu-ray Wiki, post anything true but condemning and check back five minutes later -- poof. "They" get paid good money to keep things in the companies best interest. Which is also why I don't donate anymore to Wikipedia.
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I don't think that is the same Peter Chen.
"You've got the wrong guy. I'm the Dude, man"
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I usually associate that kind of behavior with people who have a "____ derangement syndrome" (they make everything about the topic/person they hate most: Obama or Bush, Liberals or Conservatives, Communists or Capitalists, Secularism or Religion, etc).