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A trio of scholars has come to a conclusion about a year-long effort to publish fabricated papers related to identity politics, a project trumpeted by many as an indictment of political correctness in gender studies and related fields.
But those fields' defenders say that the hoax is a far larger problem: that many disciplines are peppered with shoddy scholarship. And even the authors say that they do not make any conclusions about gender studies, per se.
"Helen Pluckrose, a scholar of religious writing and one of the hoaxers, told BuzzFeed News by email.
Pluckrose and two other scholars – Peter Boghossian, assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University, and James Lindsay, a mathematician and author – managed to get seven phony papers Hooters exhibit a "unique masculinity." The elaborate hoax was cut short when their study on the culture of dog parks was taken out by a Twitter account and the Wall Street Journal (and then retracted by the academic journal that published it).
The trio targeted what they pejoratively call "grievance studies," which includes, among other fields, gender studies, queer studies, fat studies, and critical race theory. They say their successes exposes academia's troubling slide of objective, scientific truth in the name of social justice.
"[T]We are sorry, "Pluckrose is editor-in-chief", "the trio wrote on Tuesday in Areo Magazine, where Pluckrose is editor-in-chief. "In this way, it is highly verifiable knowledge."
The article was praised by some. "Is there any idea so much that it will be published in a Critical / PoMo / Identity /" Theory "journal?" Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker tweeted. Jeffrey Beall, a retired expert in academic publishing at the University of Colorado Denver, told BuzzFeed News that the hoax is working because it is biased towards the political left. "This is what happens when you have one-party rule in higher education," he said.
But other experts – in linguistics, philosophy, gender studies, and biology – told BuzzFeed that they thought the stunt was poorly conceived and politically motivated.
Yes, these critics said, there are major problems with peer review in studies of gender, race, and other facets of identity politics – just like psychology, nutrition, and many other fields of scientific research. But the trio made no attempt to test the fields they call "grievance studies" have a particular egregious problem. They set out from the get-go to prank these disciplines but not others.
"For all of the hoaxers' emphasis on scientific rigor, their experiment does not have a control," said Sarah Richardson, a professor of the History of Science and Women's Studies, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. "By their own standards, we can not scientifically conclude anything from it."
Hoaxes in academic publishing are nothing new. Most famously, in 1996 the physicist Alan Sokal of New York University published in the newspaper Social Text claiming that quantum gravity – a field of study that could unlock our understanding of fundamental particles and forces – is a social and linguistic construct.
Sokal submitted his nonsensical paper to satirize postmodern philosophy – and in particular, its misappropriation of the language of his own discipline, physics. More recent hoaxes have exhibited lax standards of peer review of low-quality journals in disciplines from biomedicine to computer science by submitting obviously flawed papers, some of the written word by bots.
Last year, Boghossian and Lindsay added to the genre by publishing a fake study, "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct," in the journal Cogent Social Sciences. It is claimed that, among other things, "manspreading" is akin to "empty space", and that the penis is "one of the poorest quality of climate change." prepared to publish one poor-quality paper (which was swiftly retracted).
The larger project revealed this week as an attempt to publish similar nonsense on a larger scale. Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose started by submitting flagrantly nonsensical papers. But all six of these were rejected.
"[N]"The Conceptual Penis" would have been published in a highly regarded gender-journal studies, "They wrote in the Areo article. "In believing that some might, and one having said so in the wake of that attempt, we were wrong."
So they set about writing subtler hoaxes. Carefully phrased to match the language of the fields they were satirizing, the papers were nonetheless used implausible statistics, made claims not warranted by the data, or relied upon ideologically motivated analyzes.
Some of the studies were submitted under the names of others, Richard Baldwin, a trained champion bodybuilder and professor of humanities at Gulf Coast State College in Florida.
The hoaxers were outed before their experiment was complete, leaving five papers still under consideration for publication. (On Wednesday, Lindsay tweeted that one of these had just been rejected.) In all, the trio wrote 20 papers and had seven accepted.
"We managed to get seven shoddy, absurd, unethical and politically-biased papers on respectable journals in the fields of grievance studies. Does this show that academia is corrupt? Absolutely not. Does it show that all scholars and reviewers in humanities fields which study gender, race, sexuality and weight are corrupt? No, "the authors wrote. But it does not point to a problem, they argue. "We should not have been able to publish this terrible issue in reputable journals, let alone seven."
Criticisms have been made to test the science of journalism by "submitting to the highest levels" by submitting the fake papers to "leading" journals. "I did not recognize many of the journals they hoaxed," Richardson said.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which ranks journals in the academic literature. Four of the journals that are accepted by the trio's papers were ranked 5th, 8th, 24th and 27th out of 42 journals in women's studies in 2017. The other three were not listed in the database at all.
We also found little evidence that the problem of bogus scholarship identified by the trio was "reaching into sociology," as they claimed. They submitted papers to three publications categorized in the JCR as sociology journals. All three papers were rejected.
In some cases, the label "leading" applied only because the trio had narrowly defined it. For example, the researchers described Affilia – Journal of Women and Social Workas a leading journalist in the field of social studies.
Pluckrose countered that these journals do not publish influential work – even Hypatia, the lowest-ranked of the journals they duped. "If you reject Hypatia as an influential producer of knowledge, you necessarily dismiss much influential feminist philosophy and feminist epistemology," she said. "Of course, we do not object if people do dismiss this kind of feminist epistemology and feminist philosophy."
Because the trio fabricated data (including fake assessments of the genitals of nearly 10,000 dogs), purposely mimicked the language of genuine papers, and reacted positively to reviewers' comments to get some papers published, some criticisms suggested the hoax had more in common with notorious examples of scientific fraud
"It's less similar to Sokal (which was breezy gibberish) and more similar to the many instances of scientific misconduct involving effortful and intentional deception, in my mind," Ketan Joshi, a science communicator working in data science in Australia who wrote a popular review of the conceptual penis paper, told by BuzzFeed News by email.
Others raised a more philosophical objection. The hoaxers began their project with the assumption that some ideas are patently, laughably absurd. But this is a cynical bias, and an affront to academic freedom and intellectual progress.
"I'm a philosopher by trade – we have people in my discipline", said Liam Kofi Bright, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who has studied scientific fraud.
"I think it would be a real shame to lose that even though absurd conclusions may be true and true."
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