Scholarship Worth Less than the iPhone on Which It Was Written

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

In an article in the New York Times titled “A Peek inside the Strange World of Fake Academia,” Kevin Carey has provided much illustrative detail on the burgeoning business in very dubious academic conferences, impostor academic societies, and predatory journals. Beyond some of the illustrative detail that is often as compelling as it is ridiculous, the most fascinating part of the article may be the closing section in which Carey explores a growing phenomenon of conferences, academic societies, and journals that are hybrids of the unarguably legitimate and obviously fraudulent versions of each:

“The papers . . . mostly describe small qualitative studies and surveys that examine well-established ideas, break little new ground and use statistical jargon to make their findings seem more complicated than they really are. They very likely would be rejected by the American Educational Research Association. But they are also well within the bounds of what gets published in many scholarly journals that, while not prestigious, have never been called a fraud. . . .

“There are real, prestigious journals and conferences in higher education that enforce and defend the highest standards of scholarship. But there are also many more Ph.D.-holders than there is space in those publications, and those people are all in different ways subject to the “publish or perish” system of professional advancement. The academic journal-and-conference system is subject to no real outside oversight. Standards are whatever the scholars involved say they are.

“So it’s not surprising that some academics have chosen to give one another permission to accumulate publication credits on their C.V.’s and spend some of the departmental travel budget on short holidays. Nor is it surprising that some canny operators have now realized that when standards are loose to begin with, there are healthy profits to be made in the gray areas of academe.”

But getting back to the illustrative detail that is as compelling as it is ridiculous, Carey includes this example of an accepted conference paper abstract written with the autocomplete feature of an iPhone: “’Atomic Physics and I shall not have the same problem with a separate section for a very long long way. Nuclear weapons will not have to come out the same day after a long time of the year he added the two sides will have the two leaders to take the same way to bring up to their long ways of the same as they will have been a good place for a good time at home the united front and she is a great place for a good time.’”

The illustration that accompanies the article is also a hoot: