Rise in predatory Science

[paulsutton]

Hi

 

Link to this was posted on the Fediverse earlier,  so am posting here too.  Hopefully spark discussion but also raise awareness of this,  as we are ll interested in science we need to be able to maintain the valuable trust in research.

Seems that there is a lot of bad science out there that is being published,  however this article relates to the USA so not sure how prevalent this is globally.  Just seems concerning that we may end up losing trust and this could potentially result in less funding if it is seen as not value for taxpayers money.

https://theconversation.com/rising-number-of-predatory-academic-journals-undermines-research-and-public-trust-in-scholarship-213107

 

Hopefully it is OK to post this.

 

Paul

[iNow]

Breaking News! Human imperfection found even within system designed to minimize inherent biases! More at eleven. 

[swansont]

I see where the article mentions journalism and communications, but not science, and from the perspective of people publishing, but not anyone being fooled by articles published in these journals.

I’d be interested to know what scientists are being fooled by such publications. I would hope that they’d be somewhat skeptical, but I get the impression that most of the science is theory rather than experiment (though that may be from only being familiar with the physics side of this) and you can see for yourself where the deviation from mainstream is occurring.

I think the danger to the public is with pop-sci journalism being pulled in, because there seems to be a lot of articles floating about that are too credulous - they cite novel results as if they are mainstream, like the recent stories about the age of the universe supposedly being tripled, because of one speculative research paper. Such reporting completely ignores the importance of confirmation and replication in the process.