Not content with past exposes of predatory journals, Discover.com blogger Neuroskeptic tells the tale of hir own saga fighting the evil empire. In hir words,
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.
The idea being that many hoaxes would be obvious to those with an understanding of the relevant field(s), but typically would not be obvious to those without expertise. The question, I suppose, was merely one of how brazen are the fraudulent and predatory journals in their ethical violations, not simply whether they are acting ethically. The results? Out of 9 publishers who received the manuscript:
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)
How did Neuroskeptic do it? Well the methodology is easy enough that any of us could replicate the experiment to confirm the results:
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.”
Read the whole blog post for more details, including the excerpt of the paper that retold the parable of Darth Plaugeis. But the most tragic detail included in the post (at least IMNSHO) was that the 3 of 4 predatory publishers who accepted the paper who turned out to actually publish it? They nominally charge fees before publication, but forgot to collect their money:
I hadn’t expected this, as all those journals charge publication fees, but I never paid them a penny.
Not even competent at fraud. That’ll go over big as a defense if there’s ever a trial.
Finally, the experiment was not without a high note or two:
Two journals requested me to revise and resubmit the manuscript. At JSM Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (JSciMedCentral) both of the two peer reviewers spotted and seemingly enjoyed the Star Wars spoof, with one commenting that “The authors have neglected to add the following references: Lucas et al., 1977, Palpatine et al., 1980, and Calrissian et al., 1983”. Despite this, the journal asked me to revise and resubmit.
Help us, careful peer reviewers. You’re our only hope.
Classic!
Oh & I really like “Annette Kin” – good idea for a female Anakin clone in an actual SW set tale maybe? 😉
One thing :
Isn’t putting something into your own words from you’ve read, a usual teaching technique to show that you’ve actually understood the subject matter? Is re-wording really a form of plagiarism if you’re trying to find better / your own ways of explaining or discussing something? Or am I not getting precisely what you mean by Rogeting here?
Also be interesting to see how many would have picked up on that and published had you not confessed it was your methodology.
having Rogeted the text is explained as having “reworded it (badly)”, but this is not doing what you might suppose. You ask:
Except there is no effort to find better ways of explaining. Rogeting is typically software-automated and involves no changes to word order. The program simply looks up a synonym for each word of sufficient length and/or rarity (it typically does not change words like “is” or “doing” or “myself”). You can find websites online to engage in Rogeting text, and Wikipedia can give you more discussion of the phenomenon.
This typically makes the text less understandable, not more, since many words are synonyms for one definition of another word, but not necessarily the most common definition. Worse, sometimes the (rogeted) context for the substituted word would strongly suggest that the desired definition of that new word is NOT the definition synonymous with the original word.
While you could use automated Rogeting of text as a starting point, then go through the text to determine how to cobble back together the original meaning (and that would necessarily involve actual understanding of the original text), merely Rogeting the text requires no understanding – it merely requires copying and pasting text into an online tool, then copying that tools output and pasting it into your final paper.
Does that help?
By the way, Times Higher Education has a piece on the coining of Rogeting by a professor at a business school. It’s full of win. The professor figured out fairly quickly that context/content blind synonym substitution was happening, but had to go further to figure out the original source(s) for a student’s paper and the original intended meanings:
Awesome. I’m going to have to find an excuse to write about the Rapture so I can work in the phrase Sinister Buttocks.
@ 2. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden : Thanks, yes that explains it and yeah, I was misunderstanding what was meant by “rogeting” before. Got it now. Cheers!
Cheers back. I always enjoy a question asked in good faith!
…besides, without looking up my sources, I would never have found “sinister buttocks”, so I suppose I owe you a large helping of thanks!