Plagiarism: Yikes!
I am deeply troubled by how much "scholarly" content of seemingly high quality work is, in fact, not scholarly or high quality. "Scientific Articles Accepted" and "Characteristics of a Predatory Journal" taught me about this issue, as I had never thought that a business would go through the motions of creating a journal just to make money (then again, a lot of people do a lot of bad things just to make money). Regardless, it's shameful that scholars in academia feel the need to be sleazy. In "Scientific Articles Accepted," I appreciated the quote "dark side of open access." Open access sounds like a great thing-- offering lots of people a multitude of "scholarly" articles. However, it does more harm to the academic community than it may realize. Because these businesses with less-than-noble intentions set the standards for their journal, they can "bait-and-switch" authors and release flawed academic articles all they'd like. As consumers, we need to be more diligent when searching for publications so we know how to identify erroneous journals.
"Characteristics of a Predatory Journal" not only outlined some alarming factors of these poorly composed journals, but also told the reader that they need to check some information on the journal before trusting their articles. Essentially, we need to watch for lies and misinformation and know how to identify them. On a personal note, I was always sketched out by poorly designed websites & typos, so I was glad to see this listed as a red flag. Though it is critical to check the credibility of a journal, how do we juggle this while we're trying to gather information and write a paper? It's already difficult to gather sources and clearly write about a research topic, and adding this level of "check your scholarly source credibility" adds another layer of stress. However, unless someone has a magic wand that will make all sketchy journals disappear, we'll just have to add this step to our research process.
Retractions are a lot more important than we think they are and we should be looking out for them more often. Why are they so buried, and why has it been this way for so long? I'll be sure to keep the "Reflection Watch" website in my bookmarks, as it may be an important website to refer to when looking to do research. I found some interesting results when searching for the Potti, Reuben, and Wakefield studies. Potti's was surprisingly easy to find via a Google search and his article on its original platform clearly said "retracted," but I'm concerned at the number of academic articles I found accessible through the IC library. Scott Reuben's article location was much sketchier: The link to his work said it "does not exist or has been moved to a new url," and the website (Anesthesiology News) plopped a large advertisement in the middle of its screen. Suspicious! However, Nature was very transparent regarding Wakefield's article, as they released a whole timeline on his article's retraction.
It is obvious that these plagiarism issues in scholarly works need to be fixed and retractions of poorly authored works need to be more accessible to the public. We see these sorts of trends in all fields-- I see plenty of "fake news" on certain media sites that are published just to rabble-rouse its readers and make money. This is a much deeper problem than some slimebuckets in academia: It is a faction of our society that we need to improve. The only question with that is, how do we do it?
Hey, Alessandra! I can totally relate to your feelings about vetting resources while already stressing about finding those sources in the first place. It feels especially difficult to me when I consider how fast the research process is for us this summer. It doesn't seem like there could possibly be enough time to do all that we need to do in just four weeks. You're right, though, checking the validity of sources is just part of the process. It's something we have to make work! Plus, I hope that this information and the skill of checking our sources helps us in future classes.
ReplyDeleteI also really appreciate your thoughts in your final paragraph. It does seem like all of the issues addressed in our readings for this blog are much bigger than they first appear. I had similar thoughts in my conclusion paragraph and also wondered how we can improve upon such problems in society. We both closed these blog posts with a question, which I think is interesting and important. Nothing changes without people challenging what exists. This entire class is based upon asking questions and challenging what we currently know, so it seems like we're both on the right track. I hope we get the chance to discuss these issues - "fake news", predatory entities, access inequities, and more - further in class.