Publishing: It's Easier Than You Think

Michelle Meyer at Faculty Lounge has an interesting post about a recent article in Science by John Bohannon.  Entitled, Who's Afraid of Peer Review, the article recounts Bohannon's authoring of a nonsensical paper detailing the anticancer properties of a certain type of lichen.  Under a false name, and writing as an employee of a false institution, Bohannon authored a paper recounting experiments "so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless."

Bohannon explains his meticulous steps to ensure that his paper would be obviously unpublishable:

To ensure that the papers were both fatally flawed and credible submissions, two independent groups of molecular biologists at Harvard University volunteered to be virtual peer reviewers.

. . .  

The researchers also helped me fine-tune the scientific flaws so that they were both obvious and "boringly bad." For example, in early drafts, the data were so unexplainably weird that they became "interesting"—perhaps suggesting the glimmer of a scientific breakthrough. I dialed those down to the sort of common blunders that a peer reviewer should easily interdict.

Bhannon submitted the article to 304 open-access journals.  More than half of the journals accepted the paper.  

This incident reminded me of V.S. Ramachandran's similar "prank" on Med Hypotheses.  As he recounts in his book, Phantoms in the Brain, in 1997, Ramachandran became frustrated with an expanding number of theories of evolutionary biology and psychology and their un-testability.  In a "whimsical mood," Ramachandran sat down one afternoon and wrote his own article on evolutionary psychology.  

Entitled, Why Do Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?, Ramachandran's article argued that men prefer blondes because historically, it would have been easier to detect parasites or disease in blonde women than in brown-haired women.  The article was "promptly accepted," and many of Ramachandran's colleagues found his arguments to seem very plausible.

For more pseudo scholarship, see: Alan Sokal's, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity and Sokal's discussion of that paper and its publication here.  (H/T: Meyer at Faculty Lounge); see also: Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken.  If you want to generate your own nonsense scholarship, check out the Postmodernism Generator.

I am not aware of anything like this happening in the world of law journals.  Yet.