Junk Science : An Academic Pandemic

“There’s never been a worse time to be a scientist.” says Eduardo Franco, a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University with over four decades of experience.

Fake scientific publications are corrupting the world of ethical scientific research, and influencing real news. If that doesn’t trouble you at all, you may want to reflect on the words you just read for a few moments before proceeding. You don’t have to be a professor of history to know that ‘controlling the truth’ is a tool that tyrannical and oppressive governments have used throughout human history. Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin and Adolf Hitler all used misinformation and pseudoscience to manipulate public opinion, just to name a few examples.

Now that I (hopefully) have your attention, let’s focus on the very real problem that our society is dealing with today. Just to be clear, this is not a story about a ‘conspiracy theory’ about some evil dictator, it is a very real problem that is well documented and accepted across the world, regarding the concerning influx of ‘junk-science’ that academics are noticing.

As head of the oncology department at McGill University, where he oversees approximately 230 people, Eduardo Franco promised to comb through every CV and annual evaluation in his department to flag any colleagues’ resumés that listed journals and/or conferences that weren’t reputable or, in some cases, completely fictitious. He didn’t spell out the consequences, but the implication was clear: the faculty members would be held accountable.

Typically, when a scholar completes some form of scientific research work that they want to see published, they will submit a paper to a reputable scientific journal. If the paper is accepted, it undergoes a rigorous series of editing processes, including peer reviews, in which several experts in the field will evaluate the work and provide feedback. Only after completing the aforementioned review process, will the paper be published, and it can be cited by others. It also inspires further research, or in some cases, media attention. The process can take YEARS.

That’s correct, you cannot speedily get a scientific discovery of any kind reviewed and published without a stringent review process. Not in any kind of legitimate way at least. Herein lies the problem… the growing dilemma of junk science ‘journals’ which have done away with the peer review process entirely, and will publish just about any nonsense someone submits. Examples of this phenomenon are readily available. Chocolate being a “superfood” would be the most prominent example. It’s absolutely false, and the pseudoscience journals pushing this claim are widely available on the internet.

Before the turn of the century, a new model of online publishing, “open access,” began opening doors for countless academics, and unfortunately, for thousands of scams in the process. This new online model created an opportunity for astronomical profits: the more papers publishers accepted, the more money they generated from authors who PAID to be included. $150 to $2,000 per paper, if not more, and often with the support of government grants. That’s right, we the public, are funding this junk science.

Researchers also see substantial benefits: the more studies they post, the more positions, promotions, job security, and grant money they receive from universities and agencies. “Junk publishers”, which are publishing companies that masquerade themselves as real publishers but accept practically every submission and skip all quality editing as well as any form of peer review, elbowed their way into the legitimate scientific journal industry.

There is now an ever growing amount of pseudoscience journals with varying standards and reputations, that are far more dangerous by showcasing flawed studies, including misleading reports about safe drinking water, fake “proof” that humans aren’t in any part responsible for climate change, or bogus research that vaccines cause autism. Many of these are written by scholars who benefit by seeing their research published with reprehensibly minimal effort, thereby padding their academic CVs.

Even more concerning is the fact that, in some cases, corporations and activists are able to push specific agendas by funding shoddy pseudoscience research published in junk journals that eventually finds coverage in popular media. There is not one single media outlet around the world who is innocent of this, the examples are widely available on the internet.

These companies have become so successful, Eduardo Franco says, that for the first time in history, scientists and scholars worldwide are publishing more fraudulent and flawed studies than legitimate research, maybe ten times more.

Approximately 10,000 bogus journals run rackets around the world, with thousands more under investigation, according to Cabell’s International, a publishing-services company. “We’re publishing mainly noise now,” Franco laments. “It’s nearly impossible to hear real signals, to discover real findings.”

In 2017, two engineers in the US, Marc A. Edwards and Siddhartha Roy, published a paper (in a reputable journal) about how researchers are implicated in junk-publishing scams: otherwise honest scholars are now cutting corners and engaging in junk publishing to further their careers without paying any mind to the detrimental and sometimes dangerous effects on their fields of research.

“If a critical mass of scientists become untrustworthy,” Edwards and Roy concluded, “a tipping point is possible, in which the scientific enterprise itself becomes inherently corrupt and public trust is lost, risking a new dark age with devastating consequences to humanity.”

That dark age may already be here. Increasingly, journalists, politicians, and the general public are, sometimes inadvertently, relying on fraudulent and flawed research to guide major decisions.

Edwards exposed, for example, the “scientifically indefensible” studies that contributed to the drinking-water crises in Washington, DC, in 2004, and Flint, Michigan, in 2015 where 9,000 children were exposed to lead contained in the drinking water, in part from improperly maintained pipes in the drinking-water service lines, but also by underplaying possible causes for concern.

In 2018, evidence from a lawsuit against Monsanto (now part of Bayer), then one of the world’s largest seed companies, proved that Monsanto had been funding junk studies that discredited legitimate research about its cancer-causing herbicide, Roundup.

Appalling as it might be, pseudoscience publishing companies are preying on academics whose ambition trumps their integrity. The traditional knowledge-sharing process has been utterly corrupted. Away from the public eye and without scrutiny, scientists and academics are facing a crisis of legitimacy, and they’re almost entirely to blame.

Before the advent of online, open-access publishing, scholars across the world had long blamed North American and European publishers for difficulties in accessing credible academic journals. Back then, the major publishers received free content from scholars, recruited peers to review the content without pay, and then sold it to university libraries at ridiculously outlandish prices.

On top of that, the peer-review process for papers, which maintained the journals’ credibility and industry standards, also faced legitimate accusations of bias and elitism. “Academics everywhere were genuinely pissed off,” Eduardo Franco says. The rigour of academic publishing had made it so expensive and inaccessible for universities that it effectively hampered the free flow of information and it restricted which scholars and scientists were able to get their work published in the first place.

Now, in 2019, more than half of new research is available online for free, but it has come at an overwhelming cost. Validity and credibility. In a sense, the new open-access model offered a licence to print money, and studies, for unscrupulous entrepreneurs.

“Instantaneously, fly-by-night operators set up shop,” says Madhukar Pai, director of McGill’s Global Health Programs. Junk science publishers, such as India-based Omics International and Turkey-based World Academy of Science, Engineering, and Technology (WASET), threw up websites, ditched proper peer reviews, and promised fast publication.

Over time, other companies that have been flagged as junk publishers, such as Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP), Baishideng Publishing Group (BPG), and the Canadian Center of Science and Education, also launched non-curated pseudoscience journals.

As Eduardo Franco stepped up his investigation and after sending a warning email to his McGill colleagues, Franco told faculty leaders that he’d discovered the names of 220 professors who seemed to be involved with Omics.

The Omics website claimed they were among its “editors, contributors and speakers.” Franco knew that Omics sometimes plagiarized academics’ biographies. But, how many of the 220 were victims and how many were colluding out of self-interest? It was practically impossible to know, and Franco was overwhelmed. Elsewhere on its website, the company listed academics from most of Canada’s ninety-five universities. As well as most credible academics from around the world.

Even more concerning and problematic is that the editing processes of some mediocre journals mimic those of legitimate journals, but with flawed standards. While junk journals are outright frauds, the mediocre ones, such as those run by Hindawi (based in Egypt) and Frontiers and MDPI (both based in Switzerland), publish credible papers alongside questionable work, and sometimes allow authors to manipulate their own peer reviews.

These journals’ distorted standards make the epidemic of pseudoscience scams nearly impossible to contain. It can be difficult, if not entirely impossible, for an outsider to navigate the populous landscape of journals with wildly variant editorial practices. As terrifying as it may be, even veteran researchers struggle to identify which publishers are legitimate.

Some of the biggest players in the fraudulent pseudoscience publishing industry are pharmaceutical companies, whose flawed health studies can have serious political and social consequences. A recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek revealed that Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Gilead Sciences, and Merck regularly use junk journals to communicate about their drugs for chronic back pain, diabetes, arthritis, HIV, and other conditions including vaccines and their effectiveness.

Some doctors trust these studies, and most patients trust their doctors. “It’s downright dangerous,” says Carly Brockington, managing editor of the Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy, which actually fought off an aggressive takeover buyout from a junk journal. “What would happen with patients if someone reads an illegitimate article and takes its inaccurate advice?”

Because of Franco’s repeated warnings about these and other issues, many McGill professors approached him with several questions. “I didn’t blame some of my colleagues,” he says. “I realized they were getting duped.” Junk journals plagiarize or copy legitimate publications in every academic field, so it’s easy to get confused.

For example, ScienceVier (a junk publisher) sounds like Elsevier (a real publisher). The Journal of Depression and Anxiety (peddled by Omics) sounds nearly identical to the established Depression and Anxiety (published by Wiley-Blackwell, a legitimate company). And authentic publishers have since created open-access journals to compete with their bogus alter egos. The real problem is that the reader may not have the qualifications necessary to determine an article's validity and credibility. And people are duped everyday by pseudoscience.

In a 2016 lawsuit, the Federal Trade Commission denounced Omics as a predatory publisher duping professionals to make quick profits. Professors and researchers have identified Srinubabu Gedela (founder of Omics) as the progenitor of a fraudulent empire that’s eroding public trust in scientific inquiry. He denies it all, continuing to extend his global reach from Hyderabad. And he’s received help from an unexpected source: the pharmaceutical industry, which regularly publishes in the company’s journals and attends its conferences, bringing Omics both credibility and the funds to grow.

Ask yourself, how do you know that THIS article is valid in any way? Well, for my sake, I hope because I list all my sources at the bottom of this article and that they come from well renowned, curated, peer-reviewed and respected publishers would help ease your concerns about THIS article.

However, I encourage you to be skeptical if you are not already, about everything you read from this point forward in your life. This is a serious issue that affects humanity in its entirety and you should definitely NOT believe everything you read just because you trust the writer or the publisher. We live NOT in the ‘age of information’, but the ‘age of mis-information’.

For the time being, you can rest assured that most ethical scientists are aware of this growing phenomenon and have taken action against it. It may take some time, but I’m confident in the human spirit that we will collectively put an end to this unfortunate situation by educating the population with REAL and verified science. Critical thinking is not necessarily something everyone is born with, but it can definitely be something everyone can learn.

I suggest to anyone who wants to improve their critical thinking skills to read the following article from Forbes about becoming a critical thinker. Alternatively, you could read this article from Master Class instead. Why not read both?

Let’s all remember to stay vigilant while on the internet shall we?

Sources:

https://thewalrus.ca/the-rise-of-junk-science/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-29/medical-journals-have-a-fake-news-problem

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-human-beast/202009/the-rise-junk-science-in-modern-life

https://www.forbes.com/sites/helenleebouygues/2019/05/27/the-cure-for-pseudoscience-clear-thinking/?sh=cac2f8f360db

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6335841/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2018/07/10/six-steps-to-becoming-a-master-of-critical-thinking/?sh=6d3eb0884875

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/guide-to-critical-thinking#7-examples-of-critical-thinking-skills

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_pseudoscience