A bunch of journal articles are found to be fake.
I like what Alan Sokal did to expose post modernistic baloney in the Journal Social Text and it was published because he sounded like one of theirs, using the buzzwords of the post modernist doyens.
The editors of Social Text did not detect that Sokal’s article was a hoax, and they published it in the journal’s Spring/Summer 1996 issue.1 The hoax was revealed by Sokal in an article for another journal, Lingua Franca;2 he explained that his Social Text article had been “liberally salted with nonsense,” and in his opinion was accepted only because “(a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” Newspapers and newsmagazines throughout the U.S. and Britain carried the story. Sokal’s hoax may join the small company of legendary academic hoaxes, along with the pseudo-fossils of Piltdown man planted by Charles Dawson and the pseudo-Celtic epic Ossian written by James Macpherson. The difference is that Sokal’s hoax served a public purpose, to attract attention to what Sokal saw as a decline of standards of rigor in the academic community, and for that reason it was unmasked immediately by the author himself.
This new report s a scandal because it shows that fake papers in a remote corner of science. These on-line journals give academics an opportunity to buff up their resume.
Thomas Lifson writes:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/something_is_rotten_in_the_state_of_science.html
The problem of readily accepting articles that agree with one’s own opinion seems to be rather wide spread indeed. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone maintained a high standard for all research regardless of the topics appeal on a personal level? Perhaps then people could get together and respectfully debate controversial topics without whining and shouting like a toddler who isn’t getting his way.