[HN Gopher] Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel
___________________________________________________________________
Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel
Author : qsi
Score : 504 points
Date : 2026-02-23 08:22 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chrisbrunet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chrisbrunet.com)
| roflmaostc wrote:
| It doesn't surprise me it happens within the Elsevier ecosystem.
| Elsevier has a long tradition of scientific misconduct and
| scientifically immoral behavior (see Wikipedia).
|
| The operating margin of Elsevier is around 40% which is huge! At
| the end mostly paid by tax-payer money.
|
| Personally, I never review or publish with Elsevier.
| jcattle wrote:
| One of the reasons why in Germany universities were able to
| collectively negotiate better open publishing deals with Wiley
| and Springer, but Elsevier just flat out refused to agree to
| any better terms for three years.
|
| (See Project DEAL: https://deal-
| konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier)
| seanhunter wrote:
| You are in very very good company. The British mathematician
| Timothy Gowers famously boycotts Elsevier also
|
| https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-...
| apwheele wrote:
| I am skeptical it is a problem isolated to Elsevier. Given the
| LLM craze now prioritizes open access,
| https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/08/28/deep-research-and-
| open..., it would not surprise me people start gaming MDPI in
| the same way for example.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Exactly. Elsevier is a dominant company. Of course it's going
| to have a huge share of anything that goes into journals.
| They probably also have a huge share of the Nobel prize
| winning papers too.
|
| That being said, I'm happy to encourage open access.
| azan_ wrote:
| MDPI is gamed by design, I think that while Elsevier is
| awful, MDPI is even worse with 100s of special issues where
| you are guaranteed to land publication in journals with quite
| nice IF (which is inflated by publishing large proportion of
| reviews and less original research).
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| I wonder if the term "published" as a binary distinction
| applied to a piece of writing is a term and concept that is
| reaching the end of its useful life.
|
| "Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given
| that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its
| filtering power.
|
| They might both be examples of metrics that became useless
| as a result of incentives getting attached to them.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I'm certain that the comment you responded to never claimed
| that it was "isolated to Elsevier" in the first place, nor is
| it very compelling to speculate about how in the future
| something even worse might emerge.
|
| Right now Elsevier is by far the biggest offender and also
| happens to the be the topic of the conversation and the
| article.
| roysting wrote:
| I'm not sure why I've never really concerned myself with
| Elsevier, but that makes a lot of sense, knowing a rather vile
| and slimy con artist snake that works/ed for them.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Almost hoped for an analysis about what, how, and why happened,
| but it turns out that Elsevier has little to do with the story
| and the author had a Twitter spat with someone years ago and is
| now celebrating the fact that the other side has been shown to do
| what? for which some of their papers had been retracted. Yes, I'm
| as confused.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Publishers have the final say in appointing editors in chief
| (EIC) and editors. So they bear the ultimate responsibility for
| holding editors accountable.
|
| A lot of people are to blame here, but Elsevier is definitely
| among them.
| gostsamo wrote:
| I get it, but the post is literally "I don't like this guy,
| he has fucked up, I'm happy". Elsevier is mentioned mostly to
| explain from how high the guy has fallen. Not a single line
| about what is the issue with those papers, what does it say
| about the field, nor about the policies that are compromised
| by it. Nor it explains how Elsevier is affected from all of
| this and what will change.
|
| It is a personal shitpost and I'm not sure what is
| interesting about it.
| qsi wrote:
| Elsevier editor published his own papers in the Elsevier
| journal bypassing peer review.
| gostsamo wrote:
| There are three magazines involved so this is only part
| of the story.
| boxed wrote:
| All three journals are Elsevier owned. Do try to keep up.
| qsi wrote:
| Well, I was in a rush writing that. I omitted the fact
| that not only did he publish his own papers bypassing
| peer review, he also set up a citation mill with a number
| of other Elsevier journals and was apparently involved in
| other shady business. It's detailed in the article...
| There is a personal component to it, but that's a very
| minor part of the article which documents the various
| misdeeds.
| boxed wrote:
| > Not a single line about what is the issue with those
| papers
|
| Well that's a blatant lie. Here's a quote for you:
|
| > After submitting that draft to the Elsevier finance
| ecosystem, that draft was scrubbed from SSRN, and in the
| final published version, an additional author (Samuel
| Vigne) was added as a new author, with an "equal
| contribution" statement
|
| That's EXTREMELY BAD. It's someone approaching your team
| after the research is done and asking to be put on the
| paper in exchange for publishing it.
| Nevermark wrote:
| You are judging someone's post based on your expectations, only
| because they were "unlucky" enough to have their writing up
| voted here, and you had "hoped" for something they didn't
| write.
|
| But, the internets' writers are not responsible for meeting
| your expectations.
|
| Accept things for what they are. You can still bring up your
| points.
|
| Without critiquing random people for not writing what you
| "hoped". That isn't a sensible standard.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Elsevier had no reason to stop this. Inflated citations mean
| higher impact factors, and higher impact factors justify higher
| subscription prices. Lucey published 56 papers in one year, the
| publisher got better metrics to sell. Hard to call that a rogue
| actor..
| jcattle wrote:
| > Elsevier had no reason to stop this
|
| If Elsevier had no reason to stop this, why did they stop this?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They _had_ no reason to stop this until it became publicly
| embarrassing for them.
| shevy-java wrote:
| We need open publishing. This is why Elsevier etc... use an
| outdated business model.
|
| That Elsevier now also runs more into fake-articles and fake-
| research, all fueled by the money-addiction, just adds to the
| problem (and also invalidates Elsevier's model, by the way - why
| do we now have to deal with fake science that is costly? That is
| Elsevier's business model). I fail to see why taxpayers money has
| to go into private companies for research already financed by the
| taxpayers. We are paying twice here, Elsevier.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Spot on, and beyond the 'double-dipping' business model of
| "academic publishers" like Elsevier and Springer, there's a
| massive systemic issue: taxpayers fund >90% of foundational
| research, only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin
| layer of additional research (or design) on top and then lock
| it behind patents for decades. Another example of how private
| interests are offloading the risk and costs to taxpayers while
| privatizing all the rewards.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Another example of how private interests are offloading the
| risk and costs to taxpayers while privatizing all the
| rewards.
|
| Another example of government leaders choosing to not spend
| taxpayer money to pay for the expensive trials to get
| medicine approved for use.
|
| Another example of voters voting for government leaders that
| campaign on privatizing the rewards in exchange for the
| promise of lower taxes.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Any taxpayer subsidized industry or subject is a massive
| magnet for this sort of "complex business that you can't dumb
| down or eli5 without making it look like a racket because
| it's fundamentally a racket with responsibility diffused to
| obfuscate it" stuff because taxpayer money has the most
| distant of principal agent problem and the government
| optimizes for "cog in the machine with blinders" employees
| and silo'd organizations who only care about their own ass so
| nobody ever takes a step back and says "hey the taxpayer is
| getting ripped off" until the ripoff is so obvious the
| taxpayers leann on the politicians.
| CraftingLinks wrote:
| "only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer
| of additional research (or design) on top"
|
| Citation needed.
|
| Go to market cost billions and takes a decade. Doesn't sound
| like a thin layer. I'm not disputing fundamental research in
| academia is an essential fuel to keep innovation engines
| running. But the contributions of biotech is not "thin".
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It can be. See glp1. Yes, whoever first came up with that
| approach is brilliant. But then the lemmings followed now a
| half dozen or so companies are peddling more or less the
| same product. And it comes at the cost of what isn't
| getting investment at scale instead.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Academia is basically outdated, or needs incredible reform.
|
| Industry and youtubers are making significant scientific
| progress. (I'm mostly joking about youtubers, but it does
| happen)
|
| I think Academia is where B/C-list performers pretend they are
| A-list.
| jcattle wrote:
| Who in Industry is making meaningful progress in the field of
| maths? How about astronomy? Particle Physics? Psychology?
| Sociology?
|
| I'd wager that I could name basically any field which does
| not have immediately obvious and proven ways to make money
| with through research.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Two of these are not like the others.
|
| One of the things that is so deceptive is the way so many
| people think that ways to make money need to be both
| obvious and proven.
|
| Of course you have to be very good at math or natural
| science to be able to figure out how to support your own
| research so you can get way more accomplished than you
| could at a unversity.
|
| All others need not apply.
|
| Most universities wouldn't act on your application anyway,
| if you got very far without being on the academic track,
| that could make lots of people look bad who would prefer to
| keep the status-quo more restrictive.
|
| Edit: The threat to the status-quo must have gotten bigger
| than I thought, defensive reactions are popping up quicker
| than ever.
| jcattle wrote:
| I have to be honest, I do not understand what you want to
| say with your comment.
|
| My point is that outside of fields which can somehow make
| money through research, not much scientific progress is
| made outside of universities. I don't see how you address
| this.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Very legitimate question.
|
| I address it with my whole life.
|
| It would have taken my whole life if I had stayed and
| gotten my PhD anyway, so why not?
|
| People can't expect dramatically different approaches to
| research to do anything but make it difficult for deep
| understanding between them.
|
| You really have to have an open mind.
|
| I see raw scientific progress that many outside of
| instiutions do not recognize, because so _many_ brilliant
| experimentalists do not have institutional credentials.
|
| So I had a head start and took advantage of it, kept
| giving chemistry lessons to colleagues as they went
| through graduate school.
|
| Even invented something really cool in one of their labs
| when I wasn't even a student any more.
|
| Naturally I have the greatest respect for PhDs in general
| because that in itself is a major achievement.
|
| But I wouldn't have gotten this far in such a non-
| industrial environment, core industriousness might just
| be a differentiation factor.
|
| It took a long time but eventually I came to the point
| where I just do science every day because I'm a
| scientist, and make money as a byproduct of what I do.
|
| No different than a university lab where 90% - 99% of
| your experiments will never pay off, if you can't handle
| it under a variety of financial and/or institutional
| situations you might need to look at reasons why like I
| did.
|
| Plus with a lifetime of more intense experimentation than
| if _I_ had a PhD (really do not compare myself to others)
| I 've got zillions of financial opportunities with
| chemicals in particular. The most important thing turned
| out to be curtailing the desire to make as much money as
| possible, most of this stuff is toxic.
|
| Any kind of treadmill could have led to a much worse
| outcome.
| jcattle wrote:
| That is kind of my point. Outside of a few fields (some
| branches of chemistry certainly being one of the
| exceptions) will someone pay you to do your research.
|
| I just pulled up the newest published math paper from
| arxiv. No one except universities will pay you to
| research "Quenched path limits and periodization
| stability for tilted Brownian motion in Poissonian
| potentials on Hd"
|
| Just because your specific thing you are interested in
| researching has value to the free market, doesn't mean
| that all are so lucky.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I'm with you to a very good extent, but there are so many
| more promising individuals that universities just haven't
| had enough room for the vast majority, for quite some
| time.
|
| We are all lucky that universities will still pay for
| advanced math progress like you have cited.
|
| Especially math, I stuck with that pretty good before I
| was allowed to touch chemicals.
|
| One of the real advantages is that all you need is a
| blackboard and chalk, the progress you can make is quite
| a bit compared to so many other things.
|
| As an outsider I observe the lucky ones to be the few
| that the universities are willing to pay. I think it
| would be better if there were more openings and better
| pay too.
|
| I know what you mean, but nobody has paid me to do
| research since 1982 when I was working for a commercial
| research startup.
|
| That's just what I do, and never wanted to stop.
|
| I _needed_ to be able to pursue whatever was within
| reach, knowing that almost none of it was going to be
| interesting to anybody else, financially viable or even
| worth money at all. Otherwise I would have actually
| stayed at the university.
|
| My most valuable milestones may be in electronics anyway
| where I have no university training. Had a whole lot
| earlier start there though.
|
| After a lifetime as an outlier, the consistent
| observation is that most of the institutional systems
| screen out more raw talent than they employ.
|
| I may seem extreme but it's good for somebody to strongly
| represent viable alternatives for that talent so maybe
| there will be more alternatives someday.
|
| I have always thought that universities should expand to
| encompass more of what they are doing right too, but I
| wasn't going to hold my breath :)
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| This was getting obvious even before the 1970's when
| university attendance went wild.
|
| >Academia is where B/C-list performers pretend they are
| A-list.
|
| The ones having top credentials and little more have gotten
| more & more outnumbered by more capable thinkers every
| decade, it's been nothing but circling the wagons which ends
| up creating more of an insular environment for those who love
| eminence and an exclusive status more than anything else.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Industry doesn't really care about research that doesn't
| advance the portfolio or function essentially as a
| demonstration of something in their portfolio. Academia is
| where research actually happens.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| OpenAI has done more for society than all academia over the
| same timespan.
|
| You could probably say the same about various medical
| devices/medicines. The internet. Chemistry/plastics.
|
| Sociology/psychology is historically unfalsifiable, and
| mostly useless, those are truly detriments.
|
| quantum physics might be useful, but I think even there,
| industry will do it better.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Elsevier is certainly evil, but I would say the root issue is the
| practices of the institutions where these "authors" are employed.
| This kind of thing is academic misconduct and should result in
| them losing their jobs.
| permo-w wrote:
| Evil Seer would be a good anagram if only Elsevier did any of
| the actual [re]viewing themselves
| grumbelbart2 wrote:
| This goes deeper than the institutions, actually. The KPI for
| many (non-industrial) researchers is the number of publications
| and citations. That's what careers and funding depends on.
|
| Goodhart's law states "When a measure becomes a target, it
| ceases to be a good measure", and that's what we see here.
| There is a strong incentive to publish more instead of better.
| Ideas are spread into multiple papers, people push to be listed
| as authors, citations are fought for, and some become dishonest
| and start with citation cartels, "hidden" citations in papers
| (printed small in white-on-white, meaning it's indexed by
| citation crawlers but not visible to reviewers) and so forth.
|
| This also destroys the peer review system upon which many
| venues depend. Peer reviews were never meant to catch cheaters.
| The huge number of low-to-medium quality papers in some fields
| (ML, CV) overworks reviewers, leading to things like CVPR
| forcing authors to be reviewers or face desk rejection. AI
| papers, AI reviews of dubious quality slice in even more.
|
| Ultimately the only true fix for this is to remove the
| incentives. Funding and careers should no longer depend on the
| sheer number of papers and citations. The issue is that we have
| not really found anything better yet.
| khafra wrote:
| There's imperfect ways to work with goodhartable metrics.
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fuSaKr6t6Zuh6GKaQ/when-is-
| go... talks about some of them (in the context of when they
| go bad).
| BrenBarn wrote:
| What you describe is still a problem with the institutions,
| because it is ultimately the institutions that provide the
| incentives (in the form of jobs). You're right that they're
| using bad metrics, but it is the institutions who are making
| those bad decisions based on the bad metrics.
|
| There are lots of better things, like people making hiring
| and firing decisions based on their evaluation of the content
| of papers they have actually read, instead of just a number.
| If someone is publishing so many papers that a hiring
| committee can't even read a meaningful fraction of them, that
| should be a red flag in itself, rather than a green one.
| grumbelbart2 wrote:
| It's true that hire and tenure decisions are under the
| institution's control. But a lot of funding comes from
| external sources, and most public funding uses some sort of
| publication-based metric. There are exceptions, but that's
| the game. The CV of your PhD's is often judged by the
| publication list and the corresponding citations. That's
| research institutes where they might go, other
| universities, large companies etc. _will_ look at this. It
| 's difficult to change this system as isolated player, and
| coordinates efforts so far failed on the "what else"
| question.
| philipallstar wrote:
| A problem with the public sector in this instance is it
| has money to spend, but no way of allocating it
| particularly well.
|
| It will just pick the best allocation metric it has
| available, even if that metric would never stand up to
| scrutiny in the private sector, or any more directly
| measured domain, public or private.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I think the state could simply allocate money to long-
| lived scientific institutions and let the experts there
| handle things as long as there is no obvious corruption.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Self-regulation has a tendency to either work well for a
| few years, then gradually become corrupted... or be
| corrupt from the beginning.
|
| A distressingly high percentage of humans like zero-sum
| status games. More people are happier when status is
| recognized as a semi-unbounded positive-sum game.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| To dig even deeper into the problem: you have to get a
| large number of institutions to agree to stop this at once,
| none will voluntarily risk their (generally) working
| pipeline and system first. It disrupts a lot of different
| things and takes them out of the currently established
| model that everyone still uses to measure success. It
| reminds me of how most people who say "well not everyone
| should go to college!" Are obviously omitting "...except
| for my kids of course." It borders on an expressive
| response, it's not something anyone wants to actually take
| action on.
|
| There's not a whole lot to gain for the individual or even
| the institution unless they hit an absolute home run on the
| first try that also shows positive results very quickly.
| More than likely the decision will be questioned at every
| turn
| newsclues wrote:
| The incentive to disprove bad science ought to be greater.
| matwood wrote:
| Exactly. There should be much greater incentives to
| (in)validate prior publications. That is what science is
| about.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| And incorrect assumptions. As I understand it, "I did a
| study on this and it turns out there's no connection"
| generally results in the study not being published (if the
| study was testing for the validity of the connection)...
| which is sad, because that's still useful information to
| have.
| newsclues wrote:
| Those are separate issues.
|
| Publishing uninteresting science for the record is
| different from an incentive to go against the crowd to
| refute incorrect claims.
|
| Both would be good especially these days.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| As for an alternative, how about using the social fabric of
| researchers and institutes instead? A few centuries of
| science ran on it before somebody had the great idea to
| introduce "objective" metrics which made things worse.
| Reintroducing that today would probably cause a larger spread
| in the quality of research, which is good: research is kind
| of a "hit-driven industry" - higher highs are the most
| important thing. The best researchers will do the best
| research, probably better without carrot and stick than with.
| dilawar wrote:
| What the guarantee is that folks won't abuse this system in
| the same way they do the citation system? The
| recommendation letter system is often abused for the
| pettiest of reasons...
| ahartmetz wrote:
| There is no guarantee. The current system is also not a
| guarantee for good results, though.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| A few centuries of science of white males. While I agree
| that the system with "objective metrics" has a lot of
| problems, but just removing it would bring us back to the
| old days when almost all science was done by a few
| privileged white men.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Almost all science was done by "a few privleged white
| men" because Europe and the Americas were the only places
| that had modernized with large central states, university
| systems, and educational systems. Even in that scenario
| before the "objective metrics" of the post-war system
| came about, we still had people like Madam Curie and
| Ramanujan being able to work with stellar results. The
| idea that somehow academia would stonewall all of the
| non-whites is absurd.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| It's really hard to come up with better examples of the
| exceptions that prove the rule than Marie Curie and
| Ramanujan. How many more names can you come up with?
|
| I'd even argue that still today women and minorities are
| strongly disadvantaged at many institutions. I'd say that
| as a white male that recently left academia myself. I
| have seen how some of my colleagues have been treated.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| > As for an alternative, how about using the social fabric
| of researchers and institutes instead? A few centuries of
| science ran on it before somebody had the great idea to
| introduce "objective" metrics which made things worse.
|
| Oh boy, you seem to be missing the forest for the trees.
| When science was a hobby of the rich, there was no need to
| measure output. Only when "scientist" became a career and
| these scientists started demanding government funding
| (which only really crystallized in the 20th century), then
| we started needing a way to measure output.
|
| You could try doing away with an objective measure of
| academic output and replace it with the "social fabric of
| researchers and institutes" (whatever the fuck that means)
| instead , but then all you'd have is a good ol' boys club
| funded by taxpayer money.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| This will be a hard argument to make.
|
| The decision makers who are the target audience for these
| metrics value "objective" data. They value the appearance
| of being quantitative, but lack the intellectual tools to
| distinguish between quantitative science and pseudoscience
| with numbers bolted on.
|
| That's modern bureaucracy in a nutshell.
| anewhnaccount2 wrote:
| The needle is beginning to move on this I believe:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00321-5
| laylower wrote:
| I've heard of Chris but not too well. This guy does not f*c$
| around, don't get on his bad side.
|
| The state of research is dire at the moment. The whole ecosystem
| is cooked. Reproducibility is non-existent. This obvious cartel
| is a symptom and there should be exemplary punishment.
|
| Publishers are commercially incentivized to simply maximize
| profit and engagement. The main actors are academics and most of
| them try to uphold the high standards and ethics. Yes there is
| free-riding, backstabbing and a lot of politics but there is also
| reputation and honesty.
|
| A few academics give academia a bad name, at the worst possible
| time and when society needs honest, reliable, reproducible and
| targetted research the most.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| I have no doubt that there are honest academics who publish
| research which actually contributes to humanity's corpus of
| knowledge. Whether that is some new insight into the past,
| observations on nature and man's interaction with it, clever
| chemical advances, or medical innovations which benefit
| mankind. People who publish works which will be looked upon as
| seminal and foundational in a decade or two, but also works
| which just focus on some particular detail and which will be of
| use to many researchers in the future.
|
| But I can't shake the impression that a lot, perhaps the vast
| majority, of science consists of academics (postdocs and
| untenured researchers in particular I suppose) stuck in the
| publish-or-perish cycle. Pushing pointless papers where some
| trivial hypothesis is tested and which no one will ever use or
| read -- except perhaps to cite for one reason or another, but
| rarely because it makes academic sense. Now with added slop,
| because why wouldn't you if the work itself is already as good
| as pointless?
|
| The system, as you say, is fucked.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Most scientists want to do good science. They get intrinsic
| meaning and satisfaction in doing so. But with any large
| group of people there will be a few bad faith actors that
| will manipulate any exploit in the system for their own
| personal benefit. The problem here is that 'the system' of
| academic appointments, and even more importantly, funding
| sources, are built around this publishing metric. This forces
| even the good faith scientists to behave poorly because it
| was a requisite to even being able to exist as a working
| researcher.
| tstactplsignore wrote:
| 0. I think your perspective is really detached from the
| actual scientific enterprise. I think this kind of take
| exists when there are cultural clashes combined with a strong
| focus in the media and online with the mistakes and issues in
| science, not its successes.
|
| Science is actually progressing at an amazing rate in recent
| years. We are curing diseases and understanding more about
| life and the universe faster than ever.
|
| Just briefly skim some top journals right now:
|
| Here's an amazing 'universal vaccine' for respiratory viruses
| in mice https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260
|
| here are brand new genome editors in human cells
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz1884
|
| Here's amazing evidence of an ancient lake on Mars
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu8264
|
| Here's a meta-analysis of 62 (!) different studies on GLP1
| receptor agonists to figure out whether they can contribute
| to pancreatitis
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/edm2.70113
|
| (covered here
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00552-6)
|
| Here's identification of a new mechanism of resistance in
| Malaria https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10110-9
|
| Here's curing a genetic disorder using gene editing in mice
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10113-6
|
| Here's a study that has figured out that as CO2 levels rise,
| there's less nitrogen in forests
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10039-5
|
| and here's personalized mRNA vaccines curing people of breast
| cancer https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10004-2
|
| Like all of these are just from the past month or two and are
| pretty astounding advances. And they are just a subset of all
| of the scientific advances recently. All of them have
| contributors in academia (and science performed outside of
| academia would not exist without academia, as it depends upon
| it for most of the conceptual advances as well of course as
| for scientist training).
|
| 1. Stuff like paper mills and complete fraudsters exist, but
| for the most part, these things are the exception, not the
| rule. Your average scientist doesn't even hear or think about
| these things and the weirdos who cause them, to be honest.
| Nobody has ever heard of "International Review of Financial
| Analysis" outside of an extremely niche economics subfield.
|
| 2. "Public or perish" is not a cycle, really. While I believe
| it's not good for people to be constantly working under
| pressure, the fact that academia is so competitive currently
| is a healthy sign. It's because we have so many people with
| extremely impressive resumes and backgrounds, doing extremely
| impressive work, that makes funding so competitive. And when
| funding is competitive, it's no wonder that funders prefer to
| fund people who have produced something and told the world
| about it ("publish").
|
| 3. Fraudsters and hucksters have been in science forever. Go
| read an account of science in the early 19th century. There
| are tons and tons of stories of crazy scientists who believed
| ridiculous things, scientists who kept pushing wrong dogma,
| and so on. And yet nobody knows about them today, because the
| evolutionary process of science works: the truths that are
| empirically verifiable win out, and, given enough time, the
| failures are selected against.
| glenstein wrote:
| Fantastic effort post and the necessary dose of fresh air
| to balance out hedonic skepticism.
|
| The collapse in faith of institutions in various ways, for
| different reasons has created a vibe that gives _any_
| criticism of _any_ institution has a whiff of plausibility,
| and these days that 's all you need for some people to
| treat it as settled fact. That is basically what I think
| the poisoned and anti intellectual attitude of hedonic
| skepticism is all about.
|
| The pace of technological advance over the past 5-10 years
| is staggering in so many ways. If our era weren't known for
| collapse of democracies and conflict, it could have been
| heralded as a major historical moment of technological
| advance on a number of levels.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| About Chris, this 3.5 years old post made me wonder what he's
| all about. https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-princeton-
| economics-profe...
| class3shock wrote:
| Liking free speech, disliking affirmative action, being
| critical of those he disagrees but also giving them a chance
| to respond.
|
| edit: is what he seems to be about based on the linked
| article
| KPGv2 wrote:
| Huh? The linked article is nothing more than "this guy is
| black, so therefore helping any underprivileged black
| people gain university admissions is bad"
|
| It's outrageous racism. A conclusion about all minorities
| based on one person's math mistake, where the logic is
| entirely based on shared skin color.
|
| If you replace the races and make it a conclusion about
| legacy admissions or something, it's obviously stupid and
| illogical, right?
|
| "This white guy doesn't know Afghanistan from Kazakhstan.
| More proof legacy admissions is bad!"
| Spivak wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/385/
|
| It's just this but with race this time.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Much has changed since this was published in 2008
| p_j_w wrote:
| There's a bunch of needlessly inflammatory bullshit in that
| article. "Innumerate woke Bolshevik" and making fun of
| someone because he thinks she looks like a Harry Potter
| character. This guy seems like nothing more than a high
| school bully. E-mailing someone asking them to respond is
| nothing more than a fig leaf.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| All of academic publishing has fallen victim to Goodhart's law.
|
| Our metrics for judging the quality of academic information are
| also the metrics for deciding the success of an academic's
| career. They are destined to be gamed.
|
| We either need to turn peer review into an adversarial system
| where the reviewer has explicit incentives to find flaws and
| can advance their career by doing it well, or else we need
| totally different metrics for judging publications (which will
| probably need to evolve continuously).
|
| We assume far too much good faith in this space.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| > On Christmas Eve, 9 "peer-reviewed" economics papers were
| quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world's largest academic
| publisher.
|
| It is becoming clearer and clearer that peer review is a
| systematized band wagon fallacy.
|
| It relies on the belief that one's peers in a competitive field,
| presented with new ideas and evidence, will simply accept it.
|
| And yet, "science progresses one funeral at a time" is an old
| joke.
|
| "Peer review" is an indication an idea is safe for granting
| agency bureaucrats to fund, not an indication of its truth,
| validity, or utility.
| estearum wrote:
| Peer review has never been an indication of truth, validity, or
| utility.
|
| It's only ever been an opportunity for other scientists
| (ideally more competitive than they are today) to see if they
| can spot some methodological problem.
| samsartor wrote:
| I feel like my papers are better for having gone through peer
| review, and I'm a better researcher for having had a few
| rejections. Of course the reviewers can't hover around in your
| lab watching everything you do. But even if reviewers can't
| check the validity of the evidence in your paper, they do a
| pretty good job ensuring that the claims you make are supported
| by the evidence you present. That's a valuable if imperfect
| guardrail! What would be the alternative?
| azan_ wrote:
| That's completely upside down take. The problem with peer
| review is not that it does not allow good papers to get
| published (that rarely happens, almost all good papers get
| published!), but that shitty papers get published!
| the_real_cher wrote:
| This is the academic industrial complex.
|
| Much like the military industrial complex and the healthcare
| industrial complex they exist to fleece people via cartel.
| __s wrote:
| fraud here is real, but
|
| > a good journal--it has an 18% acceptance rate
|
| is this supposed to be read as sarcasm?
|
| amusing when the quality of a journal is measured by denying
| papers. kind of reminds me of one of the last _People I (Mostly)
| Admire_ interviews, with Michael Crow of Arizona State
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-kind-of-university where
| he critiques elite universities as measuring their value on how
| many students they reject, which ultimately makes them infeasible
| as institutions to distribute knowledge as much as possible
| cs702 wrote:
| The folks at Elsevier turned a blind eye for as long as they
| could because it was _profitable_. It 's such a common story that
| no one even feigns to be surprised.
|
| Being an extractive business seeking to maintain a chokehold on
| scientists and their institutions is the least of Elsevier's
| problems.
|
| More problematic for Elsevier is that the current system of "peer
| review" may turn out be a failed experiment in the history of
| science:
|
| https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
| ragebol wrote:
| What could be an improvement to or over the peer review system?
| cs702 wrote:
| For a thoughtful answer to your question, see:
|
| https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-dance-of-the-
| nake...
| wil421 wrote:
| > A tenured professor hinted she might try to get me fired.
| A person with a PhD accused me of "cynical metacognitive
| polywaffle," which a good name for a postmodern noise band.
| I got some weird and vaguely threatening emails, including
| one that had a screenshot of my personal website with my
| improv experience highlighted, proof that I am literally a
| clown. Which is, I guess, true.
|
| (People said nice things too.)
| wolfi1 wrote:
| reminds me of of the El Naschie controversy:
| https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/11/25/elsevier-math...
| snowhale wrote:
| The detection lag is telling -- this only got caught because an
| external journalist spotted the pattern. Elsevier had every
| incentive to keep looking the other way (higher impact factors =
| higher subscription prices). Self-regulation won't fix this. The
| publisher's quality control function and its profit motive point
| in opposite directions.
| andreyf wrote:
| aaronsw would be proud
| tajikgpt wrote:
| Aio
| pjdesno wrote:
| https://retractionwatch.com/2026/01/08/finance-professor-bri...
|
| I've boycotted reviewing for Elsevier for years, but it's easy
| for me - I'm in CS, where ACM, USENIX and IEEE offer higher-
| status publication venues and Elsevier journals are decidedly
| second-tier.
| shenberg wrote:
| Mid-way I realized this was AI writing (took me a while), then I
| read a quote in the text about a comment that "The tragedy isn't
| that they cheated; it's that the system was designed to let them
| thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data."
| I didn't find this comment in EJMR, or anywhere on the internet
| except the OP post, for that matter.
| fdefitte wrote:
| One cartel gone, incentive structure intact. Academic prestige is
| entirely mediated through journal placement, so whoever controls
| prestige journals can extract rents indefinitely. Elsevier did
| not invent this, they just ran it more aggressively.
|
| The fix is not enforcement. It is tenure committees that stop
| treating impact factors as proxies for researcher quality. Until
| that changes, any successor recreates the same behavior. The
| cartel is a symptom.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's as if they have captured the most significant nodes on the
| map. Or were these prestige journals built up under the same
| system?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-23 23:00 UTC)