The conceptual penis as a social construct

I guess that’s supposed to be the point, but it doesn’t seem quite right, based on other consideration of what happened here. Note in particular that there are two journals involved, and neither at all well-established in the field. The first has an impact factor of zero and rejected the paper, but referred it to the second, a brand new pay-to-publish journal which isn’t even rated that way yet.

In other words, this is definitely a warning about the possibility of sketchy publishers, but it doesn’t manage to touch on what standards most social scientists actually have. Taking it as an example of what the whole political left is like is reading a lot of something else into it.

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I would think that, given time, the academic community will figure out which OA publishing platforms are “good” (i.e. have rigorous and high standards of review and publication) and which are “bad”, and seek to publish/review on the ones with “good” reputations.

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That is the old line of thought, the hermeneutics of a capitalism-based patriarchy bent on suppressing modernist movements by establishing a quantum divider, an off-by-one/divide-and-conquer approach. If you uncompress these machinations - compare ZPL-systems as described by Bachus-Naur and reveal the skeleton of the argument, you’ll come to see past the 3D-normative narrative for a higher truth.

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Want a job at ‘Cogent Social Sciences’? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Let’s not be to quick to applaud the authors of this hoax. This paper was first rightly rejected by a major journal in the field, but then accepted by what has been called a pay-to-play vanity journal, so arguably failed in its intent to expose an academic field… There’s a balanced discussion of what happened in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and a good critique of the authors (and intent) of this paper here:

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I wouldn’t call saying “But other fields do this too” a particularly cogent critique.

When incidents like this happen, there are two ways to react.

A field can examine how a hoax got published, and attempt to root out the problems that caused it. In this case, inadequate peer review, and low quality journals that will accept total nonsense (of course, if we really can’t tell the total nonsense from the serious scholarship, then we have a bigger problem).

The less useful response is to hunker down and defend against an attack from outsiders who don’t understand the field. This approach is understandable but ultimately counterproductive, as it encourages insiders to defend their field’s flaws, and makes any hint of dealing with the real problem a sign of disloyalty to the group.

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Most of the people criticising the hoaxers are not from gender studies.

The reason this got published is clear: the journal that was selected (after rejection by a journal of recognized stature) has low (or no) standards.

I wouldn’t call saying “But other fields do this too” a particularly cogent critique.

Not by itself, no, but (a) that’s not all Joshi said, and (b) it does break the hoaxers’ chain of reasoning, which is that this one acceptance suggests that the field of gender studies is nonsense.

I don’t know whether the hoaxers’ agenda is their (fairly obvious) MRA leanings, or the common belief by some physicists (usually bad ones) that most other fields are crap, or just childish academic vandalism, but I honestly don’t think that this hoax is helpful for anyone. As a professor in a STEM field (and editor of an OA journal), I have better things to do with my time than punking other fields…but if I did engage in this kind of thing, I wouldn’t be gleeful about having done such a piss-poor job of it.

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Yes indeed (and ironically enough).

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I think you’re meant to think that we’re all scum unworthy of your identification or of economic support from society. Exercises like this are meant to undermine any intellectual authority that academia has built up over the past century and a half or so, show that we’re all a bunch of frauds unworthy of respect.

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I don’t know if I’d have used legitimate there. :smirk:

There are legitimately predatory OA journals that will publish anything,

Fixed that for you

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Test papers have already shown that there are huge problems with peer review. In this one, they did want to try one that was complete post-modern garbage, but their choice of “penis causes climate change” seems a bit, hmph, targeted.

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ah, thanks for that.

My mistake was assuming this was a respectable publishing outlet, it seems. It wasn’t so much that the peer review was “rubber-stamped,” it was the publisher is a rubber stamp; or a rubber-stamp enabler?

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[quote=“noahdjango, post:35, topic:101305, full:true”]
My mistake was assuming this was a respectable publishing outlet, it seems. It wasn’t so much that the peer review was “rubber-stamped,” it was the publisher is a rubber stamp; or a rubber-stamp enabler?[/quote]
What actually happened was that when the paper was rejected from Norma, a respected Taylor & Francis publication, the authors were automatically invited to submit to Cogent, a different T&F publication which uses the pay-to-publish model (common in the sciences but very rare in the humanities & social sciences) and apparently no meaningful peer review. This is increasingly common in publishing groups BTW, where when your paper is rejected an alternate journal is automagically suggested, but when the suggested alternate is a vanity product like this one it feels like the publisher T&F is running a bit of a scam.

Incidentally, pay-to-publish (aka “page charges”) is not automatically a bad model: revenue has to come from somewhere, and libraries increasingly can’t afford to be the prime revenue source, but it has proved to be more conducive to abuse recently than traditional models.

Update: When I say Norma is respected, I should add that even it isn’t a top journal in the field, eg it isn’t on this list. It is interesting that so many people are quick to read more into the fact that this paper was accepted by a bad journal in a field than that it was rejected by better ones. Confirmation bias at work.

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How micro a climate are we talking about here?

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Think of it as a ■■■■■ cave.

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I read the paper, walked away for a while then came back and re-read it. There seems to be an undercurrent of transphobia to it, in that transgender identities are being set up to be ridiculed as much as social science. In doing so, they are undermining their own point, unless transphobia is also one of their points. As @d_r points out, they seem to have MRA leanings.

It’s not like physics is immune to publication of meaningless rubbish either. Anyone want to go looking for published papers about the electric universe hypothesis? Or free energy?

I do have different concerns about Cogent Social Sciences. Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle may be deliberately misusing “transition” to mean “post-operative” rather than “no longer living as the gender originally on their birth certificate”, but surely CSS should have known better? I’m not sure if it is transphobia in this case, or just not having a clue.

If we left things to the moderate centre, then LGBT people would still be at the point of being told they are lucky that they aren’t arrested anymore (if that). It has always been the excesses of the left that have moved things forward, even if it is only to set up a less extreme group as moderate.

Agreed. If all it takes for an entire field of research to be discredited is for one bad paper to be published, then everything has already been discredited many times over.

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Tu quoque. In any case, no-one is claiming that other disciplines are immune. In fact:

Check the list. My profession is in there too. It’s still funny.

Heck, Computer Science even has an algorithm for it.

Ad hominem and a probable straw man as well. And regardless of their political motivation; whether serious or driving trollies; MRAs can be entirely correct, just like anyone else. Even a broken clock …

Either way, a competent reviewer would have sent back for editing.

The point is that social science writing has a problem with deliberately obscure pseudo-erudite language. And it’s not even as though it hasn’t been called out on it by their own.

And our excesses are only small in degree and in the service of all that is right and good, so therefore justified. Theirs are completely extreme, in the service of all that is wrong and evil in the world and therefore to be deplored … :wink:

Unfortunately excesses also serve to polarise. And I doubt anyone would even try to argue that political debate has become less polarised over the last 30 years?

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I’m not questioning that this was a deliberately bad paper that should never have been published. What I am saying is that there seems to be a strong transphobic element to the paper. I have 25 years of experience of being on the receiving end of transphobia, whether it be from the press or personal attacks, and I had to get good at recognising it to avoid violence.

I will say again, if transphobia wasn’t a point of the paper then they have seriously undermined their message. They can be correct without being dismissive of entire groups of people who have nothing to do with social science.

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