Tadpole Paper Mill

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dyqik
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Tadpole Paper Mill

Post by dyqik » Sat Feb 22, 2020 2:49 pm

Cultivated from this Twitter thread:

There appears to be a paper mill spewing out peer reviewed papers for numbers of medical students who need an internationally published paper in order to get their MD.

Early paper on this -
Systematic fabrication of scientific images revealed

Early blog about it - The full-service paper mill and its Chinese customers

Recent paper about the digital image manipulation used to mask the copying of images - Digital magic, or the dark arts of the 21st century—how can journals and peer reviewers detect manuscripts and publications from paper mills?

Recent blog about it - The Tadpole Paper Mill

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Re: Tadpole Paper Mill

Post by dyqik » Sat Feb 22, 2020 2:51 pm

By the way, the main way I can see to reduce this would be to convince medical schools to drop the requirement for a published journal paper in order to get an MD. After all, it's not even a universal requirement for a PhD, and medical doctors do not need to do active research in order to be good doctors.

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Re: Tadpole Paper Mill

Post by Boustrophedon » Sat Feb 22, 2020 5:25 pm

So what do I say to the antivaxxer, flat earther or climate change denier, when they claim that 90% of published science is wrong or bogus?

(I think this is worthy rather than nerdy.)
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Re: Tadpole Paper Mill

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Feb 24, 2020 12:25 pm

dyqik wrote:
Sat Feb 22, 2020 2:51 pm
By the way, the main way I can see to reduce this would be to convince medical schools to drop the requirement for a published journal paper in order to get an MD. After all, it's not even a universal requirement for a PhD, and medical doctors do not need to do active research in order to be good doctors.
It's quite a common requirement in a few countries. In Brazil, the university I studied at required a submission to a journal in order to get your MSc diploma, and acceptance was a requirement for a PhD.

However, the science body there (CAPES) maintained a list of acceptable journals, and at least in ornithology and ecology they were all decent journals - not even the lower-impact proper journals were there, let alone sketchy paper mills (of which Brazil also has a few). It would certainly be possible to stop this sort of thing without drastically altering academic practices.

An MD is a Medical Doctorate degree, equivalent to a PhD in medicine. Medical doctors don't need doctorates, of course, which is why Bachelor of Medicine degrees are available. I think it's fair for doctoral programs to require active, publishable research. I don't think it's necessary to require physicians to have doctorates.
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Re: Tadpole Paper Mill

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Feb 24, 2020 12:28 pm

Boustrophedon wrote:
Sat Feb 22, 2020 5:25 pm
So what do I say to the antivaxxer, flat earther or climate change denier, when they claim that 90% of published science is wrong or bogus?

(I think this is worthy rather than nerdy.)
Well, they are probably more-or-less correct in terms of individual studies https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/ ... ed.0020124

This is why science relies on 'consensus' and the aggregation of large numbers of studies into reviews and meta-analyses and so on. A single publication really doesn't allow you to conclude much, as there could well be several sets of contradictory results going unpublished.
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Re: Tadpole Paper Mill

Post by dyqik » Mon Feb 24, 2020 1:37 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Feb 24, 2020 12:25 pm
dyqik wrote:
Sat Feb 22, 2020 2:51 pm
By the way, the main way I can see to reduce this would be to convince medical schools to drop the requirement for a published journal paper in order to get an MD. After all, it's not even a universal requirement for a PhD, and medical doctors do not need to do active research in order to be good doctors.
It's quite a common requirement in a few countries. In Brazil, the university I studied at required a submission to a journal in order to get your MSc diploma, and acceptance was a requirement for a PhD.
It's not a requirement at Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard though.

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Re: Tadpole Paper Mill

Post by dyqik » Mon Feb 24, 2020 1:39 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Feb 24, 2020 12:25 pm

However, the science body there (CAPES) maintained a list of acceptable journals, and at least in ornithology and ecology they were all decent journals - not even the lower-impact proper journals were there, let alone sketchy paper mills (of which Brazil also has a few). It would certainly be possible to stop this sort of thing without drastically altering academic practices.
The paper mills in question here are "research organizations" that sell authorships on papers they submit to journals, rather than the journals themselves.

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Re: Tadpole Paper Mill

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Feb 24, 2020 1:51 pm

dyqik wrote:
Mon Feb 24, 2020 1:39 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Feb 24, 2020 12:25 pm

However, the science body there (CAPES) maintained a list of acceptable journals, and at least in ornithology and ecology they were all decent journals - not even the lower-impact proper journals were there, let alone sketchy paper mills (of which Brazil also has a few). It would certainly be possible to stop this sort of thing without drastically altering academic practices.
The paper mills in question here are "research organizations" that sell authorships on papers they submit to journals, rather than the journals themselves.
That is trickier to deal with, but as soon as such organisations are discovered they and everybody listed on any of their publications should presumably be blacklisted from all reputable journals?
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Re: Tadpole Paper Mill

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Feb 24, 2020 1:54 pm

dyqik wrote:
Mon Feb 24, 2020 1:37 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Feb 24, 2020 12:25 pm
dyqik wrote:
Sat Feb 22, 2020 2:51 pm
By the way, the main way I can see to reduce this would be to convince medical schools to drop the requirement for a published journal paper in order to get an MD. After all, it's not even a universal requirement for a PhD, and medical doctors do not need to do active research in order to be good doctors.
It's quite a common requirement in a few countries. In Brazil, the university I studied at required a submission to a journal in order to get your MSc diploma, and acceptance was a requirement for a PhD.
It's not a requirement at Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard though.
I doubt that elite universities in English-speaking countries particularly need to encourage their students to publish, though.

Places where a lot of research is happening, but which are cut off from the global academic community by issues like funding and language barriers, do need to incentivise their researchers to publish outside regional journals for a whole host of reasons, because few researchers at Oxbridge or Harvard are going to bother reading Brazilian or Chinese journals.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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