This is one of the top journals in the field of higher education. It's a small field but the journal is very prestigious within that field.
Economists (?) Publish hoax in Higher Education Quarterly
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So in the 2nd to last paragraph of the intro the paper says it doesn’t measure corruption per se and whether it’s results generalize is an open question.
In the next paragraph it says their results can be expected to generalize and should be of interest to anyone concerned with institutional corruption.
Worse yet, it says they contacted faculty in econ, poli sci, and philosophy by email and that ** 83.2 %** of faculty responded and fully participated. There is zero chance their response rate was that high. If there is anything that makes me doubt this paper, this is it.As someone said in the comments, one of named the right wing funding institute folded before the period the study is claiming to look at. Another one is made up and has exactly zero Google hit except for people talking about this paper. It’s intentionally shoddy work to see what can get through.
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How is it a hoax if you just commit research fraud? Not really an indictment of anything, other than the editor's failure to background check the authors.
Someone didn’t try to read the paper- there are methodological and writing errors that shouldn’t escape notice and are well in the remit of reviewers.
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This is a much better executed hoax than the Peter Boghossian one. Read a theory in the comments it may be based on a real paper that showed the same result for donations from left wing orgs. Wonder if there is another shoe to drop?
Yeah it could be an audit study. The authors reached out to the Chronicle and suggested there were other papers out there.
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I mean, I'm among those who are concerned about politics in US academia. But these kinds of gotcha papers are meaningless. If you send a paper out for review at 100 mid/low-tier journals, then of course one or two are bound to bite. What do you infer from this? That peer-reviewed won't catch fraud with 100% accuracy? And you do so while getting people to provide free labor in the review process? This is just as sloppy as the rest.
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I mean, I'm among those who are concerned about politics in US academia. But these kinds of gotcha papers are meaningless. If you send a paper out for review at 100 mid/low-tier journals, then of course one or two are bound to bite. What do you infer from this? That peer-reviewed won't catch fraud with 100% accuracy? And you do so while getting people to provide free labor in the review process? This is just as sloppy as the rest.
The paper has obvious flaws even a lazy referee would have cought.
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This whole argument depends on whether the journal is low quality. Sure, publishing in a C- filler journal is scammy. Publishing something like this in an A or A- is a big Fing deal.
I mean, I'm among those who are concerned about politics in US academia. But these kinds of gotcha papers are meaningless. If you send a paper out for review at 100 mid/low-tier journals, then of course one or two are bound to bite. What do you infer from this? That peer-reviewed won't catch fraud with 100% accuracy? And you do so while getting people to provide free labor in the review process? This is just as sloppy as the rest.
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I’m gonna bet that Gender & Society will have one of these articles.
I don’t think the issue is refereeing per se, and I agree it is not possible for referees to find all fraud. I certainly don’t think it is reasonable to expect referees to replicate and look at the actual data. But just seeing the response rate the articpe claims makes it obvious something isn’t right. So basically I think this article shows how susceptible some fields are to work that fits their political beliefs.
I can’t figure out if I would be surprised if there were an example at an econ journal. THIS paper couldn’t make it in an econ journal, but could a more cleverly done one make it? A lower ranked journal like econ bulletin or something, maybe. That said, the more cleverly done, the less good an example. If it isn’t a glaring example, the point isn’t made nearly as well.