From the “may the Farce be with you” department and the Neuroskeptic Blog @ Discover
By Neuroskeptic | July 22, 2017 4:57 am
A number of so-called scientific journals have accepted a Star Wars-themed spoof paper. The manuscript is an absurd mess of factual errors, plagiarism and movie quotes. I know because I wrote it.
Inspired by previous publishing “stings”, I wanted to test whether ‘predatory‘ journals would publish an obviously absurd paper. So I created a spoof manuscript about “midi-chlorians” – the fictional entities which live inside cells and give Jedi their powers in Star Wars. I filled it with other references to the galaxy far, far away, and submitted it to nine journals under the names of Dr Lucas McGeorge and Dr Annette Kin.
Four journals fell for the sting. The American Journal of Medical and Biological Research (SciEP) accepted the paper, but asked for a $360 fee, which I didn’t pay. Amazingly, three other journals not only accepted but actually published the spoof. Here’s the paper from the International Journal of Molecular Biology: Open Access (MedCrave), Austin Journal of Pharmacology and Therapeutics (Austin) and American Research Journal of Biosciences (ARJ) I hadn’t expected this, as all those journals charge publication fees, but I never paid them a penny.
So what did they publish? A travesty, which they should have rejected within about 5 minutes – or 2 minutes if the reviewer was familiar with Star Wars. Some highlights:
- “Beyond supplying cellular energy, midichloria perform functions such as Force sensitivity…”
- “Involved in ATP production is the citric acid cycle, also referred to as the Kyloren cycle after its discoverer”
- “Midi-chlorians are microscopic life-forms that reside in all living cells – without the midi-chlorians, life couldn’t exist, and we’d have no knowledge of the force. Midichlorial disorders often erupt as brain diseases, such as autism.”
- “midichloria DNA (mtDNRey)” and “ReyTP”
And so on. I even put the legendary Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise monologue in the paper:
Ironically, I’m not even a big Star Wars fan. I just like the memes.
To generate the main text of the paper, I copied the Wikipedia page on ‘mitochondrion’ (which, unlike midichlorians, exist) and then did a simple find/replace to turn mitochondr* into midichlor*. I then Rogeted the text, i.e. I reworded it (badly), because the main focus of the sting was on whether journals would publish a ridiculous paper, not whether they used a plagiarism detector (although Rogeting is still plagiarism in my book.)
For transparency, I admitted what I’d done in the paper itself. The Methods section features the line “The majority of the text of this paper was Rogeted [7]”. Reference 7 cited an article on Rogeting followed by “The majority of the text in the current paper was Rogeted from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion Apologies to the original authors of that page.”
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None of the links to the published articles now works.
I hope you had time to make a web.archive.org copy or similar of the published articles.
If you did, can you please provide a working link to the published articles as they appeared at the time?
Haha hahaha! !!!
Brilliant effort!!
Just waiting for the trolls to come to their defence , Charles the dragon slayer .
I hope you archived your papers! They have been 404’d
Look how many papers have been published that depend upon the existance of a radiant greenhouse effect caused by trace gases with LWIR absorption bands. The fact is that a radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed anywhere in the solar system including the Earth. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction hence the AGW conjecture is science fiction and anything based on the AGW conjecture is also science fiction. There are a lot of “science journals” that are really “science fiction journals”. Peer review is really a political review depending upon the peers.
@willhaas. Well that’s one opinion, there are others here and I think the most common is a belief in the GHG effect but a thinking its effect is somewhat smaller than the CAGW adherants. We certainly see it talked about a lot, and still no nearer a resolution of these conflicting views. Dare I suggest a novel approach – conduct some repeatable experiments.
With a selection of appropriately designed experiments it should be possible to confirm (or falsify) the existence of a GHG effect and also, if so confirmed, to get some handle on it’s magnitude. If we can quantify it we can make some progress.
Possible outcomes are:
1. It’s actually negative and acts as “holes in the blanket”. Earth cools.
2. It’s zero. Dead dragons litter the Earth.
3. It’s nearly zero, very very small. One dragon lives.
4. It’s significant but won’t cause Global Warming. Anthony buys the beers.
5. It’s actually as high as the IPCC calculated, or higher. Mann wins court case.
Two questions for our distinguished authors. 1) What does say about the amount and quality of peer review? And, 2) what does it say about how dense the gray mater (if it exists) in the journal editors and publishers.
…everything you need to know
Love this approach. Satire works
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ivGMlnotG4EJ:https://arjonline.org/uploads/articleInPress/2/70118ARJB2017005.pdf%2Barjonline.org/uploads/articleInPress/2/70118ARJB2017005.pdf
The force is strong with this one!
When I was a chemical engineering student, working at CSIRO, I came across a (hoax) paper entitled, the toxicological properties of laevorotatory ice crystals, in the Analyst. Google it, there is an interesting back story.
So it was the Midichlorians in the atmosphere all along that was causing the warming?
Dare I mention the ‘N’ word or has it already been awarded to Trump for getting elected?
Maybe someone should rearrange the words and try some climate journals where so much outlandish unchecked quackery gets published demonizing CO2.
LiveScience covered this too, and noted that “JSM Biochemistry and Molecular Biology requested Neuroskeptic revise and resubmit the paper; whoever read it there got the joke and asked that the revised paper include such citations as Palpatine, et al. 1980.”