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Posted by qsi 16 hours ago

Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel(www.chrisbrunet.com)
501 points | 91 commentspage 2
wolfi1 9 hours ago|
reminds me of of the El Naschie controversy: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/11/25/elsevier-math...
__s 10 hours ago||
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

andreyf 6 hours ago||
aaronsw would be proud
tajikgpt 6 hours ago||
Аё
the_real_cher 11 hours ago||
This is the academic industrial complex.

Much like the military industrial complex and the healthcare industrial complex they exist to fleece people via cartel.

throwpoaster 12 hours ago||
> 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.

samsartor 9 hours ago||
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?
estearum 12 hours ago|||
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.

azan_ 7 hours ago||
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!
theSBUguys 5 hours ago||
[dead]
gostsamo 15 hours ago|
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 14 hours ago||
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 14 hours ago||
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 14 hours ago|||
Elsevier editor published his own papers in the Elsevier journal bypassing peer review.
gostsamo 14 hours ago||
There are three magazines involved so this is only part of the story.
qsi 12 hours ago|||
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.
efreak 1 hour ago||
> It's detailed in the article...

I had to go back and re read the article. This blog has a rather generic design on mobile, with one big glaring flaw: in the middle of the article there's a picture (I didn't look at this, I usually ignore images and this I've does a good job of blending into the dark background as part of the styling), a quote, a subscription button, and a button to leave a comment - all at a natural stopping point for a short blog post, which usually implies you've reached the end. It also happened to be at the bottom of my screen given the way I scrolled.

If you read it as I did initially, it simply looks like a post by someone pointing out that someone they don't like had some trouble.

boxed 12 hours ago|||
All three journals are Elsevier owned. Do try to keep up.
boxed 12 hours ago|||
> 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 6 hours ago||
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.