From a recent post at Retraction Watch:
Authors should be very much aware of all aspects of publication ethics, which, despite their importance and career-threatening consequences, are rarely taught in any depth at even the most research-intensive universities. However, even if adequate training were given to all postgraduates as potential authors, many would still fall for predatory scams and may even be alerted to the attractiveness of guaranteed publication in a matter of days for just a few hundred dollars. . . .
The “just a few hundred dollars” thing reminded me of the ludicrously innumerate claim that scientific citations are worth $100,000 each. That statement (literally, “It’s possible to put actual monetary value on each citation a paper receives. We can, in other words calculate exactly how much a single citation is worth. . . . in the United States each citation is worth a whopping $100,000.”) was made by a mainstream social scientist—a professor at a legit U.S. university who has over 200,000 citations on Google scholar.
If you were to literally believe the claim from that renowned scientist, then, yeah, a few hundred bucks for a publication is an absolute bargain. Of course that $100,000 number is a joke, good enough for a Ted talk or an NPR appearance or an article in PNAS but not serious science.
My point in juxtaposing these items is to point out the way in which the mainstream social science establishment provides intellectual cover, as it were, for predatory publishing.
phony social-science-cover for predatory-politics and predatory government policies is the bigger problem for the general public
Paying a few hundred bucks to publish a paper would indeed be a bargain for many young scientists…if the people evaluating them for post-docs or jobs don’t realize that they’ve published in a vanity press. Imagine, you’re applying for an academic position, you’re 26 years old, and you already have 19 publications! Or even 10. If you’re a grad student it might not be so easy to come up with the money to publish 19 papers, even at only a few hundred dollars each. Still, investing a few thousand dollars this way would be a fine investment, if only people evaluating you didn’t recognize that the journals are garbage.
I once has a candidate for a postdoc with 43 publications, all in vanity outlets. Makes a great anecdote, but sadly wasn’t enough for the shortlist (I’m in the social sciences).
We actually implemented a training program about this for new assistant profs, especially important from those in fields that do not assume that graduate students will publish. It is kind of shocking how little many grad students are taught about this.
Was the author of that article with his 200,000 citations a billionaire? How did they explain that discrepancy?
Dubi:
He’s no billionaire. He just contributed a billion dollars of worth to society. That generous guy.
I have wondered the following about journal impact factors for some time now, and I thought I’d ask about it here now. I wanted to post the following as a comment on a post that has to do with impact factors, so I used to search option to find a post that’s suitable. However, it seemed to me that the most appropriate posts were from over 10 years ago and the comments there were closed. So, I am writing the following here.
If I am not mistaken the journal impact factors are calculated using information that only covers a few years, I think I’ve seen 2, 3 or 5 years or something like that. If that’s correct, why isn’t the impact factor calculated over all the years that the journal published papers?
That would make much more sense to me because it takes into account that some findings or papers may prove to be useful or valid somewhere down to road. It perhaps also could lead to a more balanced representation of processes and associated worth of findings and papers in science by having both short-term “attention grabbing” topics and papers and more long-term “established and proven” findings and papers influence the impact factor.
Does this make any sense, and if so, has this been done before?
I don’t know exactly how impact factors are calculated, but for this idea I would think that a simple calculation could be used to represent the impact of papers published in journals which closely follows the interpretation of the now used impact factor. The main difference would be that it would cover all the years and papers that specific journal has published.