Look better, Chris: it was published in Social Text. 

It’s true that I don’t know what the journals selected by the trio were like. If they were the kind of low-impact journals that publish anything for money, then it’s hardly a surprise that they would accept nonsensical papers of unethical ones, although the very positive remarks by the reviewers show that it was not a simple case of accepting everything as long as it’s paid for.

Furthermore, years ago, students at MIT even created a program (which you can use here ) to generate ontext-free text, and as I understand it it was used to successfully send incomprehensible submissions to certain computer science conferences*. It shows that jargon can get you very far, even in STEM fields, when the entry bar is low as far as reviewing goes.

Nevertheless, in the above mentioned example, not only were the bogus papers thought to be valuable contributions by the reviewers (which is just a case of reviewers doing a poor job, or -as the authors suggest- a case of journals being motivated by ideology rather than data), but the employer of one of them took action to severly punish one of them (because an accusation of data fabrication is a very, very bad thing). That’s the big issue, here, the one that makes this more than just a funny case of academics being taken with their oants down: just how far will a university go to defend the undefendable?

That it would!


* Here’s a link. More power to these guys!