The police department, is like a crew
It does whatever they want to do
In society you have illegal and legal
We need both, to make things equal
So legal is tobacco, illegal is speed
Legal is aspirin, illegal is weed
Crack is illegal, cause they cannot stop ya
But cocaine is legal if it’s owned by a doctor
Everything you do in private is illegal
Everything’s legal if the government can see you
Don’t get me wrong, America is great place to live
But listen to the knowledge I give . . . — BDP.
Someone pointed me to an iffy paper appearing in a prestigious scientific journal. At first I was annoyed. One more??? Himmicanes, air rage, ages ending in 9, and all the rest . . . that’s not enough for them?
But then I thought, nah, it’s all good. This outlet is their journal, just like Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science is our blog. We can publish anything we want here. Through years of diligent effort, we have built an audience of people who will read what we write here, and who will give us a hearing, even if they don’t always agree with us (and even if we, the bloggers here, don’t always agree with each other).
Similarly, the organization that publishes that journal has, through many years of diligent effort, built an effective brand. They decided in their wisdom to give publishing power for their proceedings to their editors, some of whom in turn use that power to promote a certain kind of science. I’d call it junk social science or scientism; I guess they would call it the real stuff. In any case, it’s their journal! To be upset that they publish unsupported claims in social science (along with lots of good stuff too) would be like being upset that Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science publishes too many cat pictures.
P.S. I have no link to the particular paper that was sent to me, partly because I don’t actually remember what it is or even what it’s about—I wrote this post awhile ago!—and partly because the details don’t really matter. Indeed, you, the reader, might like this particular paper and not think it’s “scientistic” at all, in which case my point is better made in general terms, so that you can imagine some characteristically bad tabloid-style social science article in its place. You could also forget this particular journal entirely and think about some other journal such as the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which published and never retracted that notorious gremlins paper. The econ department is like a crew. It’s crews all the way down.
P.P.S. Again, this journal publishes lots of good stuff too including but not limited to my own publications there! I guess it’s best to think of a journal not as a unified entity but rather a loose agglomeration of mini-journals, some of which focus on the serious stuff and some of which go more for drama and publicity rather than scientific accuracy. To slam all of this journal for the bad stuff would be like slamming everything coming out of Columbia University just because we have Dr. Oz, or slamming everything coming out of the University of California just because they have that sleep guy.
Where can I find cat pictures!?
I agree. There are not enough cat pics on this website! đ¤
Jordan, Anon:
Send me some of your cat pictures and I’ll post them!
Didn’t you hear? Columbia has cut ties with Oz.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/01/dr-oz-dropped-by-columbia-amid-pro-trump-republican-senate-run-report
Wow—I had no idea!
But, Columbiaâs Irving Medical Center still has a center for “Integrated Medicine” that promotes and makes money from all sorts of quack medicine. This is from Columbia’s website, “In TCM, it is said that Qi follows Li, meaning energy follows thought.” I am not sure Columbia’s position on Oz is very principled.
Steve:
Columbia should coordinate this and have a single Department of Fraud that handles Integrated Medicine, statistics for U.S. News rankings, and whatever other promising ideas come up. A one-stop shop for everything nonreplicable!
That might make it easier for Columbia to identify who engages in fraud at their university. However, given that Dr. Oz was a professor of Integrated Medicine, that could have been tip off that he was pushing junk science because they were paying him to push junk science.
I think the Guardian piece lets Columbia off the hook because it sounds like they quietly got rid of Oz because of a letter from experts accusing him of pushing junk science, when almost certainly his position has been replaced by someone else pushing junk science.
Um…is May 4 the new April 1? Seems like you owe a lot of people an apology if this is your POV now. Like, all those journals you criticized for not retracting papers with clear data or methodological or analytical errors, or even fraud. It’s their journal, and if they sincerely believe the peer review process is a magical guarantee of validity, and they’ve built a readership that agrees, then they can not retract what they want. Or the journals that refuse to publish failed replications of articles they previously published, on the grounds that papers with flashy claims are substantial contributions to the field, but papers disproving those claims aren’t. But, it’s all good, right?
I’d argue that a professional journal, with papers catalogued in scientific databases, are very different from a personal blog. I’d also argue that editorial boards and professional staff should have lasting and journal-wide editorial policies that establish a minimum standard, so yeah, the whole journal is to blame if the whole journal sets standards too low or tolerates repeated violations of them. And, I’d argue that such radical inconsistency in quality, in the very definition of what quality science is, such that your work appears beside junk science, effectively provides a veneer of respectability to the junk science. Someone who reads your blog may know you don’t endorse that crap, but there are plenty of researchers, not to mention students, who are learning what science is by observing what gets published with what.
It’s the same thing for Dr. Oz–Columbia gave him the cover of its reputation. Now, we shouldn’t blame every professor at Columbia for Dr. Oz’s malfeasance, but surely we can blame the institution.
Michael:
I don’t know. I mean, sure, I get what you’re saying and I agree that JPSP should retract the ESP paper and PNAS should retract the himmicanes paper and so forth. Or, if not “retract,” at least put a link to various criticisms of the work. I think Ted should retract the Why We Sleep talk too.
But I also understand that they’re not going to do it: it would just take too much effort. I can personally go through my old papers and post corrections where appropriate, but there we’re talking about my own work, and it’s just a few hundred articles. Journals have thousands of articles by many different authors. To go through and clean all these up . . . it doesn’t really seem possible. And, since they can’t clean up their literatures in general, they’ve pretty much decided not to do it in particular cases either, except in some extreme examples such as that pizzagate guy or the anti-vaccine guy.
I don’t think “it’s all good”; I just accept that journals are doing their thing. One thing I’ve sometimes said is that reputations go both ways. The National Academy of Sciences has a lofty reputation, and when things are published in their Proceedings, journalists take note. Certain editors of that journal have taken advantage of this reputational penumbra to get some bad papers published. But that has had some effect: at least in some quarters, the National Academy of Sciences is not as respected as it used to be. Does the Academy want to crack down on bad papers published in its journal? It’s their call.