
The Tadpole Paper Mill - sohkamyung
https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2020/02/21/the-tadpole-paper-mill/
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troymc
While it's tempting to criticize the authors of the papers for having lax
ethics, this quote gave me pause:

"[Paper mills] sell these papers to e.g. medical doctors in China who need to
have a scientific paper published in an international journal in order to get
their MD, but who do not have any time in their educational program to
actually do research."

It's a typical case of unintended consequences. It probably seemed like a good
idea to require prospective MDs to publish a paper in a scientific journal,
but if the medical students don't have time to do the research, what are they
supposed to do? Pay others to do the research for them? Maybe some believed
that's what they did?

See also: The Cobra Effect, Mechanism Design

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design)

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_pmf_
I'd rather be treated by a doctor who knows his craft than by a doctor who is
an expert in LaTeX and citation tuning.

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NPMaxwell
Part of what is astonishing here is the existence of a system that drives such
gaming. It makes me wonder what the people who required a science publication
were thinking. Were they naive or do they cynically disrespect scientific
research?

~~~
analog31
It probably started out innocently enough with an idea that a doctor would
benefit from having a bit of research experience, and that publication would
be a quality metric. This is routine in the US for PhD education, and it looks
like China simply applied the same idea to medical training. If anything, peer
review might have been seen as an anti-fraud measure.

The article talks about the students not having time to conduct research. But
being given a job and not enough time or money to do everything in the most
desirable fashion is a widespread management style in both academia and
business. There have been articles about medical students in the US not
getting any sleep.

Those two things by themselves would not raise eyebrows in the US.

Where I went to grad school long ago, the psychology grad students had to
publish a research paper en route to getting a clinical degree. They had a
phrase, "published and outa here." I have no idea the quality of the work that
got published, but the behavioral sciences are sitting on a "replication
crisis" today, that predates China growing exponentially into the research
space.

So I don't think it's a China problem.

~~~
NPMaxwell
So naive then. That's reassuring. I guess

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Gatsky
In the life sciences, I feel like bioarxiv is the most useful publication
medium. The very long publication times for journals is one factor, it is just
too slow to be practical. The other is that preprints paradoxically are
becoming higher quality than journal articles on average, because low quality
or fake content is less likely to get submitted to bioarxiv (although this is
going to change as bioarxiv becomes more legitimate).

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toisanji
this also ends up flooding our scientific research system with trash.

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naringas
isn't this the marketplace of ideas??

/s

