Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship
Read this and weep — laughter? tears? your choice really. Personally, I’m glad folks do this from time to time as it reveals something of the flaws in the system. Two things to note. As I teach my Understanding Users class, humans have to organize a lot of data coming at them quickly, and they do this by mobilizing the rapid, sometimes automatic categorization schemas in their heads. When something looks kinda real, and one has no real reason for doubting authenticity, then you organize your thoughts around it and move on to the next data point. In this case, the reviewers likely received what they assumed to be a genuine paper and allowed their own automatic processes for reading and deciding to publish or not to kick in without too much effort. It’s lazy but it’s human. So, no, it is not too surprising this happens and people can fool the process.
Second thing — it takes some brave folks, particularly untenured ones, to tackle this kind of project and risk censure and disapproval from one’s community for dragging them into disrepute, allegedly. I don’t share that view, I think Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian might be targeting low hanging fruit given the choice of topic, but they raise genuine questions about scholarship and editorial practices in some parts of the academy that deserve attention.