this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Stupid question: Why can't journals just mandate an actual URL link to a study on the last page, or the exact issue something was printed in? Surely both of those would be easily confirmable, and both would be easy for a scientist using "real" sources to source (since they must have access to it themselves already).
Like, it feels silly to me that high school teachers require this sort of thing, yet scientific journals do not?
Because scientific journals exist to profit off science, not bolster it. Fact checking costs money so they do the bare minimum they deem necessary to preserve their reputation.
It's always greed
Many of the journals I've published in do require a link, usually a PMID or DOI, but they're not usually part of the review process. That is, one doesn't expect academic content reviewers to validate each of the citations, but it's not unreasonable to imagine a journal having an automated validator. The review process really isn't structured to detect fraud. It looks like the article in question was in the preprint stage - i.e.: not even reviewed yet - and I didn't notice mention of where they were submitted.
Message here should be that the process works and the fake article never got published. Very different than the periodic stories about someone who submits a blatantly fake, but hand written, article to a bullshit journal and gets published.
Well that used to be a thing called a bibliography but it appears that these journals don't require such. Funny when even my old 7gr essays required those
Of course they do. How do you think fake references were included if references were not needed?
Citing sources by name rather than providing full links/ISBN's/etc?
Ah! "Bibliography" is an ambiguous term.
As the linked article says, one measure that journals are starting to adopt is requiring DOI or PMID links for each reference. It ought to be standard anyway, it's much less work for reviewers to check the references if they're easy to find. Even if they exist, they often don't say what the authors cite them as saying. But journals don't pay anyone for checking these things so it often doesn't get done. Peer review needs to be paid for. For-profit journals need to die.
Yeah that's fair. Since Covid I've noticed that a bunch of the more vocal opponents online liked to pick actual scientific articles and quote small sections way out of context in order to support their "view". It's like using scientific articles for anti-science. That pull that shit repeatedly and piss people off, then report anyone who gets a bit to loud in their response. Seems a whole playbook these days