Scientific Peer Review Update

Two stories today, both the same but on opposite ends.

Story One: Accurate Paper Rescinded

We recently highlighted a paper by Bob Uttl and others in “The World’s Easiest Sociological Prediction Has Been Verified” (blog, Substack). This was the one where they showed, as was easy to guess, that the average intelligence of college students was decreasing. This had to be so: given the greater the proportion of kids going to college, the more the average intelligence of students must decrease and approach the population mean.

Or maybe even dip below it, since kids who are well above average intelligence may begin eschewing college altogether.

The journal yanked the paper! (The paper now has a new home; I also updated the original story.)

The journal was Frontiers in Psychology. As Uttl says on his site (he also emailed me), the “peer-reviews reviews were finalized…and…the article was accepted for publication by the editor.” He has a copy of the acceptance email.

Uttl’s work obviously contradicts a key cultural belief, which is Equality. So the journal pulled the paper and emailed Uttl saying “a number of overstated claims were brought to the attention of our Research Integrity team”.

But—and you can see this coming—“the email did not disclose what the allegations were, did not disclose who made them, and Frontiers in Psychology never bothered to contact any of the authors regarding the allegations.”

The journal became YouTube. You’re canceled, only told that you sinned, but not how.

After Uttl battled back, he received another email that said in part “the [published] abstract was flagged to our attention due to several posts being made online on the social media platform X.”

One of those was me, I’m proud to say.

Uttl also had a difficult time getting his money back, too. See, Frontiers is one of those journals that charges you for the privilege of them publishing the work. This amounted to about $4,000. Yes, you read that right.

Science publishing is a brilliant economic, uh, system. The journals charge you to be published. Then they charge libraries to carry copies. And they keep the copyright.

What do you get? You get to say “I have a paper.”

Now I read Uttl’s paper, as did many of you, and you can see there was no problem with it, and that it was anyway obviously correct, as it had to be. But it was not politically correct.

His isn’t the first paper that ran afoul of The Message. Remember that mask paper that came out during the covid panic, the one that showed the harms masks cause? (Blog, Substack). It, too, was fine until it was picked up on Twitter. Then it was pulled.

Many such cases.

Science is having a rough time. They keep canceling good work, mainly through the policing of peer review, which ensures contrary views on sensitive topics stays hidden. But then they also let in tons of sludge, as we see next.

Incidentally, Uttl sent me another paper of his that surely didn’t go over well with nervous Experts: “Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET): Why the Emperor Has No Clothes and What We Should Do About It“.

Story Two

You’ve likely seen headlines like this: “More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record” (Nature), and “‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point” (Guardian).

The Nature article has a graph showing retractions of a bit over 1,000 in 2013 until last year’s 10,000+.

The bulk of 2023’s retractions were from journals owned by Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley (see ‘A bumper year for retractions’). So far this year, Hindawi journals have pulled more than 8,000 articles, citing factors such as “concerns that the peer review process has been compromised” and “systematic manipulation of the publication and peer-review process”, after investigations prompted by internal editors and by research-integrity sleuths who raised questions about incoherent text and irrelevant references in thousands of papers.

Also, “A Wiley spokesperson said that the publisher anticipated further retractions — they did not say how many — but that the company takes the view that ‘special issues continue to play a valuable role in serving the research community’.”

What is interesting, to me anyway, is what proportion of, let us call them, goofy papers exist. These aren’t papers like Uttl’s, which are right but in the wrong direction. Goofy papers are wrong in the right direction—the direction preferred by Experts and the Regime.

In 2023, it’s at least 10,000 divided by the number of papers published. But it’s surely larger than that, because the 8,000+ from Wiley’s subsidiary are only there because they were caught. How many goofy papers slipped through the peer-review net?

Nature has this graph:

If 0.23% of papers are goofy, and there are 10,000 known goofies, then that’s 4,347,826 total papers.

That’s on the low side of estimates I’ve seen. Another estimate is 5.14 million a year, but I’ve seen claims of 8 million and higher. Depends on how you count, and what counts.

Of cheating, they say: “The number of articles produced by ‘paper mills’ — businesses that sell bogus work and authorships to scientists — is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands alone [summed over years], quite apart from genuine papers that might be scientifically flawed.”

In any case, less than 1% sure seems low to me. Especially since you and I, dear reader, have investigated hundreds of what are touted as the best papers, and we have found them wanting. Few were outright frauds, and few contained outright

Of course, many papers are not goofy, but are useless or boring or unnecessary. These comprise the bulk of publications.

Bonus: PEER REVIEW history article.

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