![peerreview[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/peerreview1.jpg?quality=83)
Science publishing giant Springer, with over 2900 journals, has announced on its website that 64 articles published in 10 of its journals are being retracted. Editorial staff found evidence of fake email addresses for peer reviewers.
No word yet on what type of papers, or if any climate papers are involved.
From press release:
Retraction of articles from Springer journals
London | Heidelberg, 18 August 2015
Springer confirms that 64 articles are being retracted from 10 Springer subscription journals, after editorial checks spotted fake email addresses, and subsequent internal investigations uncovered fabricated peer review reports. After a thorough investigation we have strong reason to believe that the peer review process on these 64 articles was compromised. We reported this to the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) immediately. Attempts to manipulate peer review have affected journals across a number of publishers as detailed by COPE in their December 2014 statement. Springer has made COPE aware of the findings of its own internal investigations and has followed COPE’s recommendations, as outlined in their statement, for dealing with this issue. Springer will continue to participate and do whatever we can to support COPE’s efforts in this matter.
The peer-review process is one of the cornerstones of quality, integrity and reproducibility in research, and we take our responsibilities as its guardians seriously. We are now reviewing our editorial processes across Springer to guard against this kind of manipulation of the peer review process in future.
In all of this, our primary concern is for the research community. A research paper is the result of funding investment, institutional commitment and months of work by the authors, and publishing outputs affect careers, funding applications and institutional reputations.
We have been in contact with the corresponding authors and institutions concerned, and will continue to work with them.
source: http://www.springer.com/gb/about-springer/media/statements/retraction-of-articles-from-springer-journals/735218
h/t to Leif Svalgaard
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More reason to have a Scientific Data and Conclusion Validation and Verification Agency. Why is it that the liberal industries are all unregulated? The Press, Academia, Legal, The Internet, Education? They seem to want to regulate everyone else, but avoid government scrutiny. We need to turn the government against these liberals like the liberals turn the Government on the Conservatives. The “peer” review process needs criminal oversight. I bet some of those retracted research papers were funded by the tax payer.
I’m pretty sure that once we pull the curtain away and expose these liberal groups what we will find is pretty horrific.
https://youtu.be/FzMAycMMXp8
Remember Obama’s Acorn would help you set up a child sex slavery ring.
https://youtu.be/2CMXMC7vba4
If liberal groups will help you set up a child sex slavery group, they certainly will forge Peer Review Documents and lie about Global Warming.
“More reason to have a Scientific Data and Conclusion Validation and Verification Agency. ”
Tribalism is never the answer.
I know it’s our primal instinct to form factions but it’s what’s holding science and society as a whole back. It needs to be a free-4-all so that factions like in climate science or politics don’t form:
“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”
-John Adams
That is why the analysis would be done in a double blind manner. No one would ever look at the climate data in an objective manner and reach the conclusion CO2 is the cause. CO2 only becomes the cause when the researchers know they are trying to make CO2 the cause. Remove the data from the labels and CO2 will never pop up as being significant again.
[Snip. Fake email address. ~mod.]
I wonder if RichardSCourtney’s ‘Energy and the Environment’ was involved?
I wonder if Warrenlb is a paid troll or not.
Whoops, sorry. Energy and the Environment couldn’t be involved – it’s not a peer reviewed journal.
I’ve not found a single person so far who supports global warming who doesn’t in some way have their snout in the trough of public money dolloped out from this supposed “issue”.
Warren why are you lying? E&E is peer-reviewed.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/04/correcting-misinformation-about-journal.html#Peer-Reviewed
Where is Warren’s apology for lying about E&E?
What a surprise. Sneering from someone who couldn’t READ a science article if his life depended on it … let alone, WRITE one. It’s so easy to take anonymous pot shots at your betters from the cheap seats, isn’t it?
It wasn’t actually.
But you are correct to suspect that only prestigious journals would be targeted.
No-one would take this risk to get into a poor journal, would they?
The IPCC cited them at least 28 times in their last three reports from year 2000 to year 2014 reports: http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/04/correcting-misinformation-about-journal.html#IPCC
The full list is in the above link.
Your attack against Richard Courtney is silly.
Anyone have facts disputing these quotes?—
‘When asked about the publication in the Spring of 2003 of a revised version of the paper at the center of the Soon and Baliunas controversy, Boehmer-Christiansen said, “I’m following my political agenda — a bit, anyway. But isn’t that the right of the editor?” (the editor’s statement of objectivity!)
And:
Ralph Keeling criticized a paper in the journal which claimed that CO2 levels were above 400 ppm in 1825, 1857 and 1942, writing in a letter to the editor, “Is it really the intent of E&E to provide a forum for laundering pseudo-science?”
And:
“A 2005 article in Environmental Science & Technology stated that “scientific claims made in Energy & Environment have little credibility among scientists.”
And:
According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2012 impact factor of 0.319, ranking it 90th out of 93 journals in the category “Environmental Studies”
And:
According to a 2011 article in The Guardian, Gavin Schmidt and Roger A. Pielke, Jr. said that E&E has had low standards of peer review and little impact.
I agree with the previous poster that few would want to bother to publish in E&E.
Notice that Warren ignores the undisputed fact that the IPCC cited them 28 times?
Notice that he ignored this part too:
“Energy & Environment is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary scholarly journal
ISSN: 0958-305X
– Indexed in Compendex, EBSCO, Environment Abstracts, Google Scholar, JournalSeek, Scopus and Thompson Reuters (ISI)
– Found at hundreds of libraries and universities worldwide in print and electronic form. These include; Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Library of Congress, McGill University, Monash University, National Library of Australia, Stanford University, The British Library, University of British Columbia, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Queensland and MIT.”
You posted unsubstantiated opinions from Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Pielke from a NEWSPAPER article 4 years ago.
It is clear that you have an axe to grind with E and E.
warren, these have been addressed in the link you apparently did not read.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/04/correcting-misinformation-about-journal.html#Political
Warren I suggest not copying and pasting inaccurate garbage you find off Wikipedia.
This statement is ironic considering Keeling is published in Energy & Environment.
E&E is cited 28 times in the IPCC reports. So do the IPCC reports have credibility?
http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/04/correcting-misinformation-about-journal.html#IPCC
http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/04/correcting-misinformation-about-journal.html#Impact
Actually it is a legitimate group since they are accepted by many as shown here in this quote:
“Energy & Environment is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary scholarly journal
ISSN: 0958-305X
– Indexed in Compendex, EBSCO, Environment Abstracts, Google Scholar, JournalSeek, Scopus and Thompson Reuters (ISI)
– Found at hundreds of libraries and universities worldwide in print and electronic form. These include; Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Library of Congress, McGill University, Monash University, National Library of Australia, Stanford University, The British Library, University of British Columbia, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Queensland and MIT.”
Correcting misinformation about the journal Energy & Environment
http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/04/correcting-misinformation-about-journal.html#IPCC
It appears Warren, that you just made yourself look stupid here.
sunsettommy, he pretty much does that everytime he hits the “post comment” button
This is what WARREN stated that I responded to: ” Warrenlb
August 19, 2015 at 8:15 pm
Whoops, sorry. Energy and the Environment couldn’t be involved – it’s not a peer reviewed journal.”
I showed that it is indeed listed as shown in a link I posted: “Energy & Environment is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary scholarly journal
ISSN: 0958-305X
– Indexed in Compendex, EBSCO, Environment Abstracts, Google Scholar, JournalSeek, Scopus and Thompson Reuters (ISI)”
He then after being shown to be 100% wrong, tries to minimize the journal with opinions from just TWO people,that was from the Guardian article of FOUR years ago!!!
Come on Warren, you are looking really bad here since I proved you flat out wrong, you try to wiggle your way out with this specious crap.
Oh, so it is a peer reviewed journal; does this mean it is involved in the scams you’re concerned about?
its cited 28 times among 24,000 peer reviewed journal papers published, or about 0.1%, mostly for policy essays rather than science.
So the question still stands….anyone have facts that contradict the ones I cited?
Warren goes on and on against E and E.
I have successfully answered your incorrect statement, that it was not a listed peer review journal.
YOU wrote this:
“Whoops, sorry. Energy and the Environment couldn’t be involved – it’s not a peer reviewed journal.”
I showed that it is a peer reviewed journal:
“Energy & Environment is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary scholarly journal
ISSN: 0958-305X
– Indexed in Compendex, EBSCO, Environment Abstracts, Google Scholar, JournalSeek, Scopus and Thompson Reuters (ISI)”
End of story.
You are WRONG and I proved it!
Good day.
Warrenlb is just a Soros troll. Ignore him!
He will be called off by his master soon enough, given that Soros just bought a lot of coal
Warren, you have been exposed as a lying hack.
Energy & Environment is a multi-disciplinary scholarly journal so that includes social-science papers. E&E has been cited in all 3 working groups of the IPCC and none of those are political essays.
Are you claiming the Working Group II and III sections are not important in the IPCC reports?
That was already answered earlier in the thread,here it is: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/19/peer-review-is-broken-springer-announces-64-papers-retracted-due-to-fake-reviews/#comment-2011429
You are here to sling mud,nothing else.
Retraction Watch has been covering related stories for some time now and reports that Springer is also the owner of BioMed Central Journals which retracted 43 papers earlier this year, also for fake peer reviews.
http://retractionwatch.com/2015/08/17/64-more-papers-retracted-for-fake-reviews-this-time-from-springer-journals/
That brings the total number for this one company to more than a hundred in a single year. Going further, Retraction Watch reports that there have been roughly 1,500 papers retracted across various science journals since 2012, with approximately 15% of them being for faked peer reviews.
You can see the list of the 64 recalled articles here
http://link.springer.com/search?query=The+Publisher+and+Editor+retract+this+article+in+accordance+with+the+recommendations+of+the+Committee+on+Publication+Ethics+%28COPE%29&date-facet-mode=between&facet-start-year=2015&previous-start-year=1995&facet-end-year=2015&previous-end-year=2015
they are mostly from journals such as Molecular Neurobiology and Tumor Biology along with several others.
it does beg the question of how many other science journals are quietly scotching published articles once they’ve been originally put out into the ether. And if the system was so easy to fool that people were allowed to offer their own peer reviewers and could throw the system off the trail with a devilishly clever idea like a fake email address, how solid is the rest of the data out there?
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/19/leading-science-publisher-retracts-dozens-of-papers-for-fake-peer-reviews/
Government grants has caused lying to become too easy in science.
Climate change expert sentenced to 32 months for fraud, says lying was a ‘rush’
This is nothing. 64 papers (or 64 + 43). I was certain (long before reading the later comments) that no climate papers were involved. Climatastrophists could use actual peers, since there are at least 77 who would sign off on any CAGW/AGW paper, no matter how incompetent. If Springer used more sophisticated methods of finding pal review than just checking eddresses, there’d be more like 6400 papers to retract, many of them by climate “scientists.”
Looks like all the retracted papers have authors with Chinese names…not random then.
One in three people is Chinese.
It would be clearer if that authors had, say, Finnish names.
They haven’t (yet) learnt how to play the system like the climate guys!
The obvious answer to difficulties in getting your paper published is to start your own journal (on line so as to not worry about the cost of actually printing it), get your friends to review your paper, publish it, including the reviews, and then get friends to write letters about it in as many other journals as you can think up. Not only is it then out in the public sphere, but you also have a long string of citations. You can then write a revised version and get it published in a ‘real’ journal – after all, you are a published scientist and have joined the “club”.
Thinks – if you have started your own journal on line, then you may find other people want to have papers published – you can accept them, and who knows – you may eventually make money with your own journal! Probably more profitable than your day job.
Peer review: the process by which a scientist gets other scientists who agree with him to confirm that he’s right.
To those outraged by my description, I think this is one application of the old saying, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.” IOW, it’s not supposed to work that way, but I think it often does so.
It’s all very political. Academics are all social liberal democrats – and science is the tyranny of the facts.
The big problem is that real Science isn’t Politically correct and so the academics hate it.
Bingo!!! We have a winner.
Also, as Andrew Klavan pointed out this week, Science Plus Politics Equals Politics.
http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2015/08/17/science-plus-politics-equals-politics/?singlepage=true
They’ll soon have finished taking care of that little obstacle. Even as we speak, Science is nearly deader than stink. So Springer found 64 phony “peers?” BFD. That’s like celebrating finding 64 pimples on a corpse, ignoring the knife they’ve plunged into its back.
My bet is that the great majority of the retracted papers were in biology. Biology has been where most of the scientific fraud has occurred in ever increasing numbers in recent years.,
In the last 18 months I have been reading papers about clinical trials for chemotheraphy drugs and observed that a number of the papers contained errors. Although the errors mainly involved information contradicting information else where in the paper and would not affect the overall findings of the papers it is pretty unprofessional to allow the papers to be published unamended. I think that it would be helpful if a person outside the area of expertise of the paper was included in the peer review to over come issues of confirmation bias ie for instance an engineer reviewing a medical paper.
Good observation. Your suggestion, if followed, might also greatly improve clarity.
……The peer-review process is one of the cornerstones of quality, integrity and reproducibility in research, and we take our responsibilities as its guardians seriously.
Never laughed so much before in my life. You owe me a new keyboard…
The “reproducible” is the most laughable part since providing the data is not required and authors stringently refuse to provide data even when asked. Some will not even answer detailed questions on methodology.
When the ability to reproduce goes out the window so does science.
Some publishers like Public Library of Science are now mandating the data be available, the question remains why was data not required before and why are all publishers not mandating data.
“When the ability to reproduce goes out the window so does science.”
But now even “sciency” persons (people working in the scientific fields) believe that the definition of the scientific process is the peer review system of science journals.
The education system works: even professionals, those who should know better, get brainwashed.
‘or if any climate papers are involved’
To be fair the number of people who are more than willing to ‘back scratch’ and the fact that climate ‘science’ has standards that are below that of undergraduate handing in an essay, means they do not need any fake people ‘ They have more than enough real people happy to sell themselves out to ensure they are see to support ‘the cause ‘ and ensure their next grant cheque.
The problem climate academics had, was that for years they could behave like an arts subject cherry picking the facts to fill their papers will political non-science because no one could ever prove them wrong. So, they just got into the habit of publishing garbage of attacking any academics who were not “politically correct” and generally behaving like any liberal arts subject.
But then a few decades later, new facts came in that could not just be cherry picked to fit their politics and which proved that they had been disastrously wrong.
So, now you have a heavily politicised subject with the standards of an arts subject that only used “science” as packaging for its eco-politics having to face the cold reality of the facts that necessitate the higher standards in real science.
In Marxist thought, you NEVER face the facts. You just kill everyone who cites them.
“We have been in contact with the corresponding authors and institutions concerned, and will continue to work with them.”
I would have thought that this was grounds to DIScontinue working with them.
Does this mean the 32,000 year old who took part in a prestigious survey for Lewendowsky was a fake ?
No, Nick Stokes has said they do do game the system when it comes to climate papers. Anything that deals with Climate is above bio-medical. Meanwhile Tom Brady wrote a paper on deflate gate and his Patriot teammates reviewed it with real email addresses. So he’s off the hook now.
In any human endeavor including science the foibles of bias, incompetence, stupidity, greed, and dishonesty can come into play. The issue is to what degree the results of these foibles affect society. Climate, nutrition and sociology seem to be the worst culprits in spawning a potpourri of harmful unsubstantiated alarmism. When climate and sociology come together in a paper you know there is potential for a bonanza of stupid.
A research paper titled “Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes,” passed peer review. The title alone should have tossed based on a title that suggests hurricanes have a gender. Reading further the premise was that due to implicit sexism female named hurricanes were not taken as seriously as male named hurricanes and so less preparation was taken. A sociological hypothesis unfortunately not remotely demonstrated in the paper, but gaining the imprimatur of the National Academy of Sciences. While eventually debunked due to childish non-nonsensical methodology, culturally it is still used as an example of “rampant” sexism. Thank you the National Academy of Sciences for helping society remain stupid.
Sometimes it is simple dishonesty.
When Hansen published his latest prediction on major cities going underwater, he released his paper publicly and to the press first and then to peer review second. Interestingly the paper for public consumption had charged alarmist language, the paper presented for peer review did not.
Having one version for media consumption and another for scientific consumption represented as the same paper is blatantly dishonest. There is nothing that can be done to improve the peer review process that will prevent zealots like Hansen from polluting our culture.
‘blatantly dishonest’ true but you fail to realise this a standard approach for climate ‘science ‘ so Hansen was acting ‘normally ‘
Bingo, knr!
When you think you’re a messiah, there’s no such thing as dishonesty.
“No word yet on what type of articles, or if any climate papers are involved.”
Sure. It does take some time to check 64 articles, doesn’t it?. So can we assume there’s no transparency. After all, that might provoke press releases that may just give the public a glimpse of the lies and corruption behind climate science.
What a journal should do is publish all of the articles it receives (in a uniform format *with ALL data available*) and then leave it open for direct comments by any verified (e.g. real named) member of the journal forever – only snipping a comment when it is libelous or harassing. Ideally this would be in a forum-style branching conversation with specific threads for specific parts of the paper.
Then, if any errors pop up that change the outcome of the paper, two different ratings can be applied: “Member Verified / Member Disputed” can be one that switches based on the number of issues discovered with the paper and then “Journal New / Journal Vetted / Journal Disputed” as a rating based upon the journal reviewers’ review of the paper after discussion issues are raised.
It’s a huge amount of work, but it would help science in general to be this open. It would also give a central place for all of the complaints/issues with journal papers to be, instead of spread across blogs and media the world over.
The tipoff came when someone noticed that a reviewer that kept popping up with most of these papers was named “Sum Dum Fuk”.
Time to recall the Sokal Hoax, a shrewd commentary on the sad state of liberal “science”:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/
Yes, that peer reviewed, published paper makes more sense than MBH98/99.
I’m not sure how much of peer review is relevant to any thing. I know it is supposed to be a barrier to keep unsound science out of “scientific” publication but that ship has sailed! I think that sites like Anthony’s where every angle of contentious debate can be considered may be the future of peer review. People are fond of the Plate Tectonics example of bureaucratic suppression of true insight but there are numerous other examples from the Royal Societies of (plug in your favorite geographic area of the world) which unsurprisingly seem to have a hard time balancing defending the status quo with encouraging scientific curiosity. Eventually all ends up politics.
[snip]
Mother Nature trumps peer review. Even staff ‘experts’ can be blinded by ideology or erroneous mindset. The truth will ultimately prevail.
I wonder who has been fingered for cooking the books. Hopefully, it’s members of The Team again…
Others appears to be an error with the link which seems to take me to a Chinese phone book.