Modern scientific publications have turned into tabloids

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Journalists retell the articles of scientists, presenting them as the ultimate truth. But this can no longer be done. The children of usurers turned science from a tool for understanding the world into a means of deceiving and enriching parasites …

News that begins with the words "became known", "named", etc., appear due to the authority of peer-reviewed scientific journals. Journalists retell the articles of scientists, presenting them as the ultimate truth. But this, it seems, can no longer be done. Izvestia tells why the institute of scientific journals found itself in crisis and how scientists cope in this situation.

The first folio of the Voynich manuscript

Last week, the world believed for a day that the medieval Voynich manuscript, written by an unknown author in an unknown language and decorated with incomprehensible illustrations, had been deciphered. I believed it because an article about it was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It soon became clear that its author was a swindler.

Venus flowers

The whole world wrote about the deciphering of the medieval Voynich manuscript in May, and several Russian media outlets wrote about the "creatures" found in the photographs of Venus. Chief Researcher at the Institute of Space Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IKI RAS), Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Leonid Ksanfomaliti made out 18 representatives of flora and fauna in the images of the planet 30 years old or more.

“Look, here are two mushrooms. On the panorama of "Venus-13" their conical folded "caps" are visible, - says the scientist. Another picture shows an alleged animal that "got out from under the soil that covered it and got into the lens, and then (presumably) crawled away."

The article "Hypothetical signs of life on the planet Venus: revision of the results of television experiments in 1975-1982" Ksanfomaliti co-authored with Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Academician Lev Zeleny, Chairman of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences Valentin Parmon and Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of General Physics Novosibirsk State University Valery Snytnikov. It was published in the scientific journal "Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk", which is included in the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI).

If the pseudo discoverer of life on Venus had published an article in a "predatory" journal, it would probably not have been known about it at all. But it came out in an authoritative, peer-reviewed scientific journal, which has been boldly referenced by dozens of media outlets.

Such publications in "predatory" (otherwise - "garbage") scientific journals abroad are no longer surprised. Predators are publications that publish literally everything for money. This has been proven by the experiments of skeptics. In November 2014, the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, for example, published the article "Get me off your damn mailing list." Only this phrase was repeated on 10 pages. A year later, 17 journals published an article by fictional author Pinkerton LeBrain (after the cartoon mice Pinky and Brain) - "The surgical and neoplastic role of cocoa in breakfast cereals." And these are just a couple of examples from a collection of fake articles by American biologist Zen Faulkes.

The descent vehicle of the automatic interplanetary station (AMS) "Venera-13". Baikonur Cosmodrome, 1982

"Predatory" publications sometimes take names that are identical to those of authoritative scientific publications. However, some of them ended up in the quoted lists of the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, which was revealed thanks to the "Bill's list." It is called entirely Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals. Almost 10 years ago, the librarian of the University of Colorado in the United States, Geoffrey Bill, began to collect "predators" by whose name the list is named. It began with the fact that he, as an adjunct professor, was invited to the council of one of the journals and in the letter there were a lot of grammatical errors.

Super-scientific articles

It is problematic to calculate the exact number of "predatory" magazines both abroad and in Russia. If only because the procedure for refutation and withdrawal of scientific articles takes much longer than publication in a "junk" journal without peer review. In 2016, the number of scientific journals in Russia was estimated at 12 thousand. The list of publications of the Higher Attestation Commission (VAK, publication in them is a mandatory requirement for applicants for a scientific degree) - about 2 thousand, in the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) - more than 6 thousand.

The "Dissertationopedia of Russian Journals" - a kind of analogue of "Bill's List" - began with a revision of Vakov's publications. The VAK list includes only those journals that have a peer review institute and whose numbers are included in at least one of the world citation systems, including the mentioned WoS and Scopus. But dubious articles appear there as well.

Of the 18 scientific journals in which, according to the Dissernet network community, pseudoscientific articles were published, 10 are in the current list of the Higher Attestation Commission. And in five of them, such materials were released after being included in the list. It is worth paying attention to at least two such articles.

The full name of the first one: "The over-necessity of an early super-transition to super-all-integration (super-all-being, super-all-social) in the way of thinking, outlook - and thus to super-all-disciplinarity and super-all-methodology, to super-all-convergence in science and training." It was published in the "Bulletin of the Pyatigorsk State University" by the rector of this university, Alexander Gorbunov.

He owns about a hundred more scientific works, including "Social transformative super-alternative (super-perspective) for Russia and all mankind as a successful super-exit from a deep and global super-crisis", as well as the guide work "How to manage the world, positively transforming it: creation- evolutionary transparadigmatics and transparametrics, transconsociotics and transsynergetics of a unified world order”. In January, the super-rector's overheads caught media attention. Apparently, this had no consequences either for him or for the magazine.

The author of the second remarkable work proves that the Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe did not take place in the 13th century, as everyone thought, but in the 16th. Incidentally, this author, A. M. Tyurin, also developed the principles of the so-called (them) new linguistics. These are the rules of word formation, consistent with the "New Chronology" of Anatoly Fomenko and Gleb Nosovsky, a pseudoscientific theory of a radical revision of world history.

Doubtful articles in five journals that were published before being included in the VAK list were not deleted. So in respected publications you can still read about the influence of external cosmic radiation on the structuring of the liquid on the day of Epiphany and about the contacts of the Maya Indians with the ancient Rus, which took place long before the arrival of the conquistadors.

The article by Oleg Epstein in the journal "Practical Medicine" has not been deleted or refuted. Epstein is the director and scientific director of Materia Medica Holding, which produces homeopathic medicines. An article published in Practical Medicine even before the journal entered the VAK list tells about homeopathic preparations, which are called "release-active". In 2017, homeopathy was recognized as a pseudoscience by the RAS Commission for Combating Scientific Research Falsification. In 2018, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Epstein, the Antropogenesis.ru portal and the Evolution Foundation awarded the VRAL prize for his contribution to pseudoscience. And his firm was awarded by the Ministry of Education and Science with an anti-award "for the most harmful pseudoscientific project."

An alien with a "Sad Reptilian" statuette at the presentation of the anti-award "Honorary Academician VRAL" in the framework of the scientific and educational forum "Scientists against myths - 8"

Izvestia turned to the Higher Attestation Commission for a comment on the removal and refutation of such works. As the chief scientific secretary of the commission, Igor Matskevich, answered, the Higher Attestation Commission does not interfere in the editorial policy of the journals. But for an unscientific publication, the journal may be excluded from the list.

Igor Matskevich, Chief Scientific Secretary of the Higher Attestation Commission

There are a large number of applicants (including scientists and graduate students) who apply to the Higher Attestation Commission and the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia with claims about certain publications in scientific journals. In the event that such claims are confirmed by the experts of the Higher Attestation Commission and the violations revealed relate to the quality of scientific publications, the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission recommends that the ministry exclude a particular journal from the list of the Higher Attestation Commission.

Partly encouraging in this situation is the recent proposal of the Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexei Khokhlov to radically reduce the number of scientific journals included in the VAK list from more than 2 thousand to about 700. True, Khokhlov in fact proposes replacing the VAK list with the list of journals included in the database data in the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI). It was created in 2015 as an alternative to Vakovskaya. It included a magazine from where we learned about the alleged inhabitants of Venus, and two more publications that were noticed for publishing pseudoscientific articles.

Scientists versus magazines

It was possible to exclude from scientific databases journals publishing outright nonsense thanks to enthusiasts, the Russian Pinkertons LeBrain. In 2008, Mikhail Gelfand, Deputy Director of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, together with his colleagues sent an article titled "The Rooter: An Algorithm for Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" to the Journal of Scientific Publications of Postgraduate and Doctoral Students. This journal, from a list of state-recognized scientific journals, attracted Gelfand's attention due to its extremely low quality of articles and aggressive advertising policy.

The pointless article was compiled by the Scigen quasi-scientific text generator. Gelfand translated the text (program) into Russian, and after payment for the publication of 4,500 rubles, the article was accepted for publication with "minor remarks" from the reviewer. The color of this story is added by the fact that in 2005 the same text in English was accepted for consideration by the World Conference on Systematics, Cybernetics and Informatics in Florida.

Page for the pseudoscientific article "Towards a Split-Identity" created with SCIgen

In the article, among other things, the time was measured in cylinders, researchers with the names Gayson (English "gay son"), Softporn (English "pornoerotics"), as well as Professor M. Gelfand himself, who assisted in the generation of scientific texts, were mentioned. Nevertheless, it came out, and after a big scandal in the media, the magazine was excluded from the VAK list. In 2009, the editor-in-chief of the magazine tried to get him back on the list through the courts and was refused.

According to Gelfand, such actions can cleanse the world of unscrupulous scientific journals. “Here's a way out for you,” he concluded. - We need to write a hundred "Rootters", and everything will become clear at once. " Although the "Journal of Scientific Publications of Postgraduate and Doctoral Students" has not been closed. Its website was last updated in November 2018.

The scandal that erupted in the United States after the publication of an article by the scientific journalist John Bohannon in the journal Science had no particular consequences. He sent out an article on cancer treatment with serious and notable errors in 304 peer-reviewed scientific journals. 157 magazines in one form or another (mainly about the need to transfer money for publication or expand the introduction) accepted a fake. Among them were magazines owned by Elsevier. This company owns one of the most famous databases of scientific periodicals, Scopus. In a high-profile article, Bohannon cited the names of several magazines that agreed to publish the nonsense. And they continue to come out to this day.

Science journalist John Bohannon

Scientometric fetishism

In 2017, VAK excluded 293 journals from its list. Then 344 editions were deleted from the RSCI system. Then the general director of the "Scientific Electronic Library" eLibrary Gennady Eremenko assumed that out of 6 thousand publications included in the database, about a thousand were "junk". In the list of Dissernet's persons, the leaders in the "trash" cases have hundreds of publications. For example, the professor of the Moscow State Academy of Water Transport Oleg Kochetov has 626 (now it is not mentioned on the university website), the leading engineer of MEPhI Vladimir Svinarenko has 241.

RSCI, after excluding 350 journals, gave recommendations on the calculation of "predators"

► a sharp increase in the number of publications;

► inaccurate reviews;

► a bloated list of core disciplines;

► placement fee.

However, according to the law, the Vakovsk magazines, despite budget funding, are not prohibited from taking money. The question is what they are hired for: it’s one thing if they go to pay publishers, it’s another for fake reviews, or even writing articles. This service is offered by dozens of intermediary offices, which indirectly indicates the presence of demand. Submitting an article to the Vakovsky journal will cost an average of 10-15 thousand rubles, in Scopus - about 30 thousand.

Publishing in magazines outside the lists is cheaper. They are useful not only for scientists for paper reporting, but also for commercial structures. So, scientific research is cited by companies that offer "fortune-telling by prints" - dermatoglyphic testing. Most of the articles they mentioned were published in little-known publications, some of which ended up in the "predators".

Most scientists secure work with the help of scientific grants, which, "according to recent practice, are given not for an idea, but for highly rated publications already available to applicants," says an article to the scientific-practical conference of the Association of Scientific Editors and Publishers (ANRI) 2017 year.

It turns out to be a vicious circle: research is needed to obtain scientific results; money is needed to carry them out; to get them, you need articles - and as many as possible. Constantly breaking through to authoritative publications is boring, and therefore small publishers appear. An eminent editor-in-chief is not enough, again, money is needed, and in the absence of a sponsor and a paid subscription, a model is taken for armament, when the publication pays off by charging the authors. This is the main way the "predatory magazines" work and the reason why they grow like mushrooms after rain.

“Publishing costs will be easily offset by the large grants that can be received if the journal gets to the list of good journals, ie. publications indexed in key global citation systems ", - note the authors of the article, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the journal" Bulletin of Moscow University. Series 16. Biology”(not included in the list of“Dissertationopedia”) Alexander Khokhlov, as well as two employees of the journal Alexander Klebanov and Galina Morgunova.

Around a million scientific workers, including post-graduate students, “knock” on scientific journals a year. Such calculations were cited by Natalya Alimova, Candidate of Economic Sciences, who opposed the black list of publications. In her opinion, violations are a logical consequence of inadequate demand.

The ANRI experts called the reason for the appearance of such a number of "predatory" journals "scientometric fetishism." “Scientists are offered, or rather strongly recommended, to develop a 'constructive' ability to bake publications, like pies or hamburgers - in the factory logic of a conveyor belt, stamping, and standardization. Instead of full-fledged food, McDonald's serves beautifully packaged and conditionally edible food, and modern science produces beautifully packaged garbage instead of full-fledged scientific articles,”say Anna Kuleshova, Ph. D. RAS Denis Podvoisky.

By 2020, five Russian universities should enter the top hundred of the world's best - this is the level set by the state. And one of the steps towards this goal is the increase in the number of scientific publications. Over 2010-2016, it really increased among universities participating in the 5-100 project - more than five times, scientists from the Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics and the State Public Scientific and Technical Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (an article on this topic was published last year in the scientific journal Scientometrics, which is not listed as "predatory").

The researchers believe that a sharp increase in the number of publications was achieved, among other things, due to the "predatory" strategy - sending articles to publications where money is at the forefront, and sometimes they turn a blind eye to peer review. Out of 21 universities, it was massively adopted by two, primarily the Kazan Federal University, which was also among the leaders in the development of the budget. More than a thousand publications in junk magazines were counted in 2015 alone.