Course description
A recent story on fake science on U.S. National Public Radio included this stunning comment on the number of bogus scientifical articles: “The percentage was in 2020 at 28% of all biomedical publications. That comes to over 300,000 in the biomedical field alone. Now, if you consider that all of science is maybe roughly double that, then you can sort of roughly estimate that there may be a half million fake papers published per year.” Those who have not participated in scientific research often think of science as a fixed body of knowledge, free from biases, sloppiness, or money-driven influences. While the scientific enterprise has been one of the undoubted achievements of human history, it has not been without its problems. The health sciences, with so much money to be made through the sale of pharmaceuticals, procedures and medical equipment, has been especially vulnerable.
While twenty-first century technology has given science researchers incredibly powerful tools, from big data analytics to CRISPR, the growth of digital communications has also introduced new challenges to scientific publishing—through which scientific research gets communicated to other researchers and policy makers. One example is the rise of scientific “preprints,” unreviewed drafts of scientific papers which are increasingly being used by non-scientists as if they were legitimate scientific publications. Another example is the “predatory journal”—bogus scientific journals that pretend to have a real peer-review process but will actually publish just about anything if the author pays their publication fees.

TOPICS
• What is scholarship? How do research publications differ from other kinds of writing about science? What is their purpose? Who writes them, and why? Who reads them, and how?
• Peer review. How is it supposed to work? What are its benefits when it works well? How can it go wrong? How is the process evolving to address concerns about biases and labor? What alternatives are being promoted?
• Publication bias. Scientists make hypotheses, and these are more likely to be wrong that right. But scientific journals rarely publish results from studies that showed a treatment or approach did not work, so the scientific community rarely knows what’s already been tried and failed. And since pharmaceutical companies are not required to publish studies that showed poor outcomes, are government agencies and physicians mislead about the real benefits and risks of new medications?
• Replication. We often hear that scientific reports should be written in way that makes it easy for others to repeat the study to confirm the results, but researchers rarely do this—because few journals will publish replication studies. Why not? How has this lack of confirmation impacted the accuracy of scientific research and what attempts are being made to encourage the publication of such studies?
• Plagiarism. How has digitization led to a drastic rise in plagiarism in science? How well do plagiarism-detection platforms like CrossCheck work to detect plagiarism, and what new problems do these “solutions” cause?
• Fake Science: What are fake articles and how are they made? What are editors doing to detect them—or can they? How is AI contributing to this problem?
• Predatory Journals. What are these fake journals and why do they exist? How can we tell if a journal is real or not? What efforts are being made to combat this growing threat to scientific validity? Are good scientists in poorly-resources countries being accidently caught in the predatory journal net?
• Advertising. Does this form of communication give consumers valuable information or just make them vulnerable to scientific-sounding sales pitches?
• English as the dominant language of science. Why did this come to be? Who benefits and who is harmed? How does English-centric science influence the breadth and quality of health-science research?

Guest experts on topics such as predatory journals and peer review will join the class via zoom on some days for short lectures and discussion.

Assignments
• Analyses and report on a possibly predatory journal
• Context analysis of a science journal article to examine conflicts of interest, authoritativeness, and timeliness.
• Analysis of marketing materials making scientific claims

Learning Outcomes
Students will (1) understand the contemporary scientific publishing process and they stakeholders involved; (2) learn about inherent limitations in scientific communications; and (3) learn about new challenges to scientific publishing resulting from digitization of writing and publishing.

Evaluation
Attendance and Active Participation 25%
Short Analyses 25%
Presentation 25%
Final Paper 25%

Example Readings
• Mystery as controversial list of predatory publishers disappears. Dalmeet Singh Chawla. Science, 2017.
• The Dark Side of Publishing. Dalmeet Singh Chawla. Nature, 2013.
• Predatory journals recruit fake editor. Katarzyna Pisanski. Nature, 2017.
• Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Jeffrey Beale. Nature, 2012.
• When to trust (and not to trust) peer reviewed science. Merlin Crossley. phys.org, 2018
• Who's Afraid of Peer Review? John Bohannon. Science, 2013.
• AI is complicating plagiarism. How should scientists respond? Diana Kwon. Nature, 2024.
• Plagiarism, Paper Mills, and Profit: These Scientists Are Fighting the Epidemic of Fraudulent Research. Sabahat Rahman. Cancer Therapy Advisor, 2024.

Last updated: November 20, 2024