On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 02:14:26PM -0600, Roger Critchlow wrote: > Russ Abbott reposted this on g+, but it's too meritorious not to be > archived here: > > > http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=6577844 > > Take published articles by highly respected authors, replace the authors > and institutions with fakes, resubmit to the same journals that originally > published the articles, and watch what happens. >
What astounded me was the very low detection of resubmission (8%). This was in spite of the articles having been published within the previous two years in the _same_ journals. Obviously these must be large journals with multiple editors who clearly aren't across what their colleagues are doing. The other concerning thing is that the rejection rate of the papers that pass that filter is so high (89%), particularly that it is higher than the rejection rate for new articles submitted to. Obviously, I would expect the rejection rate to be greater than 0, but it should be less than the overall journal rejection rate, as the paper concerned have already run the gauntlett of peer review. I guess the conclusion is that referees were being influenced by who wrote the paper, not the contents. It'd be interesting to redo the experiment today - although I would hope that journals now have a better detection of article resubmission in place. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
