[largepeepee]

You know what's funny? Even if the numbers are hot garbage, they proved the point about how easy it is to publish fake science papers, since it got published.

Kinda similar to those researchers years back who proved how easy it was to go into certain social science journals as long as you copied their ideology.

[cauch]

Well, there is a difference between "fake science" and "tried to do correct science but ending being wrong". If the second is "fake science", then basically all that Newton has ever produced is "fake science".

For the social science journals bit, are you thinking of the "grievance studies affair": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair ?

Ironically, this study has generated a lot of "fake news" on the field of social science. The conclusions of this study were widely spread mainly by people for ideological reason. When we look at the study in question, it's clear the conclusions are quite different than what the rumors say. For example, the same researchers tried such hoax before the ones they mention in their study, except that these hoaxes failed to be published, and they "forgot" to mention it. They did not have any control group, neither as "correct article" or "article defending the opposite ideology" (so, how can we conclude that the reason these bad articles were published were because of ideology if you don't know how many articles are published without being critically reviewed). They also count as valid a lot of journals that are pay-to-publish and not seriously used in the field. One of the author, ironically, ended up supporting platforms publishing conspiracy theories (and he was even banned from Twitter) (not that the study should be judged based on that, but it's a funny anecdote: the author who, according to some, had the courage to defend real science against bad woke ideology, who ends up demonstrating that he never cared about real science and is driven by ideology not science)

[caddemon]

There's also a difference between outright fake science i.e. lies/fabricated data in the manuscript and bad science i.e. the conclusions drawn by the authors were always "fake" because of bad practices but if you look at the details of the work they are honest about what they did. Of course ideally you would minimize both types of bad paper, but the latter isn't too damaging to the system in isolation while the former can cause a handful of papers to mislead a subfield of science for years. Also how to screen for and how to systemically discourage these two things could be quite different.

[cauch]

And the first one should be divided further into two categories:

1) committed deceiver that started working in this field for years and that somehow managed to not get caught (pretty rare).

2) fake science articles that get published but has absolutely no impact on scientists because scientists don't progress based on randomly found articles, but by meeting the authors in workshops, exchanging with them, ... which make a one-off fake article with fake author totally irrelevant.

If you are a junior scientist, the articles you read are mainly the ones recommended by senior scientists around you, and if you are a senior scientist, you are part of a community, you know the people who publish, and if you see a random article coming from nowhere, you may read it just in case, but you don't let it mislead you or change significantly your own research just based on reading it.

I think it's a flaw on some lawman people when they discuss "fake articles being published": they don't realize how small "having an article published" impact the field. Presenting it in workshop and debating with colleagues does, but what the layman person has in mind will never maintain the illusion.

[kevviiinn]

A reviewer should have seen that massive red flag

[boomboomsubban]

>Even if the numbers are hot garbage, they proved the point about how easy it is to publish fake science papers, since it got published.

Not by the definition of "fake" used in the article, as the data wouldn't be plagiarized or fabricated. It'd just be shitty data.

[newswasboring]

It's a medRxive preprint. It didn't get published anywhere. Science (the magazine) has lowered it's standards.