Let's NOT shape the world's energy through oil, gas, and petroleum
Keith S. Taber
Let's shape the world's energy by moving away from reliance on non-renewable and polluting fossil fuels (Image by jpenrose from Pixabay)
I have just replied to yet another invitation to speak at a conference about a topic where I have no expertise! (Presumably, actually an invitation to be hoodwinked into paying a conference registration fee to a conference organiser who has no concern for the academic quality or accuracy of their conference presentations. 1)
Dear Dr. Jessie Parker
Thank you for your invitation to speak at the International E-Conference on Oil, Gas and Petroleum Engineering, but I really do not see I have any particular expertise that would be relevant to delegates at such a conference.
As you "would also love to hear [my] thoughts and opinions" relating to the conference theme of "Shaping world's energy through latest advances in oil, gas, and petroleum" then I am happy to share. Basically my opinion would be that oil, gas and petroleum should be phased out as contributions to the "world's energy" (i.e., power generation to meet human needs) as soon as it is feasible.
Best wishes
Keith
My reply to an email inviting me to speak on "Shaping world's energy through latest advances in oil, gas, and petroleum", 21/12/2021
An invitation to my alter ego 'Taber Keith S'
Note:
1 The email comes from urfconferences.com, which according to the web is Universal Research Foundation now seemingly trading as United Research Forum:
"The website United Research Forum is a platform where knowledge and zeal to [sic] meet with the vision of educating with the latest scientific and technology-specific innovations and the best implementations for mankind."
https://unitedresearchforum.com
Well, quite.
But strangely, the conference I was invited talk at to does not appear on the diverse of events shown on their website:
Someone there at least has a sense of humour, as on the dates that they invited me to talk about "Oil, Gas and Petroleum Engineering" they are advertising a meeting on "Environmental sustainability"! I hope they have not got the two meetings conflated.
Whereas there is a conference on the topic of Oil, Gas and Petroleum Engineering, with the same dates, listed on the website of the 'The World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology' which apparently is "an open science research organization dedicated to promoting the advancement of science, engineering, and technology" (https://waset.org/page/support, accessed 21/12/2021):
https://waset.org/oil-gas-and-petrochemical-engineering-conference-in-april-2022-in-london (accessed 21/12/2021) [I had thought it was (the old) London Bridge, not Westminster Bridge, that had been built with buildings along it.]
Surely, United Research Forum (a.k.a. Universal Research Foundation) and The World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology are not different 'fronts' for the same organisation?
Anthropomorphism is the name given treating non-human entities as if they were human actors. An example of anthropomorphic language would be "the atom wants to donate an electron so that it can get a full outer shell" (see for example: 'A sodium atom wants to donate its electron to another atom'). In an example such as that, an event that would be explained in terms of concepts such as force and energy in a scientific account (the ionisation of an atom) is instead described as if the atom is a conscious agent that is aware of its status, has preferences, and acts to bring about desired ends.
Of course, an atom is not a complex enough entity to have mental experience that allows it to act deliberately in the world, so why might someone use such language?
Perhaps, if the speaker was a young learner, because they have not been taught the science.
Perhaps a non-scientist might use such language because they can only make sense of the abstract event in more familiar terms.
But what if the speaker was a scientist – a science teacher or a research scientist?
When fellow professionals (e.g., scientists) talk to each other they may often use a kind of shorthand that is not meant to be taken literally (e.g., 'the molecule wants to be in this configuration') simply because it can shorten and simplify more technical explanations that both parties understand. But when a teacher is talking to learners or a scientist is trying to explain their ideas to the general public, something else may be going on.
Anthropomorphism in science communication and education
In science teaching or science communication (scientists communicating science to the public) there is often a need to present abstract or complex ideas in ways that are accessible to the audience. At one level, teaching is about shifting what is to be taught from being unfamiliar to learners to being familiar, and one way to 'make the unfamiliar familiar' is to show it is in some sense like something already familiar.
Therefore there is much use of simile and analogy, and of telling stories that locate the focal material to be learned within a familiar narrative. Anthropomorphism is often used in this way. Inanimate objects may be said to want or need or try (etc.) as the human audience can relate to what it is to want or need or try.
Such techniques can be very useful to introduce novel ideas or phenomena in ways that are accessible and/or memorable ('weak anthropomorphism'). However, sometimes the person receiving these accounts may not appreciate their figurative nature as pedagogic / communicative aids, and may mistake what is meant to be no more than a starting point, a way into a new topic or idea, as being the scientific account itself. That is, these familiarisation techniques can work so well that the listener (or reader) may feel satisfied with them as explanatory accounts ('strong anthropomorphism').
Evolution – it's just natural (selection)
A particular issue arises with evolution, when often science only has hypothetical or incomplete accounts of how and why specific features or traits have been selected for in evolution. It is common for evolution to be misunderstood teleologically – that is, as if evolution was purposeful and nature has specific end-points in mind.
The scientific account of evolution is natural selection, where none of genes, individual specimens, populations or species are considered to be deliberately driving evolution in particular directions (present company excepted perhaps – as humans are aware of evolutionary processes, and may be making some decisions with a view to the long-term future). 1
Yet describing evolutionary change in accord with the scientific account tends to need complex and convoluted language (Taber, 2017). Teleological and anthropomorphic shorthand is easier to comprehend – even if it puts a burden on the communicatee to translate the narrative into a more technical account.
What the virus tries to do
The first example from the recent Science in Action episode related to the COVID pandemic, and the omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This was the lead story on the broadcast/podcast, in particular how the travel ban imposed on Southern Africa (a case of putting the lid on the Petri dish after the variant had bolted?) was disrupting supplies of materials needed to address the pandemic in the countries concerned.
This was followed by a related item:
"Omicron contains many more mutations than previous variants. However scientists have produced models in the past which can help us understand what these mutations do. Rockefeller University virologist Theodora Hatziioannou produced one very similar to Omicron and she tells us why the similarities are cause for concern."
"When you give the virus the opportunity to infect so many people, then of course it is going to try not only every possible mutation, but every possible combination of mutations, until it finds one that really helps it overcome our defences."
Dr Theodora Hatziioannou interviewed on Science in Action
Dr Theodora Hatziioannou Research Associate Professor Laboratory of Retrovirology The Rockefeller University
I am pretty sure that Dr Hatziioannou does not actually think that 'the virus' (which of course is composed of myriad discrete virus particles) is trying out different mutations intending to stop once it finds one which will overcome human defences. I would also be fairly confident that in making this claim she was not intending her listeners to understand that the virus had a deliberate strategy and was systematically working its way through a plan of action. A scientifically literature person should readily interpret the comments in a natural selection framework (e.g., 'random' variation, fitness, differential reproduction). In a sense, Dr Hatziioannou's comments may be seen as an anthropomorphic analogy – presenting the 'behaviour' of the virus (collectively) by analogy with human behavior.
Yet, as a science educator, such comments attract my attention as I am well aware that school age learners and some adult non-scientists may well understand evolution to work this way. Alternative conceptions of natural selection are very common. Even when students have been taught about natural selection they may misunderstand the process as Lamarckian (the inheritance of acquired characteristics – see for example 'The brain thinks: grow more fur'). So, I wonder how different members of the public hearing this interview will understand Dr Hatziioannou's analogy.
Even before COVID-19 came along, there was a tendency for scientists to describe viruses in such terms as as 'smart', 'clever' and 'sneaky' (e.g., 'So who's not a clever little virus then?'). The COVID pandemic seems to have unleashed a (metaphorical) pandemic of public comments about what the virus wants, and what it tries to achieve, and so forth. When a research scientist talks this way, I am fairly sure it is intended as figurative language. I am much less sure when, for example, I hear a politician telling the public that the virus likes cold weather ('What COVID really likes').
Vulture bees have the guts for it
The other item that struck me concerned vulture bees.
"Laura Figueroa from University of Massachusetts in Amhert [sic] in the US, has been investigating bees' digestive systems. Though these are not conventional honey bees, they are Costa Rican vulture bees. They feed on rotting meat, but still produce honey."
Bees do not actually make reasoned choices about their diets (Original image by Oldiefan from Pixabay)
The background is that although bees are considered (so I learned) to have evolved from wasps, and to all have become vegetarians, there are a few groups of bees that have reverted to the more primitive habits of eating meat. To be fair to them, these bees are not cutting down the forests to set up pasture and manage livestock, but rather take advantage of the availability of dead animals in their environment as a source of protein.
These vulture bees (or carrion bees) are able to do this because their gut microbiomes consist of a mix of microbes that can support them in digesting meat, allowing them to be omnivores. This raises the usual kind of 'chicken and egg' question 1 thrown up by evolutionary developments: how did vegetarian bees manage to shift their diet: the more recently acquired microbes would not have been useful or well-resourced whilst the bees were still limiting themselves to a plant-based diet, but the vegetarian bees would not have been able to digest carrion before their microbiomes changed.
As part of the interview, Dr Figueroa explaied:
"These are more specialised bees that once they were vegetarian for a really long time and they actually decided to change their ways, there's all of this meat in the forest, why not take advantage? I find that super-fascinating as well, because how do these shifts happen?
Because the bees, really when we are thinking about them, they've got access to this incredible resource of all of the flowering plants that are all over the world, so then why switch? Why make this change?
Over evolutionary time there are these mutations, and, you know, maybe they'd have got an inkling for meat, it's hard to know how exactly that happened, but really because it is a constant resource in the forest, there's always, you know, this might sound a little morbid but there's always animals that are dying and there's always this turn over of nutrients that can happen, and so potentially this specialised group of bees realised that, and maybe there's enough competition on the flowers that they decided to switch. Or, they didn't decide, but it happened over evolutionary time.
Dr Laura Figueroa interviewed on Science in Action
Dr Figueroa does not know exactly how this happened – more research is needed. I am sure Dr Figueroa does not think the bees decided to change their ways in the way that a person might decide to change their ways – perhaps deciding to get more exercise and go to bed earlier for the sake of their health. I am also sure Dr Figueroa does not think the bees realised that there was so much competition feeding on the flowers that it might be in their interests to consider a change of diet, in the way that a person might decide to change strategy based on an evaluation of the competition. These are anthropomorphic figures of speech.
Dr Laura Figueroa, NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology Department of Entomology, Cornell University / University of Massachusetts in Amherst
As she said "they didn't decide, but it happened over evolutionary time". Yet it seems so natural to use that kind of language, that is to frame the account in a narrative that makes sense in terms of how people experience their lives.
Again, the scientifically literate should appreciate the figurative use of language for what it is, and it is difficult to offer an accessible account without presenting evolutionary change as purposive and the result of deliberation and strategy. Yet, I cannot help wondering if this kind of language may reinforce some listeners' alternative conceptions about how natural selection works.
Work cited:
Dawkins, R. (1976/1989). The Selfish Gene (New ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1 The 'selfish' gene made famous by Dawkins (1976/1989) is not really selfish in the sense a person might be – rather this was an analogy which helped shift attention from changes at the individual or species level when trying to understand how evolution occurs, to changes in the level of distinct genes. If a mutation in a specific gene leads to a change in the carrying organism that (in turn) leads to that specimen having greater fitness then the gene itself has an increased chance of being replicated. So, from the perspective of focusing on the genes, the change at the species level can be seen as a side effect of the 'evolution' of the gene. The gene may be said to be (metaphorically) selfish because it does not change for the benefit of the organism, but to increase its own chances of being replicated. Of course, that is also an anthropomorphic narrative – actually the gene does not deliberately mutate, has no purpose, has no notion of replication, indeed, does not even 'know' it is a gene, and so forth.
2 Such either/or questions can be understood as posing false dichotomies (here, either the bees completely changed their diets before their microbiomes or their microbiomes changed dramatically before their diets shifted) when what often seems most likely is that change has been slow and gradual.
You tell me that you have reviewed my research, and yet you feel I would be in a good position to submit a research proposal on canine cancer cell lines to your pharma company.
I cannot see how anyone who genuinely had reviewed my research/publications and was in any way competent to undertake this kind of search on behalf of an industrial partner could possibly have come to that conclusion.
I had intended to suggest that, assuming you would are both honest and competent, you might wish to explain on what basis you feel my research makes me a suitable candidate for this kind of work. However, checking my email records, I find I sent you a similar email when you invited me to propose a project about manufacturing connectors for textiles and composite foils that would not change the thickness while maintaining flexibility for the automotive industry, which I do not yet seem (?) to have received a reply to. That invitation was also supposedly based on your looking at my research. I struggle to see how you could feel my research is relevant to either of these fields, let alone both of them.
You also claimed to have looked at my research when you 'reached out' to me when you had been "asked by an innovative specialty pharma company to look for proposals on the interspecies transmission of Covid-19 from academics…" (which seemed somewhat unfair to academics).
So, I hope you will understand why I will be dismissing your footer informing me that "any unauthorized review, copying, disclosure or any other use of this information is strictly prohibited" as I suspect that is intended to deter scholars from warning each other that Inospin is not a reputable company that follows careful ethical procedures, but rather that although you present as tagetting your marketing based on scrutiny of researchers' areas of work, this is not true and you are simply sending out spam.
Best wishes
Keith
November 2021: Inospin seeks experts on canine cancer– so, after looking at my research, they contact meAugust 2021: Inospin seeks experts on interspecies transmission of COVID-19 – so, after looking at my research, they contact me
Dear Claire
Thank you for the invitation.
I am really intrigued. I would be really fascinated to know what it was, in "Looking at [my] research", that prompted you to reach out to me in particular for help with "connectors for textiles and composite foils that would not change the thickness while maintaining flexibility"?
(Whilst I at least understand what "stable, flexible connectors for textiles and composite foils (PVC, TPO, PU)" means, I struggle to appreciate in what sense these connectors might also be quick: "quick, stable, flexible connectors for textiles and composite foils (PVC, TPO, PU)".)
Best wishes
Keith
June 2021: Inospin seeks experts on textiles and composites – so, after looking at my research, they contact me
Addenda
January 2022: Inospin seeks experts on sound isolation materials – so, after looking at my research, they contact meJanuary 2022: Inospin seeks experts on pathophysiological mechanisms of equine metabolic syndrome – so, after looking at my research, they contact meFebruary 2022: Inospin seeks experts on gene modification – so, after looking at my research, they contact me based on my expertise
"I picked up that phrase 'almost certainly due to lack of vaccine', I mean that sounds like a bit of guesswork."
Presenter on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme
Yesterday, I was drafting a post about how a scientist had referred to a scientific theory being 'absolutely certain'. I suggested that this seemed at odds with the nature of science as producing conjectural knowledge always open to revisiting – yet might be considered necessary when seeking to communicate in public media.
Today, I sadly heard an excellent example to support that thesis.
BBC Radio 4's Today programme included an interview with Dr Raghib Ali
Robinson: "Now one of the first things we learned when the pandemic began, was that a greater proportion of Black and South Asian people were dying from corona virus. That remains the case many months on, but a new government report out today argues that the mortality gap now is mainly due, is not due, I'm sorry, to any genetic or social factor, it is, and I quote almost certainly down to vaccine take-up, or more accurately a lack of vaccine take-up. We're joined now by the government's independent expert advisor on COVID-19 and ethnicity, Dr. Raghib Ali, who is a consultant in acute medicine at Oxford University Hospitals. Morning to you"
Dr Ali: "Good morning Nick."
Robinson:"I picked up that phrase 'almost certainly due to lack of vaccine', I mean that sounds like a bit of guesswork. Do we actually know that?"
Nick Robinson interviewing Dr Raghib Ali on Today, 3rd December 2021, c.08.46
This seems to show a worrying level of ignorance (or else an odd provocation) from a senior and experienced journalist expecting scientific studies to be able to offer certain knowledge about causes in complex multivariate social situations.
How a scientific claim was understood on a prestigious news magazine programme
Sadly, if the news media are only interested in absolute certainty, then they should stop talking to scientists about their work as absolute certainty has no place in scientific discourse. Nor should it, I might suggest, have a place in serious journalism.
Is there a place for absolute certainty in science communication?
Keith S. Taber
I just got around to listening to the podcast of the 10th October episode of Science in Action. This was an episode entitled 'Youngest rock samples from the moon' which led with a story about rock samples collected on the moon and brought to earth by a Chinese mission (Chang'e-5). However, what caused me to, metaphorically at least, prick up my ears was a reference to "absolute certainty".
Now the tag line for Science in Action is "The BBC brings you all the week's science news". I think that phrase reveals something important about science journalism – it may be about science, but it is journalism, not science.
That is not meant as some kind of insult. But science in the media is not intended as science communication between scientists (they have journals and conferences and so forth), but science communicated to the public – which means it has to be represented in a form suitable for a general, non-specialist audience.
For, surely, "all the week's science news" cannot be covered in one half-hour broadcast/podcast. 1
My point is that "The BBC brings you all the week's science news" is not intended to be understood and treated as a scientific claim, but as something rathere different. As Wittgenstein (1953/2009) famously pointed out, language has to be understood in specific contexts, and there are different 'language games'. So, in the genre of the scientific report there are particular standards and norms that apply to the claims made. Occasionally these norms are deliberately broken – perhaps a claim is made that is supported by fabricated evidence, or for which there is no supporting evidence – but this would be judged as malpractice, academic misconduct or at least incompetence. It is not within the rules of that game
However, the BBC's claim is part of a different 'language game' – no one is going to be accused of professional misconduct because, objectively, Science in Action does not brings a listenerallthe week's science news. The statement is not intended to be understood as an objective knowledge claim, but more a kind of motto or slogan; it is not to be considered 'false' because it not objectively correct. Rather, it is to be understood in a fuzzy, vague, impressionistic way.
To ask whether "The BBC brings you all the week's science news" through Science in Action is a true or false claim would be a kind of category error. The same kind of category error that occurs if we ask whether or not a scientist believes in the ideal gas law, the periodic table or models of climate change.
Who invented gravity?
This then raises the question of how we understand what professional academic scientists say on a science news programme that is part of the broadcast media in conversation with professional journalists. Are they, as scientists, engaged in 'science speak', or are they as guests on a news show engaged in 'media speak'?
What provoked this thought with was comments by Dr Fredi Otto who appeared on the programme "to discuss the 2021 Nobel Prizes for Science". In particular, I was struck by two specific comments. The second was:
"…you can't believe in climate change or not, that would just be, you believe in gravity, or not…"
Which I took to mean that gravity is so much part of our everyday experience that it is taken-for-granted, and it would be bizarre to have a debate on whether it exists. There are phenomena we all experience all the time that we explain in terms of gravity, and although there may be scope for debate about gravity's nature or its mode of action or even its universality, there is little sense in denying gravity. 2
Newton's notion of gravity predominated for a couple of centuries, but when Einstein proposed a completely different understanding, this did not in any sense undermine the common ('life-world' 2) experience labelled as gravity – what happens when we trip over, or drop something, or the tiring experience of climbing too many steps. And, of course, the common misconception that Newton somehow 'discovered' gravity is completely ahistorical as people had been dropping things and tripping over and noticing that fruit falls from trees for a very long time before Newton posited that the moon was in freefall around the earth in a way analogous to a falling apple!
Believing in gravity
Even if, in scientific terms, believing in a Newtonian conceptualisation of gravity as a force acting at a distance would be to believe something that was no longer considered the best scientific account (in a sense the 'force' of gravity becomes a kind of epiphenomenon in a relativistic account of gravity); in everyday day terms, believing in the phenomenon of gravity (as a way of describing a common pattern in experience of being in the world) is just plain common sense.
Dr Otto seemed to be suggesting that just as gravity is a phenomenon that we all take for granted (regardless of how it is operationalised or explained scientifically), so should climate change be. That might be something of a stretch as the phenomena we associate with gravity (e.g., dense objects falling when dropped, ending up on the floor when we fall) are more uniform than those associated with climate change – which is of course why one tends to come across more climate change deniers than gravity deniers. To the best of my knowledge, not even Donald Trump has claimed there is no gravity.
But the first comment that gave me pause for thought was:
"…we now can attribute, with absolute certainty, the increase in global mean temperature to the increase in greenhouse gases because our burning of fossil fuels…"
That did not seem to me like a scientific statement – more like the kind of commitment associated with belief in a religious doctrine. Science produces conjectural, theoretical knowledge, but not absolute knowledge?
Surely, absolute certainty is limited to deductive logic, where proofs are possible (as in mathematics, where conclusions can be shown to inevitably follow from statements taken as axioms – as long as one accepts the axioms, then the conclusions must follow). Science deals with evidence, but not proof, and is always open to being revisited in the light of new evidence or new ways of thinking about things.
For example, at one time many scientists would have said that the presence of an ether 3 was beyond question (as for example waves of light travelled from the sun to earth, and waves motion requires a medium). Its scientific characterisation -e.g., the precise nature of the ether, its motion relative to the earth – were open to investigation, but its existence seemed pretty secure.
It seemed inconceivable to many that the ether might not exist. We might say it was beyond reasonable doubt. 4 But now the ether has gone the way of caloric and phlogiston and N-rays and cold fusion and the four humours… It may have once been beyond reasonable doubt to some (given the state of the evidence and the available theoretical perspectives), but it can never have been 'absolutely certain'.
Science is the most reliable and trustworthy approach to understanding the natural world, but a large part of that strength comes from it never completely closing a case for good – from never suggesting to have provided absolute certainty. Science can be self-correcting because no scientific idea is 'beyond question'. That is not to say that we abandon, say, conversation of energy at the suggestion of the first eccentric thinker with designs for a perpetual motion machine – but in principle even the principle of conservation of energy should not be considered as absolutely certain. That would be religious faith, not scientific judgement.
So, we should not believe. It should not be considered absolutely certain that "the increase in global mean temperature [is due to] the increase in greenhouse gases because [of] our burning of fossil fuels", as that suggests we should believe it as a doctrine or dogma, rather than believe that the case is strong enough to make acting accordingly sensible. That is, if science is always provisional, technically open to review, then we can never wait for absolute certainty before we act, especially when something seems beyond reasonable doubt.
You should not believe scientific ideas
The point is that certainty and belief are not really the right concepts in science, and we should avoid them in teaching science:
"In brief, the argument to be made is that science education should aim for understanding of scientific ideas, but not for belief in those ideas. To be clear, the argument is not just that science education should not intend to bring about belief in scientific ideas, but rather that good science teaching discourages belief in the scientific ideas being taught."
To be clear – to say that we do not want learners to believe in scientific ideas is NOT to say we want them to disbelieve them! Rather, belief/disbelief should be orthogonal to the focus on understanding ideas and their evidence base.
I suggested above that to ask whether "The BBC brings you all the week's science news" through Science in Action is a true or false claim would be a kind of category error. I would suggest it is a category error in the same sense as asking whether or not people should believe in the ideal gas law, the periodic table, or models of climate change.
"If science is not about belief, then having learners come out of science lessons believing in evolution, or for that matter believing that magnetic field lines are more concentrated near the poles of a magnet, or believing that energy is always conserved, or believing that acidic solutions contain solvated hydrogen ions,[5] misses the point. Science education should help students understand scientific ideas, and appreciate why these ideas are found useful, and something of their status (for example when they have a limited range of application). Once students can understand the scientific ideas then they become available as possible ways of thinking about the world, and perhaps as notions under current consideration as useful (but not final) accounts of how the world is."
But how do scientists cross the borders from science to science communication?
Of course many scientists who have studied the topic are very convinced that climate change is occurring and that anthropogenic inputs into the atmosphere are a major or the major cause. In an everyday sense, they believe this (and as they have persuaded me, so do I). But in a strictly logical sense they cannot be absolutely certain. And they can never be absolutely certain. And therefore we need to act now, and not wait for certainty.
I do not know if Dr Otto would refer to 'absolute certainty' in a scientific context such as a research paper of a conference presentation. But a radio programme for a general audience – all ages, all levels of technical background, all degrees of sophistication in appreciating the nature of science – is not a professional scientific context, so perhaps a different language game applies. Perhaps scientists have to translate their message into a different kind of discourse to get their ideas across to the wider public?
The double bind
My reaction to Dr Otto's comments derived from a concern with public understanding of the nature of science. Too often learners think scientific models and theories are meant to be realistic absolute descriptions of nature. Too often they think science readily refutes false ideas and proves the true ones. Scientists talking in public about belief and absolute certainty can reinforce these misconceptions.
On the other hand, there is probably nothing more important that science can achieve today than persuade people to act to limit climate change before we might bring about shifts that are (for humanity if not for the planet) devastating. If most people think that science is about producing absolute certain knowledge, then any suggestion that there is uncertainty over whether human activity is causing climate change is likely to offer the deniers grist, and encourage a dangerous 'well let's wait till we know for sure' posture. Even when it is too late and the damage has been done, if there are any scientists left alive, they still will not know absolutely certainly what caused the changes.
"…Lord, here comes the flood We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood If again the seas are silent In any still alive It'll be those who gave their island to survive…"
(Peter Gabriel performing on the Kate Bush TV special, 1979: BBC Birmingham)
So, perhaps climate scientists are in a double bind – they can represent the nature of science authentically, and have their scientific claims misunderstood; or they can do what they can to get across the critical significance of their science, but in doing so reinforce misconceptions of the nature of scientific knowledge.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953/2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans. P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte Eds. Revised fourth ed.). Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Schutz, A., & Luckmann, T. (1973). The Structures of the Life-World (R. M. Zaner & H. T. Engelhardt, Trans.). Evanston, Illinois: Northwest University Press.
1 An alternative almost tautological interpretation might be that the BBC decides what is 'science news', and it is what is included in Science in Action, might fit some critics complaints that the BBC can be a very arrogant and self-important organisation – if only because there are stories not covered in Science in Action that do get covered in the BBC's other programmes such as BBC Inside Science.
2 This might be seen as equivalent to saying that the life-world claim that gravity (as is commonly understood and experienced) exists is taken-for-granted Schutz & Luckmann, 1973). A scientific claim would be different as gravity would need to be operationally defined in terms that were considered objective, rather that just assuming that everyone in the same language community shares a meaning for 'gravity'.
3 The 'luminiferous' aether or ether. The ether was the name given to the fifth element in the classical system where sublunary matter was composed of four elements (earth, water, air, fire) and the perfect heavens from a fifth.
(Film director Luc Besson's sci-fi/fantasy movie 'The Fifth Element' {1997, Gaumont Film Company} borrows from this idea very loosely: Milla Jovovich was cast in the title role as a perfect being who is brought to earth to be reunited with the other four elements in order to save the world.)
4 Arguably the difference between forming an opinion on which to base everyday action (everyday as in whether to wear a rain coat, or to have marmalade on breakfast toast, not as in whether to close down the global fossil fuel industry), and proposing formal research conclusions can be compared to the difference between civil legal proceedings (decided on the balance of probabilities – what seems most likely given the available evidence) and criminal proceedings – where a conviction is supposed to depend upon guilt being judged beyond reasonable doubt given the available evidence (Taber, 2013).
5 Whether acids do contain hydrated hydrogen ions may seem something that can reasonably be determined, at least beyond reasonable doubt, by empirical investigation. But actually not, as what counts as an acid has changed over time as chemists have redefined the concept according to what seemed most useful. (Taber, 2019, Chapter 6: Conceptualising acids: Reimagining a class of substances).
Is Rahul Hajare the Alan Sokal for the Open Access era?: Part 2
Keith S. Taber
the Journal of Dermatology Sciences Research Reviews & Reports managed to not spot that an article supposedly about safety precautions taken by sex workers in India during the COVID pandemic, but actually about anger management in the workplace, was illustrated by a news bureau's photographs from Bolivia, and made wholesale use of text from a U.S. business association website
In the first part of this article, I discussed some of the publications of Dr Rahul Hajare who has made a habit out of publishing dubious articles in predatory journals that only superficially mimic genuine research journals. I would suspect that most people who publish their research in such predatory journals do so either
in good faith, not realising they are submitting to a journal that only pretends to apply rigorous editorial and peer-review procedures, or
realising that they are in effect simply paying for publication, but enter into an unspoken (and unwritten) conspiracy with the journals by sending manuscripts that at least have a prima facie appearance of being serious work
Dr Hajare does not seem to fall into either category. I do not think he can believe the work he is submitting reflects high quality scholarship, and yet nor does he make an effort to give a superficial impression of proper research writing.
Quite the opposite.
Instead:
He often provides long convoluted titles that seem to juxtapose unrelated items, or short titles that are provocative;
He sometimes compiles papers from segments that seem to be about totally different topics and studies;
He ignores normal paper structures – as when proceeding directly from an introduction § to a conclusion § omitting everything that usually goes between, or writing an abstract which is much longer than the main text of the paper;
He includes nonsense sentences (sometimes very early in the text);
He interjects sentences on unrelated topics;
He makes fantastic or counterfactual claims;
He drops leitmotifs into his work – incongruous references to colours, sunlight, pharmacy institutions …
It would, surely, actually be easier to write articles which were, superficially at least, canonical – and which were coherent and non-contentious. Hajare seems to be deliberately bringing attention to problems in his work as if he is telling his readers – "you cannot take this seriously – do you get the joke'?"
My best assumption is that Hajare is seeking to call out predatory journals for what they are – making it very clear that either:
no editor or expert reviewer has ever read his submissions carefully before publication; or
if his works have been evaluated, they passed an extremely low bar (publication criteria along the lines 'it has (a) a title and (b) some text, and so we can charge a publication fee')
Nobody reading across Hajare's canon could possibly think his work (or at least a large part of it over the last few years) is serious scholarship, or that any results he reports in his hoax papers can be considered reliable. But what he has shown very clearly is that the journals publishing his submissions are not even trying to be serious research journals.
That is very useful, as it could always be claimed that
predatory journals may have inexperienced editors, or struggle to persuade suitable experts to carry out reviews, which is why some poor quality work gets published, yet they are doing their best and will look to improve their standards.
The Hajare hoax makes it clear that that explanation will not do. Any well educated person reading his work will see that there are obvious problems with his manuscripts (obvious, I suspect, because Hajare has made sure they are obvious) and these papers clearly should not stand as part of the research literature.
That's the argument that informed the first part of this article, where it was supported by a range of examples from a selection of Hajare's articles in outlets self-describing as research journals .
However, as I dug into Hajare's outputs, and after a very minimal due diligence (a few quick web searches), I soon found that Hajare's hoax seemed to rely on another feature as well: plagiarism. That is, presenting other people's work as your own.
Can you have a well-meaning plagiarist?
I am sure I must have have plagiarised other people's work.
Certainly not intentionally. But if we are meant to acknowledge sources which we have drawn upon in the thinking that we represent in texts, this is surely inevitable. I recognised this as part of the acknowledgements for one of my books:
I am aware that I inevitably own an enormous debt to the authors of many things I have read over the years that are not cited here as well as to colleagues and students for things I have heard in presentations and in conversations in both formal and informal contexts. I have sought to acknowledge those key sources I am aware have informed my thinking, and I would here like to acknowledge that I am aware that I am surely drawing on many other sources that I either no longer specifically recall or have simply not recognised as influences in writing this book.
I suspect there may even be some good ideas in here that I present as if original, but which have worked their way into my consciousness so slowly that I was unaware that their original inspiration was something I had long ago read or heard. I take some comfort in knowing that if this is indeed so, my failure is probably not so unusual, as is indicated by occasional high-profile examples such as when George Harrison was sued for a great deal of money for not acknowledging a highly popular song was very similar to an earlier hit written by someone else. At least working in the academic world, rather than 'the material world', such unconscious plagiarism is unlikely to lead to claims for vast amounts of unpaid royalties.
Deliberate plagiarists, at least if they do not want to be caught, will make sure they change enough so that it is not obvious (especially in terms of being identified by software tools used by publishers) that they are copying.
Students are trained not to work with many long quotes of other people's work (as cutting and pasting is not a high level cognitive skill!) but should paraphrase in their own words as much as possible (so processing the information, thinking about its meaning, relating it to their own prior knowledge to make it meangful – and so having some chance of understanding and remembering it) – and just use a few select quotes that are seen as seminal, punchy, or worth repeating for some other reason. But, the important thing, is: even when paraphrasing, you cite the original sources.1
Someone who draws upon an other's ideas without citing them may have forgotten the original source or may consider their own ideas are sufficiently different, or believe the background ideas are so much part of what is taken for granted that no citation is needed. (In some fields people still regularly cite Plato and Aristotle, whereas in the natural sciences it would be rare for anyone to cite scientists who introduced foundational ideas that are still underpinning research today when the original publications were decades, and certainly centuries, old.)
It is different with text (or figures). Presenting someone else's text as your own is either due to poor scholarship habits (moving quotations around in a document or between files without the citation so that later it looks like original text) or just deliberate stealing.
Journal norms on reuse of text
There are two issues relating to copying someone else's text or images. Plagiarism and copyright. Plagiarism is a moral issue – a matter of scholarly standards and academic norms. These are socially constructed of course. 2
Today, however, the rules are very clear. An author's text should be her own, except where other work is quoted, in which case there are typographic conventions (quotation marks or block quotes indented from the main text) and the source must be cited. To simply present some else's text as your own is plagiarism: cheating, stealing intellectual property, dishonesty: indeed academic malpractice.
It may also be illegal. An author has copyright in their text. This gives them the right to have it published – or indeed not to allow it to be published. They also have the right to be acknowledged as the author of the text (unless they choose to be anonymous) when their work is published, and they have the right to have the integrity of their text respected: so an editor cannot make substantial changes to work appearing under the author's name without their permission. (Even if some publishers, such as Oxford University Press, will sometimes try to persuade authors to sign away the legal right to protect the integrity to their work.)
Traditionally, publishers have been very fussy to make sure authors assure them that they own the copyright in their submitted works, and that they have not already licensed the rights to another publisher. This is why journals usually insist that authors submitting manuscripts can only send in work that is unpublished and not being considered by another publisher. Traditionally, on publication, the rights in an academic work either transfer to the publisher or the publisher is granted an exclusive license to publish (according to the publication agreement {'contract'} between the parties).
A journal publishing already published work was likely to be infringing another publisher's copyright – and potentially subject to legal redress.
Copyright and open access
Increasingly, research reports are published open access, which normally means that there is a license granted by the author which acknowledges the author's copyright, but allows reuse of the material. Anyone else can copy, and republish, the text in whole or part as long as they do not distort it, and they acknowledge the original source and the license.
So, there is usually no legal barrier to someone republishing an open access article.
However, serous journals do not want to republish material already in the public domain (except sometimes where it is considered a classic paper worth republishing with commentaries, or something was originally published in an obscure source that is not easily accessed). So, a serious research journal is still likely to insist that it will normally only consider publishing previously unpublished material that is not currently under consideration elsewhere.
Hajare's multiple publications
As I demonstrated in the first part of this article, Hajare will sometmes publish the same material, or substantially the same material, in several journals.
"An attempt to Characterize Street Pharmaceutical Teachers Abusing Drugs and Aspect of Allergy Among Adult Men Attending Long Distance Institutions in Pune, India" – well, actually, three attempts?
As these are open access journals, this does not breach copyright. It does however go against academic norms. Even predatory journals will usually claim they only accept original material, although one might suspect that is mainly part of the pretense of being serious research journals. Serious journals usually have systems that can check submissions against published work and spot obvious cases of reuse of text, but, presumably, predatory journals would rather have the publication fee than notice this issue.
Hajare's multiple publication habit does not really offer evidence on this, however, as he seems to send copies of manuscripts to different journals almost simultaneously before there is a copy in the public domain to be included in the corpora compiled for plagiarism-detection systems.
Another example would be the article "In Vitro, Widowed and Curse Words form [sic, from?] Principal during Unplanned Meeting of the College in Private Pharmaceutical Instituions [sic] in Pune University India: An Attractive Study", which was such 'an attractive study' that it attracted publication in two journals (Journal of Natural & Ayurvedic Medicine; Current Opinions in Neurological Science) almost simultaneously (on the 1st and 3rd July, 2018).
Perhaps the 'In vitro' reference in the article(s) title was a deliberare nod to the study being a hoax. Neither journal seems to have queried why research with human participants might be carried out in vitro rather than, as is customary in the social sciences, in vivo.
"In Vitro, Widowed and Curse Words form Principal during Unplanned Meeting of the College in Private Pharmaceutical Instituions [sic] in Pune University India: An Attractive Study" was submitted to two journal eight days apart. [Use the 'slider' the see the full images.]
This article(s?) is somewhat longer than most of Hajare's recent output and included a table of results, and even a pie chart supposedly reporting the outcome of 'multivariable analysis':
The results of multivariable analysis – a pie chart from "In Vitro, Widowed and Curse Word…"
This study seems (to the best of my understanding) to be about how widows are subject to domestic violence, and in particular being sworn at (which is certainly not acceptable, but perhaps diminishes the seriousness of actual domestic violence if being conflated with it?), by (I think) Pharmacy college principals. Like many of Hajare's articles much of the text is (deliberately?) obscure. And as with many of his studies he seems to leave a large clue that we should not be trying too hard to make sense of the work:
For in the Methods § the reader is told that,
"Using two-stage time location eight clusters sampling, we recruited limited sample size 100 of FAWPPIs [female adults widowed in private pharmaceutical Institutions], ages 21-49 years, who had purchased respect from FAWPPIs in the past month."
p.542 [Current Opinions in Neurological Science version]
Yet in the Executive Summary the reader is instead told,
"This study of 40 homosexual adults aged 24 to 49 years comprised widowed, and cohabiting participants from three occupational groups, and concerned curse risk within this sample."
p.544 [Current Opinions in Neurological Science version]
The versions of the paper in the two journals are not entirely the same, as the version in Current Opinions in Neurological Science places the Executive Summary at the very end of the paper, following the Conclusions. However, the version in Journal of Natural & Ayurvedic Medicine has an extra section. Here the Executive Summary follows the section Conclusions, but precedes a section called Conclusion which repeats the text of the Executive Summary.
The 'Conclusion' § is different from the 'Conclusions' § – but the same as the 'Executive Summary'
Stealing work from other scholars
In any case, re-using one's own work is a rather different matter than genuine plagiarism, where someone else's work is passed off as your own. Sadly, during my preparation of this article it became clear that there was strong evidence suggesting that Hajare is using the work of others and claiming it as his own.
Given that prestige is so important to academics, and this depends to a large degree (although of course not entirely) on respect for published works, to deliberately present someone else's research or scholarship as your own is a serious breach of academic standards, and is a form of misconduct that opens an academic officer to disciplinary action.
Face recognition, IQ scores and the missing Trojans
A diatribe against facial recognition systems … and the same diatribe but against IQ scores!
In part 1, I described one of Hajare's papers ("Facial Recognition Technology and Detection of Over Sexuality in Private Organizations Combined with Shelter House. Baseline Integrated Behavioural and Biological Assessment among Most at-Risk Low Standards Hope Less Institutions in Pune, India") in Advanced Research in Gastroenterology & Hepatology which included some very bizarre material, but where the main text offered quite a serious and cogent argument about the dangers of widespread use of facial recognition software.
I also described a very similar paper, also by Hajare, with a very different title ("Detection of Progression over Sexuality in Indian Students and Teachers Combined") in the Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function.
I displayed selected text from the two papers to show they made precisely the same argument with almost the same wording – except where one paper was an argument about the potential threat of facial recognition software, the other made the same argument, in the same terms, but now the threat to society and freedom had become IQ scores.
The same argument – but highlighting a different perceived menace
There are certainly reasons to be suspicious of some uses of IQ, but any editor or reviewer should have questioned the specific claims made in the the Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function (as well as its relevance to that specialist journal of course!)
"such a grave threat to privacy and civil liberties, measured regulation should be abandoned in favour of an outright ban…IQ score is the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented…IQ score is a menace disguised as a gift…Because IQ score poses an extraordinary danger…IQ score will continue to be marketed as a component of the latest and greatest apps and devices. Apple is already pitching IQ, ID as the best new feature of its new iPhone…the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology's report proposes significant restrictions on government access to IQ-print data-bases as well as meaningful limitations on use of real-time IQ score. Tragically, most of these existing and proposed requirements are procedural, and in our opinion they won't ultimately stop surveillance creep and the spread of IQ-scanning infrastructure…Because IQ score holds out the promise of translating who we are and everywhere we go into track able information that can be nearly instantly stored, shared, and analyzed, its future development threatens to leave us constantly compromised. The future of human flourishing depends upon IQ score being banned before the systems become too entrenched in our lives"
Part of the rationale for banning IQ scores that was considered publishable scholarship in the Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function
Actually, I do not now think Hajare did construct this argument, as it seems to have been taken from a blog posting on the site 'Medium' written by a professor of law and computer science with a professor of philosophy. Hajare seems to have taken much of the original text, removed (some, but not all of the) references to the U.S. context and made the occasional tweak to the text. That posting starts
"With such a grave threat to privacy and civil liberties, measured regulation should be abandoned in favor of an outright ban
The Trojans would have loved facial recognition technology.
It's easy to accept an outwardly compelling but ultimately illusory view about what the future will look like once the full potential of facial recognition technology is unlocked. From this perspective, you'll never have to meet a stranger, fuss with passwords, or worry about forgetting your wallet. …"
Hartzog & Selinger, 2018
Here, Hajare seems to have changed the word 'Trojans' in the original text to 'species' for some reason – perhaps a deliberate nod to the hoax . So, when 'his' text reaches the "And that is how the trap gets sprung and the unfortunate truth becomes revealed: IQ score/facial recognition is a menace disguised as a gift…." the original resonance with 'Greeks bearing gifts' is missing.
Text
Date
Hartzog & Selinger, 2018
Published: 2nd August 2018
Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function paper apparently based on Hartzog & Selinger text
Submitted September 9th 2018
Advanced Research in Gastroenterology & Hepatologypaper apparently based on Hartzog & Selinger text
Submitted September 24th 2018
Chronology for the three publications
Clearly the editors of 'Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function' had no reservations about publishing a paper supposedly about 'over sexuality' which was actually an extended argument about the terrible threat to our freedoms of…IQ scores, and which seems to have been plagiarised from a source already in the public domain when Hajare submitted his version (as it did not take me long to spot with a simple web search). That this make no sense at all, is just as obvious as that it has absolutely nothing to do with gastrointestinal disorders and liver function!
Sadly, this was not the only example of Hajare seemingly plagiarising other sources that I came across.
An empirical study, lablelled as a review article,in the jouran COJ Nursing & Healthcare
A paper in COJ Nursing & Healthcare had the unwieldy title "Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Variation of High Risky Behaviour in Private Pharmacy Institutional Principal and Assistant Professor Combined Attending from Long Distance Driver Role in Pune University, India: An Attractive Findings", and the abstract claimed
"The study employed a concurrent triangulation research methodology where both descriptive cross sectional survey and naturalistic phenomenology designs have used. Probability and non-probability sampling methods have used to sample 120 adults from 4 degree course B. Pharmacy Colleges within Pune University. Data has collected using questionnaires to gather information from the teachers (sample size). …"
p.1/6
So, the sample seems to have been 120 teachers in Pharmacy Colleges in the University cited in the title of many Hajare papers. This seems to be confirmed later: "Probability and non-probability sampling methods were used to sample 120 teaching staffs from 28 colleges within Pune University India" (p.417). Despite references to "quantitative data obtained from the sample and the qualitative data generated from interview respondents who were the guidance and counseling" the paper does not offer any detail of interviews, and only seems to report statistical data and analysis.
The article itself begins "The world health organization recognizes emotional suicide as one of the world's leading causes of death" (p.1/6, emphasis added). The paper goes on to give more detail of the statistics around 'emotional [sic] suicide'. Unlike much of Hajare's recent output, this paper offers a full account of an empirical study over 6 pages, including tables of statistical results.
The Introduction to the paper includes a paragraph
"It has investigated the relationship between trait emotional intelligence and resilience with suicidal ideation [1,2]. Moreover, the study hypothesized that emotional intelligence and resilience would be correlated with each other and that they have moderating variables between stressful life events due to long distance driver role and suicidal ideation. A total of 277 male and female attending inconsistently on biometric without current psychiatric diseases have recruited per online questionnaire asking for lifetime and 4-weeks suicidal ideation and demographic data and containing the Resilience Scale of Wagnild and Young, the Connor Davidson Resilience Scale and, for the measurement of trait emotional intelligence, the Self-Report Emotional Ability Scale. Additionally, researcher applied the Social Readjustment Rating Scale to assess stressful life events."
p416
This seems to be reporting a study by Sojer and colleagues (2017). Yet Hajare cites two of his own papers (entitled [1] "Detection of high addictive habits circulating office in charge of private pharmacy institutions in Pune university India (Evidence Based Study of Late Report Office In Charge to College)" and [2] "Men Residing in Slums Correlate Pharmaceutical Institution in South West Pune") as the sources for this study.
Hajare then refers to
"A study by WHO aimed to investigate the relation between emotional intelligence and instable personality in substance abusers. The present [sic] correlational study selected 80 male addicts through available sampling [3,4]. The subjects referred to the community center. Their emotional intelligence and personality have evaluated by Baron [sic, Bar-On: after Reuven Bar-On] Questionnaire and Eysenck personality questionnaire (EPQ) for adults male, respectively. Pearson's correlation coefficient has used to assess the correlations between different factors."
p.416
This seems to refer to a study by Hosseini and Anari (2011) – who claim no affiliation in their study to WHO – but again Hajare cites two of his own articles as the source (entitled [3] "Understanding academic and educational problems fit for purpose in the contributing to attentional and learning difficulties in our children?" and [4] "Live and let live: acceptance of learning disability of people living with co-educational pharmaceutical institute selffinanced and privately managed remote areas in India where stigma and discrimination persist").
In both cases the Hajare works cited as sources seem to be on themes unrelated to the studies discussed.
Relocating photographs
A 'research article' entitled "Evaluation of Disposable Bed Sheets and Safety Guidelines for Black Dog Sex Workers Resumes in the New Normal Living with Burnside Pharmacy Institute in Pune University" published in the Journal of Dermatology Sciences Research Reviews & Reports includes two photographs that are labelled:
Sex workers wearing protective face masks and face shields wait for customers.
Sex worker wearing a protective face mask and a face shield disinfects bedfellow employees at room.
I found the same photographs, which Hajare's article implies were of sex workers based at a Pharmacy Institute in India (did that not seem odd to the journal editor?) on a website of the news organisation Reuters, which reported they were not taken in India at all, but rather in Bolivia:
Sex workers wearing protective face masks and face shields wait for customers at a club, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in El Alto outskirts of La Paz, Bolivia, July 15, 2020.
A sex worker wearing a protective face mask and a face shield disinfects a room at a club, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in El Alto outskirts of La Paz, Bolivia, July 15, 2020.
Hajare's text also included major elements with a very close match to a previously published work: a website report discussing a published study (Motro et al, 2018):
Angry employees has more likely to engage in unethical behaviour at work, a new study has revealed…. even if the source of their anger has not job-related.
Angry employees are more likely to engage in unethical behavior at work, even if the source of their anger is not job-related, according to new research, published in the Journal of Business Ethics.
At the same time, when employees have feeling guilty, they have far less likely to engage in unethical behaviour than those in a more neutral emotional state, researchers found.
At the same time, when employees are feeling guilty, they are far less likely to engage in unethical behavior than those in a more neutral emotional state, researchers found.
Unethical workplace behaviour, ranging from tardiness to theft, costs businesses billions of dollars a year, so it has important for managers to recognise how emotions may drive on the job behaviour.
Unethical workplace behavior, ranging from tardiness to theft, costs businesses billions of dollars a year, so it's important for managers to recognize how emotions may drive on-the-job behavior, says lead study author Daphna Motro, a doctoral student in management and organizations in the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management.
At every level of an organisation, every employee has experiencing emotion, so it has universal, and emotions have really powerful they can overtake and make do things never thought were capable of doing," [sic, no open inverted commas] a doctoral student in pune university and organisations in the pune university
"At every level of an organization, every employee is experiencing emotion, so it's universal, and emotions are really powerful–they can overtake you and make you do things you never thought you were capable of doing," Motro says.
While research often looks at "negative emotions" as a whole, work that not all negative emotions work in the same way.
While anger and guilt has both negative feelings, they have very different effects on behaviour.
While research often looks at "negative emotions" as a whole, Motro illustrates in her work that not all negative emotions work in the same way. While anger and guilt are both negative feelings, they have very different effects on behavior.
The reason for the difference It has how the two emotions impact processing [1]. [1 is a citation to another (unrelated) Hajare paper entitled "Scientology applied to the workday of women feels just as good as sex: Non clinical examination of less sunlight habit"]
"We found that anger was associated with more impulsive processing, which led to deviant behaviour, since deviant behaviour has often impulsive and not very carefully planned out. Guilt, on the other hand, has associated with more careful, deliberate processing, trying to think about what they have done wrong, how to fix it and so it leads to less deviance.
"We found that anger was associated with more impulsive processing, which led to deviant behavior, since deviant behavior is often impulsive and not very carefully planned out," Motro says.
"Guilt, on the other hand, is associated with more careful, deliberate processing–trying to think about what you've done wrong, how to fix it–and so it leads to less deviance."
Researcher findings come from two studies, in which she [sic, not Hajare] and her collaborators used writing prompts to induce the desired emotion. Study participants have asked to write about either a time when they felt very angry or a time when they felt very guilty.
The First Study Motro's findings come from two studies, in which she and her collaborators used writing prompts to induce the desired emotion. Study participants were asked to write about either a time when they felt very angry or a time when they felt very guilty.
etc.
etc.
Hajare's August 2020 publication seems to match text from a 2016 website posting with only minor modifications.
So, the Journal of Dermatology Sciences Research Reviews & Reports managed to not spot that an article supposedly about safety precautions taken by sex workers in India during the COVID pandemic, but actually about anger management in the workplace, was illustrated by a news bureau's photographs from Bolivia, and made wholesale use of text from a U.S. business association website.
I soon found other examples of copying work from other source in Hajare's publications.
Diabetes becomes dullness
As reported in Part 1 of this article, in "Guessing Game And Poor Quality Teaching Staffs Study Of Less Sunlight Private Pharmacy Institution In Pune University" published in Advances in Bioengineering & Biomedical Science Research, Hajare describes 'dullness' as a serious medical condition,
"The study suggests that mentally draining work such as teaching may increase the risk of dullness in women. According to the research, employers and women should be more aware of the potential health risks associated with mentally tiring work.
Dullness is an increasingly prevalent disease that places a huge burden on patients and society and can lead to significant health problems including heart attacks, strokes, blindness, and hair fall, mouth odour, under eye blackness, pelvis dislocation, one sided vagina, and kidney failure.Numerous factors can increase the risk of developing dullness including obesity, diet, exercise, smoking or a long term family history of the disease."
p.1
I recognised that although the list of 'problems' seemed bizarre, it included a number of complications of diabetes. So that gave me a hint for doing a web search. With this clue I soon found a website that reported on a genuine research study,
"The study findings suggest that mentally draining work, such as teaching, may increase the risk of diabetes in women. This suggests that employers and women should be more aware of the potential health risks associated with mentally tiring work.
Type 2 diabetes is an increasingly prevalent disease that places a huge burden on patients and society, and can lead to significant health problems including heart attacks, strokes, blindness and kidney failure. Numerous factors can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes including, obesity, diet, exercise, smoking or a family history of the disease.
Again, Hajare's text appears to be a slightly adulterated version of previously published material:
What Hajare claimed as his own study
Scimex website report of a study in European Journal of Endocrinology
In the study, Dr Rahul Hajare from the Indian Council of Medical Research Batch 2013
In a French study, Dr Guy Fagherazzi and colleagues from the Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health at Inserm,
examined the effect of mentally tiring work on dullnessincidence [sic] in over 20 women, during a 22- 32 year period.
examined the effect of mentally tiring work on diabetes incidence in over 70,000 women, during a 22-year period.
Approximately 75 per cent of the women were in the teaching profession and 24 per cent reported finding their work very mentally tiring at the beginning of the studydue to lack of complete knowledge,
Approximately 75% of the women were in the teaching profession and 24% reported finding their work very mentally tiring at the beginning of the study.
The study has found that women were 21 per cent more likely to develop no happinessif they found their jobs mentally tiring at the start of the study.
The study found that women were 21% more likely to develop type-2 diabetes if they found their jobs mentally tiring at the start of the study.
Hajare's account of 'his' research into the medical condition he calls 'dullness' seems to be a modified copy of an acount of someone else's research into a more widely recognised medical condition, type-2 diabetes
To claim someone else's research as your own is serious academic malpractice, although here Dr Hajare could reasonably claim that he had made the study seem so ridiculous that no one could seriously think it was genuine (except perhaps the editor at Advances in Bioengineering & Biomedical Science Research?)
In any case, the main text of this journal paper had nothing to do with diabetes (or 'dullness') but the association between how a person makes pancakes and how much sexual activity they engage in. This reads like a good spoof, but sadly, seems again to be stolen goods. The story is reported on a number of websites, including that of the popular UK tabloid newspaper 'the Sun' which ran the story (illustrated by a photograph of an apparently naked couple in an intimate embrace) under the heading "Tossers get more sex", and rather than cite Hajare as the source claimed that the 'research' was a "poll of 2,000 Brits by Clarks Maple Syrup" – so a marketing ploy to sell more pancake syrup.
The 'Concussion' [sic] to the same paper seems to have nothing to do with pancakes or diabetes, but seems to 'borrow' two snippets of text from a web article "How a DNA test can help you deal with depression" by Matthew Hutson.
Finding the right person is a guessing game. A researcher prescribes one, and after giving it six weeks to take effect, the patient might find it is not doing anything. So the patient tries another one and waits six weeks. And might need to do it again, and again, in a process that can take months. For me, the fourth drug hit the mark, but some people give up before making it that far.
Finnding the right antidepressant is a guessing game. A doctor prescribes one, and after giving it six weeks to take effect, the patient might find it's not doing anything. So the patient tries another one and waits six weeks. And might need to do it again, and again, in a process that can take months. For me, the fourth drug hit the mark, but some people give up before making it that far.
For example, Color Genomics added a PGX-for-reduce depression element to its popular gene-testing kit.
… For example, Color Genomics added a PGx-for-depression element to its popular $249 gene-testing kit in September.
Hajare also includes text very similar to that from a third source.
So, "Guessing Game And Poor Quality Teaching Staffs Study Of Less Sunlight Private Pharmacy Institution In Pune University" was an article which made no reference to poor quality teaching, or to sunlight, but seems to be compiled from other people's texts about diabetes, making pancakes, and anti-depressant drugs, mixed together with a few absurdist changes and flourishes. Yet it still passed peer review at Advances in Bioengineering & Biomedical Science Research.
A 'short communication' with the same title, "Guessing game and poor quality teaching staffs study of less sunlight private pharmacy institution in Pune University" was also published by Hajare in the Journal of Forensic Pathology.
The entire article is labelled as Abstract, and is broken down into two paragraphs. I have copied the entire text below (the article is again open access allowing unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction), but have broken the text in a different place (as Hajare breaks paragraph in the middle of a sentence).
Text of "Guessing game and poor quality teaching staffs study of less sunlight private pharmacy institution in Pune University" (Journal of Forensic Pathology version)
Abstract from (Magno & Golomb, 2020)
[Title" "Measuring the Benefits of Mass Vaccination Programs in the United States"]
Measuring the Benefits of Mass Vaccination Programs in the United States: Since the late 1940s, mass vaccination programs in the USA have contributed to the significantly reduced morbidity and mortality of infectious diseases. To assist the evaluation of the benefits of mass vaccination programs, the number of individuals who would have suffered death or permanent disability in the USA in 2014, had mass vaccination never been implemented, was estimated for measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, polio, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), hepatitis B, varicella, and human papillomavirus (HPV). The estimates accounted for mortality and morbidity trends observed for these infections prior to mass vaccination and the impact of advances in standard of living and health care. The estimates also considered populations with and without known factors leading to an elevated risk of permanent injury from infection. Mass vaccination prevented an estimated 20 million infections and 12,000 deaths and permanent disabilities [there is a paragraph break here in Hajare's article] in 2014, including 10,800 deaths and permanent disabilities in persons at elevated risk. Though 9000 of the estimated prevented deaths were from liver cirrhosis and cancer, mass vaccination programs have not, at this point, shown empirical impacts on the prevalence of those conditions. Future studies can refine these estimates, assess the impact of adjusting estimation assumptions, and consider additional risk factors that lead to heightened risk of permanent harm from infection.
Since the late 1940s, mass vaccination programs in the USA have contributed to the significantly reduced morbidity and mortality of infectious diseases. To assist the evaluation of the benefits of mass vaccination programs, the number of individuals who would have suffered death or permanent disability in the USA in 2014, had mass vaccination never been implemented, was estimated for measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, polio, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), hepatitis B, varicella, and human papillomavirus (HPV). The estimates accounted for mortality and morbidity trends observed for these infections prior to mass vaccination and the impact of advances in standard of living and health care. The estimates also considered populations with and without known factors leading to an elevated risk of permanent injury from infection. Mass vaccination prevented an estimated 20 million infections and 12,000 deaths and permanent disabilities in 2014, including 10,800 deaths and permanent disabilities in persons at elevated risk. Though 9000 of the estimated prevented deaths were from liver cirrhosis and cancer, mass vaccination programs have not, at this point, shown empirical impacts on the prevalence of those conditions. Future studies can refine these estimates, assess the impact of adjusting estimation assumptions, and consider additional risk factors that lead to heightened risk of permanent harm from infection.
The researchers concluded that the finger have important implications for policy and prevention and should inform the creation of more effective sexual health education programs and interventions. Sex can accepted as non-negotiation strategies to sex. Hot have many perceptions. Black and whitish both can be hot. A HOT thinking is higher-order thinking, known as higher order thinking skills (HOTS). Old fat clothes women who find their mentally tiring are at increased risk of developing dull, a new study has found. The study suggests that mentally draining work such as teaching may increase the risk of dullness in women. According to the research, employers and women should be more aware of the potential health risks associated with mentally tiring work. Dullness is an increasingly prevalent disease that places a huge burden on patients and society and can lead to significant health problems including heart attacks, strokes, blindness, hair fall, mouth odour, under eye blackness, pelvis dislocation, one sided vagina, and kidney failure. Numerous factors can increase the risk of developing dullness including obesity, diet, exercise, smoking or a long term family history of the disease. In the study, Dr Rahul Hajare from the Indian Council of Medical Research Batch 2013 examined the effect of mentally tiring work on dullness incidence in over 20 women, during a 22- 32 year period. Approximately 75 per cent of the women were in the teaching profession and 24 per cent reported finding their work very mentally tiring at the beginning of the study due to lack of complete knowledge, The study has found that women were 21 per cent more likely to develop no happiness if they found their jobs mentally tiring at the start of the study. Skin turns out as baggy as their old "fat clothes. Under normal circumstances, seen no sexual desire or waiting for call.
Submitted for publication: 5th March 2021
Published: 29 September 2020
Two contrasting styles of writing in Hajarre's short piece in the Journal of Forensic Pathology.
The second part of Hajare's text is the same nonsense mixed with a fabricated new medical condition that comprised the 'Summary' of the Advances in Bioengineering & Biomedical Science Research article with the same name. However, the rest of that article (the 'pancake' material for example) is not reproduced in the version published in the Journal of Forensic Pathology.
Instead, that piece starts with writing in a very different style: a coherent segment of text about the value of mass vaccination. A segment of text which bears a remarkable similarity (or at least it would be a remarkable similarity if this were a coincidence) to the abstract of a genuine academic study published in a serious research journal, Vaccines (Magno & Golomb, 2020).
Dangerous fabrication of science
It is unlikely that even the casual reader will be persuaded of the dangers of a severe medical condition called 'dullness' by reading Hajare's strange patchwork quilts of different texts on different themes. However, what about a suggestion that there is a link between domestic violence and epilepsy. Might that seem plausible?
Certainly that is what is suggested by Hajare in "Co- Relation of Domestic Violence and Epileptic Seizure ("Fit") Experience among Recently Married Women Residing Inslums [sic] Communities' Pharmaceutical Institutions in Pune District, India" – an article in the journal Research & Investigations in Sports Medicine.
In this article Hajare suggests that women who are subjected to violence by their partners are at higher risk of having epileptic fits, that their children will also suffer more epilepsy symptoms, and that "women who reside in India's slums pharmaceutical institutions are among those at greatest risk" (p.226).
Now, if these were claims that had just been copied from elsewhere, (as his claims about about pancake preparation techniques seem to be) then it would not add to the level of low quality information in circulation. However, here Hajare seems to be fabricating a connection between two serious topics based on no evidence whatsoever.
This becomes clear when doing a quick web search for extracts from his text. The table below show the text from the start of Hajare's article (first column), juxtaposed with text from two other sources. One of these is a serious academic study that reports empirical research with a "sample of 100 recently-married women residing in slums in Pune, India" (Kalokhe et al 2018). (This perhaps explains the reference to 'Recently Married Women' in Hajare's title, which does not relate to anything in his short text.)
Hajare's text relating domestic violence and epilepsy
Kalokhe et al 2018 text from a study about domestic violence experience among recently-married women residing in slums in Pune, India
In many cases, the exact cause is not known. Some people have inherited genetic factors that make epilepsy more likely to occur.
In many cases, the exact cause is not known. Some people have inherited genetic factors that make epilepsy more likely to occur.
Other factors that may increase the risk include: head trauma, for instance, during a car crash, stroke
infectious diseases, for instance, AIDS and viralencephalitis,
developmental disorders, for instance, autism or neurofibromatosis.
Other factors that may increase the risk include: • head trauma, for instance, during a car crash • brain conditions, including stroke or tumors • infectious diseases, for instance, AIDS and viral encephalitis • prenatal injury, or brain damage that occurs before birth • developmental disorders, for instance, autism or neurofibromatosis
It is most likely to appear in children under 2 years of age very rare, middle age and adults over 65 years.
It is most likely to appear in children under 2 years of age, and adults over 65 years.
What a patient with epilepsy experiences during a seizure will depend on which part of the brain is affected, and how widely and quickly it spreads from that area.
What a patient with epilepsy experiences during a seizure will depend on which part of the brain is affected, and how widely and quickly it spreads from that area.
The incomplete note of medical sciences that the condition "is not well understood." Often, no specific cause can be identified.
The CDC note that the condition "is not well understood." Often, no specific cause can be identified.
Intimate partner violence (IPV), defined as the physical, sexual, psychological abuse, and control perpetrated against an intimate partner, is highly prevalent and cannot ignore for epilepsy epidemic.
Intimate partner violence (IPV), defined as the physical, sexual, psychological abuse, and control perpetrated against an intimate partner, is highly prevalent globally.
Approximately one in ten of women reporting physical and abuse by their partner during their lifetime, violation of human rights that often results in physical injury can lead neurological disturbances (trauma).
Approximately one- third (30%) of women reporting physical and/or sexual abuse by their partner during their life- time. Not only is IPV a violation of human rights that often results in physical injury;
Women who experience IPV have higher odds of depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders, sexually transmitted infections including HIV chronic pain disorders and gynaecologic morbidity among other chronic disease states lead the epileptic seizure ("fit").
women who experience IPV have higher odds of depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders, sexually transmitted infections including HIV, chronic pain disorders, and gynecologic morbidity among other chronic disease states.
Additionally, their children suffer from greater symptom of epilepsy morbidity and mortality.
Additionally, their children suffer from greater morbidity and mortality.
In India, although national estimates suggest decreasing frequency, one in three women still report having been abused by their spouses during their lifetime. Further, this figure is likely an underestimate of the abuse women suffer post-epileptic seizer [sic] or other members of the husband's family, hereafter termed domestic violence (DV).
In India, although national estimates suggest decreasing frequency, one in three women still report having been abused by their spouses during their lifetime. Further, this figure is likely an underestimate of the abuse women suffer post-marriage, as it did not survey violence perpetration by the mother- in-law or other members of the husband's family, hereafter termed domestic violence (DV).
Women who reside in India's slums pharmaceutical institutions are among those at greatest risk of high fever with epilepsy-like symptoms.
Women who reside in India's slums are among those at greatest risk of DV, with lifetime estimates of 21-99%.
Hajare's text (opening segment shown here) draws on different sources, and makes factual changes to source information
Hajare seems to have taken text about epilepsy, made small changes (such as removing the reference to the U.S. based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC), then shifted to a text about domestic abuse, but gratuitously made claims about links to epileptic fits not found in the original study.
Whatever Hajare's true motives here, there can be no excuse for deliberately putting false medical information into the public domain.
I expect with some more digging I could find more examples of how portions of Hajare's published work draw upon other work already in the public domain, without acknowledgement.
However, I think the point has been made, and I will end with one especially intriguing example.
Is the Nobel Prize going to the dogs?
Hajare has contributed an editorial article with the curious title "Sensitivity and Specificity of the Nobel Prize Testing to the Dogs" in the journal Advances in Biotechnology & Microbiology.
A little over a month before Hajare submitted his manuscript to Advances in Biotechnology & Microbiology, another journal, the Peer Reviewed Journal of Forensic & Genetic Sciences, published an opinion piece by Seun Ayoade.
Ayode's peice is hardly the stuff of serious research journals, being very journalistic even for an opinion piece,
"the Nobel Prize has been hijacked by an evil left- wing cabal… The final nail however was the award to a musician-Bob Dylan of the literature prize. I nearly threw up when I heard the announcement…Does the word 'Kardashian' ring a bell? The moral depravity of the Nobel Committee has reached such scandalous levels that no literature prize was awarded in 2018 because of licentious assault accusations"
Ayode, 2018: 151
However, it was a coherent piece.
Hajare's editorial seems to comprise of the same text as Ayode's, with some additions – it seems that as well as changing the title to something more obscure, Hajare has added:
1. An incoherent 'executive summary'
"Has the Nobel Prize gone to the dogs? Nobel Prize has been accepted as an uncountable value, however difficult to eliminate. The hope for possible selection without power politics has stemmed from the reports of the populations at high risk of malign the credibility of noble remaining free of selection. A number of host factors associated with lower selection to higher selection and better control on conflict multiplication have been reported. However, the correlates of protection from encroachment have eluded the scientific community. This has been a significant barrier in developing effective award to protect against infection. On the contrary, a spectacular success has been achieved in the field of noble award treatment."
p.0041
2. An odd list of keywords
Power politics;
Protection;
Encroachment;
Infection;
Realizable assets;
Physiological;
Stockholm;
Instrumentation
3. An incoherent 'Summary and Conclusion'
"The findings revealed high awareness of noble [sic] is high, its causes, impacts, methods of financing; and prevention. It has seen most award has abusing. The attitude towards it is mixed."
p.0042
4. A splattering of self-citations
Hajare omits the three references in Ayode's article, and replaces them with a raft of references to his own articles on a wide range of topics.
Part of Hajare's reference list for the article about the Nobel prize.
So, it looks as if Hajare has just taken the published text of Ayode's article, which – even if not exactly written in academic language – offered a coherent argument and (deliberately?) spoilt it by topping and tailing it with some nonsense text. If the editors of Advances in Biotechnology & Microbiology did not do plagiarism checks to look for previously published work, then Hajare had (as usual, see Part 1) offered plenty of clues that something was off here. Yet, even the addition of gibberish did not present re-publication.
Perhaps Hajare thinks that as he has done his best to prevent anyone taking his work seriously, it does not matter that he is using other people's work as the basis for some of his hoax articles. Yet, he is still using work without acknowledgement, and passing it off as his own writing. That is usually considered a serious academic offence.
Coda
It looks like Hajare lifted Ayode's complete article for his editorial.
But, of course, that is assuming that Rahul Hajare from India and Seun Ayoade from Nigeria are real people, and also that they are not actually the same person.
That may seem an odd point to make. But as I was writing this article, I thought that the name Seun Ayoad looked somewhat familiar.
In Part 1 of this article, I pointed out that I become intrigued about (if not for a while obsessed with) Hajare's output after having reason to check out the journal Petroleum and Chemical Industry International. I had quickly found in looking at this journal two articles which seemed to have nothing to do with the supposed scope of the journal.
One of these was Hajare's "An attempt to Characterize Street Pharmaceutical Teachers Abusing Drugs and Aspect of Allergy Among Adult Men Attending Long Distance Institutions in Pune, India".
The other was "Was glass the classical currency of the yoruba?". That was written by one…Seun Ayoade. Is it a coincidence that I've found these two names associated again?
Perhaps it is just that.
Ayoade's (and so therefore Hajare's) diatribe against the Nobel prize choices included a slightly odd aside:
"By the way the "scientists" of the Nobel prize committee are among the many "scientists" that continue to deny the existence of the microzymas. No surprise there."
p.151
Actually, virtually all current mainstream biologists and medical scientists today "deny the existence of the microzymas" as other entities are considered to better explain the phenomena that microzymas were introduced to explain. 3
Just as Hajare has his own themes that recur in his work (see Part 1 for examples), Ayoade has written a number of pieces on microzymas – promoting microzymas as the future of medicine, and as possible candidates for the universe's 'missing' mass.
So, I do not think Hajare and Ayoade are the same person. Just as well for the predatory journals, as even with Hajare's flow of incoherent and obscure pieces rehashing his preferred themes, his output is never going to be sufficient to support all those predatory journals prepared to publish anything submitted to them regardless of the level of scholarly merit.
Work cited:
Haj Hosseini, F. and Mehdizadeh Zare Anari, A. M. (2011) The Correlation between Emotional Intelligence and Instable Personality in Substance Abusers, Addict & Health, 3(3-4): 130-136, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33489654.pdf
Kalokhe, A. S., Iyer, S. R., Kolhe, A. R., Dhayarkar, S., Paranjape, A., del Rio, C., et al. (2018) Correlates of domestic violence experience among recently-married women residing in slums in Pune, India. PLoS ONE 13(4): e0195152. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0195152
Magno, H., and Golomb, B. 2020. Measuring the Benefits of Mass Vaccination Programs in the United States. Vaccines 8, no. 4: 561. https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines8040561
Motro, D., Ordóñez, L.D., Pittarello, A. et al. (2018) Investigating the Effects of Anger and Guilt on Unethical Behavior: A Dual-Process Approach. Journal of Business Ethics, 152, 133-148 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3337-x
Sojer, P., Kainbacher, S., Kemmler, G., Freudenthaler, H. & Deisenhammer, E. (2017) The impact of trait emotional intelligence and resilience on suicidal behavior in university students. European Psychiatry 41S (2017) S365-S404
1 Cutting and pasting has its place. When studying a new topic it may be very useful to cut and paste sections from key sources as a first stage in compiling ideas on the topic. However, this is an initial stage in a process of moving from the sources to a personal take on a topic (perhaps a conceptual framework to inform a research study). One moves from a large number of discrete segments of other people's scholarship to a coherent personal account presented in a single voice. This is somewhat akin to the analytical process in grounded theory work which moves from the discrete data through increasing stages of generalisation and abstraction towards a 'grounded theory'.
2 In the Medieval period it was quite normal for people to copy out the texts of others – before printing the only way books were copied was by hand. Monks famously made copies of texts – but intellectuals also sometimes copied texts that they wanted to have their own copy of. Downloading the pdf simply was not an option. Copying a book is a big job – so often people would compile their own books by just copying selected material of particular interest from other texts, rather than complete books. Sadly for historians, even though a lot of this material is still extant, there was no widely accepted scholarly standard about acknowledging authors: so, manuscripts do not always report the source being copied and who the original author was. For that matter, manuscripts do not always report who actually did the copying. Where there are names these sometimes report ownership which may not reflect the original author or the scribe.
3 Microzymas were hypothetical, non-destructible units that were conjectured to make up living things and other matter. The theory fell into disuse when cell theory was found to offer a better basis for understanding the structure of complex organisms, and germ theory was found to better explain infectious diseases.
Is Rahul Hajare the Alan Sokal for the Open Access era?: Part 1
Keith S. Taber
…the editors of the Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function had no reservations about publishing a paper supposedly about 'over sexuality' which was actually an extended argument about the terrible threat to our freedoms of…IQ scores. That this makes no sense at all, is just as obvious as that it has absolutely nothing to do with gastrointestinal disorders and liver function!
He seems to be hoaxing open access journals 1 that will publish for a price regardless of the quality of scholarship by seeing just how bizarre, and incoherent, and irrelevant, one can get before a journal looking for an author to pay a publication fee will 'draw the line' and reject nonsensical text and unsubstantiated claims. Based on Hajare's project, that line is sometimes drawn very low.
Why admire a hoaxer?
Should we admire someone who produces copious publications that are clearly of low quality, contain wild claims, obvious non sequiturs, and garbled text?
Normally, the answer would be obvious. But what if the author is testing out just how banal, illogical, and incoherent a manuscript needs to be before a predatory journal (a periodical pretending to be a serious research journal in order to charge authors for publishing their work) feels it cannot publish it. I think this is what Dr Rahul Hajare has been doing. And the results of his project should worry us all.
The Sokal affair
This reminds me of the Sokal hoax. Alan Sokal was a physicist who was so convinced that a lot of post-modern cultural studies literature was actually devoid of content and just consisted of flowery and impressive sounding rhetoric, that he wrote a paper about the 'hermeneutics of quantum gravity' (Sokal, 1996) which was published in a research journal despite Sokal himself believing it no had merits as an academic argument.
Sokal did a good job of adopting the literary style of much scholarship in the area he was lampooning, and some might claim he did too good a job and, without realising it, actually offered a meaningful account of some of the challenges in understanding the fundamental meanings of modern physics. Even a final flurry claiming that a 'liberatory science' would need a 'profound revision of the canon of mathematics' (p.26) was well enough contextualised to be read as a serious suggestion.
Sokal's hoax can be seen as part of the culture/science wars, which relate to such questions as the special nature of science and whether it offers us an account of reality which has more validity than alternative options (religions, philosophical systems, magic, astrology, homeopathy…). 2 He thought that the authors and editors of journals such as Social Text did not apply the kind of critical thinking that is able to scrutinise an argument and recognise obviously flawed conclusions or analogies. However, I do not think he considered most of the academics concerned to be deliberately producing and publishing nonsense, rather just unable to see that the Emperor's new clothes offered nothing to protect their intellectual modesty.
Post-truth journals
There is a much more serious problem today: one that I have written about a lot in this blog. This is the large number of journals that publish nonsense not because they have not spotted that it is nonsense, but because they have not even checked to find out. They have not been taken in by flowery language, but by imprecise, ungrammatical, incomplete texts – or rather, not actually taken in, as they are simply not concerned. Perhaps they would rather not notice it is nonsense – although perhaps, more to the point, it is irrelevant to their business models.
Articles that are incoherent, poorly argued, illogical, counter to accepted wisdom, counter to common sense, and even blatantly counterfactual, bring in publication fees as well as any others. Indeed, authors of such poor quality work are more likely to be keen to pay such fees, as they would likely have found that competent research journals have no interest in publishing their work. These predatory journals sometimes even publish, word for word, material already published elsewhere (where genuine research journals actively avoid this). After all, if an author is foolish enough to pay several journals for publishing the same work then a re-publication is just as profitable as an original piece.
None of this would really matter if it was obvious which journals are spurious – but these predatory journals have titles similar to (sometimes almost copying) real research journals, claim to have serious academics editing them, claim to use rigorous peer review, claim they only want high quality original work, et cetera. And, of course, often serious scholars will submit their work in good faith to a dodgy journal and get it published. Some of these studies may be sound, even if the work was not tested, and therefore potentially strengthened, by genuine peer review.
So, a predatory journal may contain a lot of nonsense, but clearly not everything that reaches a very low standard will be of a very low standard. (For example, even I could jump the high jump if the bar was set at 0.5m – but, of course, so could the world champion. )
When an expert in a relevant field looks at one of these journals it soon become clear that much of their content cannot be relied upon – but as these journals are open access they can be read by any member of the public such as
children researching their science homework,
students researching topics,
ill people looking for medical advice,
as well people looking for scientific backing to
support belief in
alien abductions, or in
dangers of vaccination, or
to support denial of canonical scientific thinking:
An academic's publication list may have a large number of articles in journals with very respectable-sounding title, indeed sometimes titles VERY similar to those of well-established, reputable journals. Would a potential employer or funder more likely hire or give a grant to the person with 12 research publications or the other applicant with 34 – if not equipped to spot that the longer list was made up of work of little merit?
Like many academics I get many invitations to send work to journals I have never heard of, across a great range of scholarly fields (regardless of my lack of qualifications in most of those fields), and I have sometimes been tempted to reply to an invitation to send in something, even just a two page article (a common ploy is to invite something this brief), before next week's deadline. It would not be difficult to test the claims of 'peer review' by writing something superficially scholarly but of no substantive intellectual content, to see if it was accepted. (What then? Do I want to put a worthless article out there under my name? Do I wish to part with hundreds of pounds just for the sake of proving the point?)
Anyway, I no longer need to consider this, as the work has been done. I think Dr Hajare has been showing up these journals for a while now.
Dr Rahul Hajare, who claims to be a fellow at the Indian Council of Medical Research, has quite a long publications list. From the titles, some of these publications seem to be serious scientific studies. However, many appear to be spoofs. Indeed Dr Hajare seems to have been playing a game of deliberately leaving clues that should be picked up with the most cursory editorial attention: the kinds of clues that should tell any reasonably informed reader not to take the work too seriously. Despite peppering his work with such hints, it still keeps getting published.
Convoluted titles
I first came across the Hajare hoax when I was invited to submit a medical article to a journal about petroleum. I had a look at what had been published, and found some examples of articles which seemed to have nothing to do with petroleum. One of these was "An attempt to Characterize Street Pharmaceutical Teachers Abusing Drugs and Aspect of Allergy Among Adult Men Attending Long Distance Institutions in Pune, India".
Characterising Street Pharmaceutical Teachers Abusing Drugs…
An article published in Petroleum and Chemical Industry International that was submitted on 23rd September 2018
What immediately struck me as most odd was that there seemed to be two very different things going in the title here:
Characterising Street Pharmaceutical Teachers Abusing Drugs
Aspects of Allergy Among Adult Men Attending Long Distance Institutions
So, how were these two themes linked?
Well, of course, they were not. The 'research article' did not discuss allergies. Indeed the ONLY reference to allergy in the paper was in the title. This seems to be one type of 'reveal' or 'giveaway' signal that Hajare will use, presumably to signify to anyone paying attention that the article is a hoax.
My initial reaction, however, was that perhaps this was some unfortunate production error, and the title of a completely different paper had been appended by mistake. So, I tried searching for the missing paper, instead found more of Hajare's output… and it was then I started to realise that Dr Hajare seemed to be a serial hoaxer.
It seems unlikely that the odd title was a journal error, when the same article has been published with the same title elsewhere:
An article published in Current Trends in Gastroenterology and Hepatology that was submitted on 25th September 2018 (two days after it was also submitted to Petroleum and Chemical Industry International)An article published in Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences Current Research that was submitted on 27th September 2018 (two days after it was also submitted to Current Trends in Gastroenterology and Hepatology and four days after it was submitted to Petroleum and Chemical Industry International)
Dodgy definitions: teaching staff and van drivers
Hajare's study helpfully defined what he meant by 'street teachers'. (What did you think this term would mean, dear reader?)
"Street Teaching Staffs: any person (27 to 47 years) who spends majority of his time in car parks sometimes working or roaming; and have limited or no contact with a family and spend both days and nights in the car parks without returning to a family or a guardian."
p.2 (Emphasis added)
Hm. If we take this at face value the study sample would have excluded any 'street teacher' who spends their time teaching children on the streets (rather than in car parks) or who is 25 years old, or who has a home to go to at the end of the day. Are there really substantial numbers of people employed as teachers who might fit this definition?
Another term in this study was 'commercial van [sic, not bus or coach] driver', which was defined for this study (for some reason) as:
"Commercial Van Driver: any male person who control operation and movement of a motorized vehicle for transporting more than nine persons including himself on public road for payment and for a distance not more than 90 kilometers"
p.2 (Emphasis added)
What Hajare seems to be doing here is mimicking the way everyday terms need to be operationally defined in research – but in an absurdist way.
Some of his other productions offer similar kaleidoscopes of words masquerading as titles.
Facial Recognition Technology and Detection of Over Sexuality…
The journal Advanced Research in Gastroenterology & Hepatologywas happy to publish work under the title "Facial Recognition Technology and Detection of Over Sexuality in Private Organizations Combined with Shelter House. Baseline Integrated Behavioural and Biological Assessment among Most at-Risk Low Standards Hope Less Institutions in Pune, India". What any of this might have to do with gastroenterology or hepatology is anyone's guess: not bothering to even offer some tenuous linkage to a journal's supposed scope seems to be part of the way Hajare metaphorically winks at his readership so they will share in the joke.
😉
Putting the clues up front
One type of spoof is written in such a way that it starts off being largely credible and gradually moves to the more obscure? The reader experiences a gradual realisation that they have been fooled. That can be clever – but is dangerous when hoaxing academic work, as someone dipping into the work may not read that far in.
Hajare, however, often uses techniques to warn readers up front about his intentions – such as including unrelated and irrelevant themes in his titles, the use of absurd statements in the abstract or executive summary or opening lines of an article. This particular article begins with an Executive Summary:
When this[*] occurs the over sexuality cells can travel away from the original sexuality and create more sexuality attraction when they settle and grow in a different part of the body. Any type of over sexuality can spread. This depends on several factors which include: The type of human, How aggressive it is, The duration one has had it before culture, Its environment, Its colour, Chronic inflammation, Modified sex signalling, Secretion of Connective Tissue-Dissolving Enzymes, Selection of food with colonial mind set. The following approaches will help prevent the formation, growth and spread of over sexuality in working place.
p.0050 [* n.b., no subject has yet been introduced!]
It is very hard to see how anyone reading about how 'over sexuality cells' move away from the 'original sexuality' is going to think this is a serious contribution to science. In case there is any doubt, we are told how the mobility of 'over sexuality' depends on a range of factors such as its colour (what colours does 'sexuality' come in?) and food tastes.
So what is wrong with facial recognition technology – and IQ testing for that matter?
In the main text Hajare constructs a detailed account of the uses, and in particular what he sees as the potential misuses, of facial recognition technology. 3 This seems at face value [no pun intended] to be a seriously held viewpoint (albeit having no connection with the 'over sexuality' theme of the Executive Summary)
However, this seems less likely when one notices another of his publications in the Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function entitled "Detection of Progression over Sexuality in Indian Students and Teachers Combined". This repeats, virtually word for word, the same executive summary (except we now have 'acceptance sexuality cells' moving around the body).
This article, submitted to that journal on September 9th 2018 (about a fortnight before the 'facial recognition technology' article was submitted) offers virtually the same argument. The key differences is whereas in Advanced Research in Gastroenterology & Hepatology it is facial recognition technology which is the great menace, in the earlier submission to the Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function the target had been IQ scores:
Text [emphasisadded] from Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function
Text from Advanced Research in Gastroenterology & Hepatology
With such a grave threat to privacy and civil liberties, measured regulation should be abandoned in favour of an outright ban. The species would have loved IQ score. It is easy to accept an outwardly compelling but ultimately illusory view about what the future will look like once the full potential of IQ score is unlocked. From this perspective, will never have to meet a stranger, fuss with passwords and unreal people, or worry about forgetting wallet …
With such a grave threat to privacy and civil liberties, measured regulation should be abandoned in favor of an outright ban. The species would have loved facial recognition technology. It is easy to accept an outwardly compelling but ultimately illusory view about what the future will look like once the full potential of facial recognition technology is unlocked. From this perspective, will never have to meet a stranger, fuss with passwords and unreal people, or worry about forgetting wallet. …
…We [sic] believe IQ scoreis the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented. Tempted by this vision, people will continue to inviteIQ score into colleges, homes and onto their devices, allowing it to play symmetrical role in ever more aspects of their lives. And that is how the trap gets sprung and the unfortunate truth becomes revealed: IQ score is a menace disguised as a gift….
…We [sic] believe facial recognition technology is the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented. Tempted by this vision, people will continue to invite facial recognition technology into colleges, homes and onto their devices, allowing it to play symmetrical role in ever more aspects of their lives. And that is how the trap gets sprung and the unfortunate truth becomes revealed: Facial recognition technology is a menace disguised as a gift…
… Corporate leadership is important, and regulation that imposes limits on IQ score can be helpful. But partial protections and "well-articulated guidelines" will never be enough. Whatever helps legislation might provide, the protections likely won't be passed until IQ-scanningtechnology becomes much cheaper and easier to use. If IQ score continues to be further developed and deployed, a formidable infrastructure will be built, and we'll be stuck with it. …
…Corporate leadership is important, and regulation that imposes limits on facial recognition technology can be helpful. But partial protections and "well-articulated guidelines" will never be enough. Whatever help legislation might provide, the protections likely won't be passed until face-scanning technology becomes much cheaper and easier to use. If facial recognition technology continues to be further developed and deployed, a formidable infrastructure will be built, and we'll be stuck with it. …
… BecauseIQ score poses an extraordinary danger, society can't afford to have faith in internal processes of reform like self-regulation. Financial rewards will encourage entrepreneurialism that pushes IQ score to its limits, and corporate lobbying will tilt heavily in this direction. …
… Because facial recognition technology poses an extraordinary danger, society can't afford to have faith in internal processes of reform like self-regulation. Financial rewards will encourage entrepreneurialism that pushes facial recognition technology to its limits, and corporate lobbying will tilt heavily in this direction. …
… IQ score will continue to be marketed as a component of the latest and greatest apps and devices. Apple is already pitchingIQ, ID as the best new feature of its new iPhone. …
…Facial recognition technology will continue to be marketed as a component of the latest and greatest apps and devices. Apple is already pitching Face ID as the best new feature of its new iPhone. …
[and so forth throughout]
[and so forth throughout]
… The future of human flourishing depends upon IQ score being banned before the systems become too entrenched in our lives. Otherwise, people won't know what it's like to be in public without being automatically identified, profiled, and potentially exploited. In such a world, critics of IQ score will be disempowered, silenced, or cease to exist.
…The future of human flourishing depends upon facial recognition technology being banned before the systems become too entrenched in our lives. Otherwise, people won't know what it's like to be in public without being automatically identified, profiled, and potentially exploited. In such a world, critics of facial recognition technology will be disempowered, silenced, or cease to exist
This looks very much as if having constructed an argument for the menace of face recognition systems (a concern shared by many), Hajare simply copied the text to a new file, and began a new article substituting IQ scores for face recognition technology. (That the variant published first seems to be the more derivative text is promising – does it mean at least one journal rejected the face recognition paper before it was accepted elsewhere?) 3
Clearly the editors of the Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders and Liver function had no reservations about publishing a paper supposedly about 'over sexuality' which was actually an extended argument about the terrible threat to our freedoms of…IQ scores. That this makes no sense at all, is just as obvious as that it has absolutely nothing to do with gastrointestinal disorders and liver function!
Depression, Cursing, Pharmaceutical Institutions and Sanitation
Another Hajare article in the same journal, has the convoluted title: "Assessment of the Depression-Level Effectiveness of the Curse Words in Young Adults in Private Co-Educational Pharmaceutical Institutions in Pune University Pharmaceutical Institutions Living With Poor Sanitation, India: A Pre-planned, Causal-Pathway-Based Analysis". No one at the journal (editor, reviewer, production department) seems to have thought to ask if the nesting of "…Pharmaceutical Institutions in Pune University Pharmaceutical Institutions…" was an error.
This paper looks superficially like a serious study, and deals with very serious and important issues. Yet, like most of Hajare's articles I looked at, he cites no work by anyone else (see the appendix below), and again he starts the paper with a little clue that this is a hoax article: "As we aware sex lives in black mind".
There might also be a subtle clue in the brisk description of the research procedure:
"Participants viewed the invitation to participate in the study on SONA [n.b., not defined], which directed them to the survey which was implemented with a professional license of Surveymonkey.com. Additional information collected from college muster, signature style, colour of signature, font size and treatment received by administrative officer while signed the muster."
Although survey monkey is an on-line tool "Data was collected…in private by a trained male female staffs study team member", but regardless of whether there really was a physical person collecting data and asking for a signature, or whether the 'muster' refers to a previous college registration procedure, the way in which 'colour of signature' might have been used in analysis is not explained. But colour seems to be one of the code words that Hajare uses to acknowledge the nature of his hoax articles (e.g., sexuality had a colour, and "sex lives in black mind"; in another article Hajare points out – as an apparently arbitrary statement with no context – that blood plasma is yellow).
This is a concern though – if I am using a form of hermeneutics to interpret texts within a wider canon, then, even if I am right, this is not something available to the causal reader looking for reliable information and coming across an isolated journal article. This paper has indications of being a haox, rather than simply incompetent scholarship, but I was not entirely sure if it is meant as one.
I think, even though I had started exploring more of Hajare's work on the assumption he was producing hoax articles, there was still a nagging doubt: if the reviewers and editor of a journal, even a sloppy and lax journal, thought this made sense (surely, someone at these journals must read the submissions before accepting them for publication?), then could it just be me? Am I just ignorant about topics and conventions out of my specialism? Am I not being forgiving enough for someone from another culture who is perhaps having to write in a language that is not the one in which he is most fluent? Am I going to publish and provoke lots of comments on the blog from people who think Hajare's articles make perfect sense?
Yet, there is another dodgy definition
"Depression is defined as, 'Any act on the part of the husband, partner or family which causes physical, mental, social or psychological trauma to the woman and prevent sher [sic] from developing her personality' "
p.6
That may be a good definition -but it is not a definition of depression. It seems to relate more to the theme of another Hajare publication in the journal Research & Investigations in Sports Medicine…
This opinion article, "Co- Relation of Domestic Violence and Epileptic Seizure ("Fit") Experience among Recently Married Women Residing Inslums Communities' Pharmaceutical Institutions in Pune District, India", unlike some of Hajare's work, seems largely to consist of coherent passages – although the linkage between the two key themes (domestic violence and epilepsy) was not clear, and seemed somewhat gratuitous. 3 There were also a number of common Hajare features:
the reference to recently married women in the title did not seem to be followed up in the main text
the work seems to be set in a community within pharmaceutical institutions ("Women Residing Inslums [sic] Communities' Pharmaceutical Institutions…", "Women who reside in India's slums pharmaceutical institutions…")
the only work cited was by 'Rahul H'
And, of course, the article did not seem to have any obvious linkage to sports medicine – the supposed topic of the journal.
Unrelated jibberish
Hajare produces text that in places seems like some kind of obscure poetry or the output of a very poor AI system (even worse than the digital helper offered by my bank). In extremis, Hajare has produced publications where the different sections not only make little sense, but seem unrelated to each other.
Dullness – a serious disease
So in "Guessing Game And Poor Quality Teaching Staffs Study Of Less Sunlight Private Pharmacy Institution In Pune University" published in Advances in Bioengineering & Biomedical Science Research, we have another obscure heading. The first paragraph of the 'Summary' tells readers that
"The researchers concluded that the finger have important implications for policy and prevention and should inform the creation of more effective sexual health education programs and interventions…"
p.1
Huh? Which editor or peer reviewer thinks that makes sense to readers?
And the second paragraph of the summary starts,
"Dullness is an increasingly prevalent disease that places a huge burden on patients and society and can lead to significant health problems including heart attacks, strokes, blindness, and hair fall, mouth odour, under eye blackness, pelvis dislocation, one sided vagina, and kidney failure."
p.1
So, 'dullness' is a disease, and moreover, one associated with a wide range of seemingly unrelated medical conditions – though some (not all) of these are associated as being complications of diabetes. One of the conditions listed appears to be an anatomical impossibility (or is a one-sided tube just a topological tautology?) Dullness is certainly not something one associates with Dr Hajare's writing. One wonders how anyone reading this summary could recommend, or even think it was ethically acceptable, to publish this article.
In case the nonsensical, and medically incorrect, aspects of this study (supposedly by a Fellow of the Indian Council of Medical Research, remember) are not considered a reason to reject it, Hajare throws in unscholarly expression:
"The study has found that women were 21 per cent more likely to develop no happiness if they found their jobs mentally tiring at the start of the study. Skinturns [sic] out as baggy as their old fat clothes. Under normal circumstances, seen no sexual desire or waiting for call."
p.1
The reader is also told that
"In the study, Dr Rahul Hajare from the Indian Council of Medical Research Batch 2013 examined the effect of mentally tiring work on dullness incidence in over 20 women, during a 22- 32 year period"
p.1
The editor apparently had no difficultly in understanding and believing that this study had been carried out over "a 22- 32 year period"!
So what is the study about?
Making pancakes
The 'introduction' section of the article is about making pancakes, book-ending with what is presumably a deliberately eye-catching claim (another nod to the hoax?)
"Those who tossed their pancakes have double the amount of sex than those who turned it. A recent study in aimed to find out if there was any relation between the way people cooked their pancakes and treated their relationship …The findings suggested that people who turned their pancakes were either shy or scared to experiment (feared risk of dropping pancakes). Those who tossed came across as fun loving and enjoyed more success in bed. The study concluded that those who tossed their pancakes have double the amount of sex than those who turned their pancakes."
p.1
The 'introduction' of the study is followed by …a paragraph headed 'Concussion' (is it the conclusion?) which makes no reference to concussion – nor indeed the pancake study, but seems to be about dating and medications ("For me, the fourth drug hit the mark…"). The article ends with a list of recommendations…apparently for carrying out a research study:
Do not forcefully register any menwomen [sic] in study.
Do not touch any men women without permission.
Use sax while performing a study.
If someone contact any bad intension [sic] contact pure head of the Institutions. (p.1)
How does sunlight fit in? Well, this is only mentioned in the article title – no where else. To be fair, sunlight does make an appearance in the 'research article' "Why Black Died by White Study of Totally Less Sunlight Pharmacy Institutions in Indian University India" in the Journal of Physical Medicine Rehabilitation Studies & Reports.
The abstract for this article begins:
"Fake can personality and personality is divine. According to a new research from Pune University teacher, living at higher latitudes, where there has also less sunlight, could result in a higher prevalence rate of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) increase sexual desire focus on the less teaching link up and more exchange skin in the game either or."
p.1
Again, Hajare seems to be telling readers right at the start that this is not a serious academic work. This also illustrates a common trope in Hajare's method, which is to use a journalistic style ("According to a new research from Pune University teacher…") to refer to his studies. In case anyone misses these clues, there is an obviously nonsensical 'executive summary' to reinforce the point:
"Underground abortions work has a threat. Recent technical advancement may disrupt oppressive laws, if they go through in real. Best practice with sexual satisfaction has no one goes to office every day. It has true. Why did happy man continue to dance in the heart even though he had a hole in his heart?"
p.1
The 'Introduction' to the article starts "Cheek pulp has sexual honesty called Anti-Abortion extremism" and the section reporting the sample begins "Dark privilege has hunger for sexual satisfaction."
Journalistic writing
Some of Hajare's writing is so journalistic that it would fit better in popular magazines.
For example, his piece in Advances in Neurology and Neuroscience entitled, deep breath, "Non-Medical Basis Characterization of Orgasm Associated with Approach Sex Can Last Up to 20 Seconds to 15 Minutes, Eligible Women Individuals' Poor Transportation Facility of Private Pharmacy Institutions in Pune, India" offers editors a big clue to his approach at the start of the piece ("Non-medical basis…"). Gratuitous references to transportation and pharmacy institutions (both common Hajare themes) that seem to have nothing to do with the article are allowed as part of the title. A feeling for the writing style is offered by
"This climax combo can be achieved through certain positions, such as lying on office chair back with feet dangling over the edge of the bed. …Orgasms get better as age. Now here one good reason to look forward to golden years…Orgasms can last up to 20 seconds or 15 minutes, claims introvert technique…Everyone has faked an orgasm at least once but no need. If have faked it at least once. Other mums have faked it, too…But it is also important for him to calm his mind and to concentrate on close retina. This will take massive focus on his part, but the end result will be totally worth it!"
pp.1-2
And so forth. Suitable for Cosmopolitan? Perhaps. But published in a journal called Advances in Neurology and Neuroscience?
However, mixed in with this magazine copy are claims supposedly based on Hajare's research
"Researcher found, while 61 per cent of women ages 18 to 24 experienced orgasm the last time they had sex, 65 per cent of women in their 30s did and about 70 percent of women in their 40s and 50s…
Forty seven per cent of the study's participants reported orgasms worked faster than painkillers when it came to easing headaches…
While 85 percent of men thought their partner had an orgasm during their most recent episode of sex, only 64 percent of women reported having an orgasm."
pp.1-2
This 'short communication' in a supposed research journal includes absolutely no information on how the researcher 'found' these things. Not from the literature, presumably, as Hajare only cites his own papers. At one points he writes "According to Medical History Today,…" but he does not cite any such publication in his reference list. Indeed, I could not find any such publication on a basic search.
Again, Hajare leaves hints for his readers not to take his work too seriously. The quotation about headaches above was truncated – Hajare's text referred specifically to headaches one has when marking student work,
"Forty seven per cent of the study's participants reported orgasms worked faster than painkillers when it came to easing headaches while checking sessional paper about same answers and not need take extra efforts."
p.1
The sunlight motif referred to above features in an article in the Journal of Gastrointestinal Disorders.
"Scientology applied to the workday of women feels just as good as sex: Non clinical examination of less sunlight habit Pharmacy Institute in Pune University" has a very short nonsense (and provocative) abstract:
"Black and white desire for sex. Open day meditation has the same effect on our brains as sex. 20 new normal orgasms in a research row and affordable in all color of skin."
p.1
The introduction to the article (that is, the section immediately before the conclusion!) ends with the claim that:
"Close monitoring MRIs and face recognition confirm that a particular part of the brain becomes most active when consumers get a great bargain or when they are having great sex."
p.2
This seems to be another 'in joke' for anyone who knows about MRI scanners. Moreover (yet another 'in joke'?) face recognition seems to be an approved research technique here, with no mention of how the author suggests elsewhere that "the future of human flourishing depends upon facial recognition technology being banned"!
MRI scanning – using nuclear magnetic resonance – requires the subject to be very still inside a large magnet. It is difficult to see how an MRI brain scan can be obtained during shopping or sexual intercourse. (Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay)
How is this study 'scientology'?
Scientology, according to the Church of Scientology International, is "a religion that offers a precise path leading to a complete and certain understanding of one's true spiritual nature and one's relationship to self, family, groups, Mankind, all life forms, the material universe, the spiritual universe and the Supreme Being". Scientology is a very contentious religion that is accused of being a kind of cult, but even on its own terms, it does not seem to be the basis for generating new scientific knowledge in gastrointestinal medicine. Needless to say, the article "Scientology applied to the workday of women…" does not actually seem to have anything to do with Scientology.
Perverting the structural conventions of academic writing
In some of these examples, Hajare seems to be taunting editors by deliberately ignoring the usual conventions on structuring research reports – such as papers that move from the 'Introduction' to the 'Conclusions' and 'Recommendations' without any intermediary sections.
One example of Hajare testing conventions to the limit is an article in the journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology Insights entitled "An Attempt to Eradicate Alcohol Dependency from Adult Men in Service Privately Managed Pharmaceutical Institutions in India". This paper has the following structure:
Section
Word count
Abstract
1028 words
Statement of Problem
323 words
Recommendation
48 words
The structure of a 'short communication' in 'Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology Insights'
The abstract of a paper is meant to be a brief summary of the key points in the main text. No reputable journal is likely to allow an abstract of over a thousand words – and an abstract well over twice the length of the substantive text is completely bizarre, and again absurd. But not so absurd it seems, that the editor of Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology Insights thought it was sensible to decline publication.
How does a journal editor not notice that the abstract of a study is a lot longer than the full report it is meant to summarise?
The 'abstract' reports a study where it is claimed "both male and men volunteers were asked to watch porn involving alcohol" (p.1, emphasis added). The statement of the problem included some more clues for the editors and peer reviewers who are supposed to ensure the quality of published research,
"In the new study, author introduces a alcohol dependency which ten folds into a helical structure that mimics surface features of the breakdown of health principal, and whose precise shape can be altered in a unparallel fashion by the attachment of various substituents diseases."
p.2
Apparently, if the editor of Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology Insights actually read this gibberish, he considered it made a useful contribution to the research literature. (And, as according to his twitter home page, https://mobile.twitter.com/yhasanen1 (accessed 26th November, 2021), he is "an independent researcher…not related to any university or medical institute" one would imagine he has sufficient time to read such short submissions quite closely.)
Hajare's recommendations to eradicate alcohol dependency include:
Mobile phone should be kept in the office.
Teachers are not allowed to give physical punishment to the students.
Fourth Saturday of the month is holiday.
These may not seem especially related to the theme, but then they are among points which Hajare includes in his recommendations across a range of articles supposedly about different issues.
Perhaps the reason for the odd structure of the Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology Insights article was to avoid this article seeming too similar to an article in Trends in Technical & Scientific Research.
This article is basically the same article, but swapped around, so what had been the Abstract in Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology Insights becomes the Introduction in Trends in Technical & Scientific Research – an Introduction which immediately precedes the same Recommendations as before.
Provocative titles
Not all of Hajare's works have convoluted titles: sometimes he seems to be going for shock value. So, one paper in the journal Current Trends in Gastroenterology and Hepatology is entitled "Doggy Style Sex Distorts the Appearance of Face":
Doggy Style Sex Distorts the Appearance of Face
Hajare tells readers that "There are more than 1000 types of autoimmune diseases including penile fracture". Unfortunately there really is a rare medical condition known as penile fracture, which is as unpleasant as the name suggests – but as the name might also suggest this is a trauma injury, not an autoimmune disease. One does not have to be a medical expert to to have queried that one. (But perhaps I am not qualified to make that discrimination, given my {entirely undeserved} reputation as an expert in areas such as regenerative medicine, otolaryngology, neuroscience and brain disorders, orthopedics…)
Cows Die from an Overdose of Love
A 'mini-review' published in Acta Scientific Nutritional Health (or possibly Acta Scientific Gastroenterology – the journal itself seems uncertain which it is), which is actually a one page personal anecdote (that does not review any literature), reaches the "Conclusion. Being (non) black is a personal choice" which does not seem to have anything to do with the topic of the article.
The publisher seems to be unsure about the name of its journal.
The header gives the journal title as 'Acta Scientific Gastroenterology' and the page footer as 'Acta Scientific Nutritional Health'.
(As far as I can see there is no journal called 'Acta Scientific Gastroenterology' although there is an 'Acta Scientific Gastrointestinal Disorders')
The anecdote concerns something of social significance in India (what should a poor person do when their cow no longer provides milk, but still needs feeding, in a cultural context where it is not acceptable to kill the cow?) but seems to have nothing to do with Gastroenterology and is only related to Nutritional Health by the vague link that cows produce milk which is used by humans as food.
Abortion Patient Whose Family Thinks She is a Virgin
The article "Abortion Patient Whose Family Thinks She is a Virgin" was published in the journal Pharmaceutical Sciences & Analytical Research Journal. There is no reference in the text of the article to abortion or any virgin. The 'executive summary' starts with the statement "Blood plasma is yellow in colour". As well as being another gratuitous colour reference (apparently one of Hajare's regular hints for knowing readers of his canon), the sentence has no connection to what follows. There are no other references to blood or plasma in the article.
Sex, sin and divine justice in a medical journal
A 'mini review' (which again does not actually offer a review of literature) on safe sex in the journal General Medicine Open does not limit itself to a non-judgemental, scientific approach:
"The best definition for safer sex is the statistic one in week – a reminder that beyond a point, one cannot control or ever completely prepare for the future. Believes unsafe sex afflicts those who have a sinful past, people cannot compensate for the sin against the unseen. But when you see the background, it will be found it was divine justice, nothing else."
An article with the provocative title "Why No More Apes Evolving Into Humans" in the journal Research in Medical & Engineering Sciences offers another special Hajare definition:
"The best definition for ape is the one by hundred – a reminder that beyond a point, one cannot control or ever completely prepare for the future."
p.1 (emphasis added)
I confess to having no idea what, if anything, was meant, but noticed the use of a key phrase across two papers supposedly discussing very different things.
Meanwhile a 'research article' entitled "Evaluation of Disposable Bed Sheets and Safety Guidelines for Black Dog Sex Workers Resumes in the New Normal Living with Burnside Pharmacy Institute in Pune University" published in the Journal of Dermatology Sciences Research Reviews & Reports seems to genuinely report some real research.
The title and the first paragraph of the abstract seems to refer to precautions being taken in the light of COVID to protect sex workers and their clients, and this is reinforced by photographs which supposedly show sex workers based at the Pharmacy Institute at a University [?] wearing protective clothing. 45
However, the second half of the abstract ('summary') is incongruous with the first:
Indian government eased isolation measures and introduced social distancing, as bars and nightclubs nationwide reopened in Low to high side category employees can villain. This has undergone and final result has publishing after the examination of skin pulp of angry employees according to their physic and anatomy of hair.
Angry employees has more likely to engage in unethical behaviour at work, a new study has revealed. Researcher has seen poverty during early service. … To control crime researcher realised that they have to go to ethical college where they will get a mid-day meal.
p.1 ('Skin pulp' seems to be another of Hajare's recurring leitmotifs.)
[I have omitted a sentence that can be read as a serious claim of misconduct which if untrue could be libelous. 5]
However, the 'angry employee' theme does link to the main text which reports a research study discussing "how important it is for supervisors to pay attention to employees' emotions — especially when the emotion is anger" (p.1). Yet at the end of an extensive account of this study, Hajare adds a meaningless conclusion that was unrelated to the research discussed,
"Women have less regret if the sex has good, researcher report from Pune University data mining reveals fundamental pattern of Indian women thinking tooth decay has a powerhouse of sex regret. All colours can significant for sex. The benevolent behaviour may actually be playing into negative stereotypes. Sex with equality in more beneficial rather than non-human. Handicap sex through the course in life may be trusted."
p.2
So, obviously, more nonsense – but not so obviously nonsensical that the editor of the Journal of Dermatology Sciences Research Reviews & Reports thought it wiser not to publish it, or to ask for irrelevant material to be removed before publication.
A useful exercise in calling out poor academic standards – or just more noise clogging up the scholarly literature?
I have not exhausted the canon as there is plenty more in this vein, but I have commented on enough of Hajare's output to give a feel for the scale of the hoax. He has been consistently persuading incompetent journals to publish nonsense despite seeming to leave obvious as well as more subtle clues. When a journal editor does not notice that the the title of a submission does not relate to the theme of its content, and that neither are within the scope of the journal, then there are provocative, counterfactual, or simply obscure and absurd segments of text to push the point home.
In summary I found Hajare's project clever, and intriguing, and a well-targeted expose of some very poor journals. Once I started to see the patterns and so got the jokes, it was also at times amusing. Still, Hajare has surely achieved this at the cost of his own scientific reputation (how can anyone now take anything he writes seriously?), risking reputational damage to the Indian Council of Medical Research – and, when much of his work focuses on important health and social issues (drug abuse, domestic violence, sexual health, epilepsy…), he has managed to add to the vast amount of nonsense and misinformation to be found by the causal seeker after truth. All in all, even though Hajare has done a good job of demonstrating that certain journals (that claim peer review and high editorial standards and oversight by strong international boards) will publish work of no academic merit at all, even when it is blatantly incoherent and counterfactual, but only by feeding the parasitic publishers and further polluting the scientific literature.
Coda
As I did some due diligence in preparing this posting I discovered another issue with some of these publications that makes it even more difficult to be equivocal about Hajare's hoax. Sadly, even if his approach does show up some incompetent journals, he seems to have definitely stepped over the line of academic malpractice in doing so.
This raises the question (taken up in Part 2) of whether academic misconduct can be justified for the greater good?
Work cited:
Sokal, A. (1996). Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Social Text (46/47), 217-252.
Authors of scholarly works are expected to cite those works that they have drawn upon in their work. (Of course that is impossible: we are all influenced, sometimes profoundly, by things we have read but no longer specifically recall being the source of our ideas. Serious scholars at least do their best.) A well established researcher following a programme of research is likely to cite some of their earlier works that they are building upon, or which go into more detailed accounts of points passed over quickly in the current article as not so central to the present study.
Excessive self-citation is gratuitously citing your own work where it is not central, adds nothing to the present account, or is not the best source for what is being discussed.
I suspect there is a tendency for authors (who inherently know their own work more intimately than anybody else's) to see a logic to citing more of their own work than others may have thought optimal. (Mea culpa.) Peer reviewers are likely to comment if they feel that an article puts too much emphasis on the author's own work, and not that of other authorities.
Hajare's level of self-citation would be something that virtually any experienced peer reviewer would question, as the examples below suggest:
Article
N
N'
An attempt to Characterize Street Pharmaceutical Teachers Abusing Drugs and Aspect of Allergy Among Adult Men Attending Long Distance Institutions in Pune, India
13
11
Facial Recognition Technology and Detection of Over Sexuality in Private Organizations Combined with Shelter House. Baseline Integrated Behavioural and Biological Assessment among Most at-Risk Low Standards Hope Less Institutions in Pune, India
22*
22*
Detection of Progression over Sexuality in Indian Students and Teachers Combined
24
24
Assessment of the Depression-Level Effectiveness of the Curse Words in Young Adults in Private Co-Educational Pharmaceutical Institutions in Pune University Pharmaceutical Institutions Living With Poor Sanitation, India: A Pre-planned, Causal-Pathway-Based Analysis
12
12***
Guessing Game And Poor Quality Teaching Staffs Study Of Less Sunlight Private Pharmacy Institution In Pune University
4
4
Why Black Died by White Study of Totally Less Sunlight Pharmacy Institutions in Indian University India
6
6
Scientology applied to the workday of women feels just as good as sex: Non clinical examination of less sunlight habit Pharmacy Institute in Pune University
3
3
Characterization of Doggy Style Sex-Alcohol Dependent Inter Subtype Among Men Who Have Sex with Women Lead in Heart Disease for Men From India
6
6
Safe sex: the train your mind (revise)
3
2
Cows Die from an Overdose of Love
4
4
Doggy Style Sex Distorts the Appearance of Face
8
8
Abortion Patient Whose Family Thinks She is a Virgin.
10
10**
Why No More Apes Evolving Into Humans
6
5
An Attempt to Eradicate Alcohol Dependency from Adult Men in Service Privately Managed Pharmaceutical Institutions in India
6
6***
A Short Review on "Social and Behavioural Research: Tool for Identify Alcohol Dependency Adult Men in Service Privately Managed Pharmaceutical Institutions in India"
6
6***
Evaluation of Disposable Bed Sheets and Safety Guidelines for Black Dog Sex Workers Resumes in the New Normal Living with Burnside Pharmacy Institute in Pune University
4
4
Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence and Variation Of High Risky Behavior In Private Pharmacy Institutional Principal And Assistant Professor Combined Attending From Long Distance Driver Role In Pune University, India: An Attractive Findings
18
18***
J Nat Ayurvedic Med 2018, 2(6): 000143. In Vitro, Widowed and Curse Words form Principal During Unplanned Meeting of the College in Private Pharmaceutical Institutions in Pune University India: An Attractive Study
18
18***
Co- Relation of Domestic Violence and Epileptic Seizure ("Fit") Experience among Recently Married Women Residing Inslums Communities' Pharmaceutical Institutions in Pune District, India
5
5
There is no Cure for the Cancer of Stupidity
5
5
Non-Medical Basis Characterization of Orgasm Associated with Approach Sex Can Last Up to 20 Seconds to 15 Minutes, Eligible Women Individuals' Poor Transportation Facility of Private Pharmacy Institutions in Pune, India
3
3
N: Number of works cited; N': Number of self citations
* actually there are 28 references, but the author seems to have got bored of completing the bibliographic details, so only 22 report who wrote the work cited. (These omissions should have been spotted as 'author queries' in production had the work been sent to a competent research journal.) But I recognise some of those unattributed titles as Hajare outputs.
** 5 of these 10 outputs are co-authored by Hajare with other scholars.
*** Including one coauthored publication.
Notes
1 I am certainly not suggesting all open access journals are like this. However the publication model of open access journals (income from authors, not readers) can be an incentive to set a low bar for article quality (Taber, 2013). (A good journal seeks high quality in publications, so that capable academics will want to publish in a reputable, high status outlet. A predatory journal has a different business model!)
3 As I did some 'due diligence' prior to posting, I realised that Hajare did not seem to have written the bulk of the article at all. I discuss this in the companion article.
4 As the article is open access and can be reproduced with acknowledgement I was intending to include the images. However, when I did some 'due diligence' prior to posting I released the images may well have been copyright of a third party. I discuss this in 'Part 2' of this article.
5 As I read more of Hajare's papers, I found a number of suggestions, indeed sometimes explicit claims, of serious malpractice by senior staff at the University cited in the articles. It is possible that Hajare has some kind of grievance with, or perhaps even vendetta against, the University – and of course such matters should not be judged without offering a right of reply to those accused of, or implied to be involved in, wrongdoing. (And if Dr Hajare himself wishes to respond to my observations about his work, I would be happy to publish his comments below.)
The scholarly community needs to shame academics who knowingly offer respectability to obviously dishonest practices and the dissemination of fabricated research reports
Keith S. Taber
The article seems to report some kind of experimental study, but I do not know what hypothesis was being tested, and I do not understand the description of the conditions being tested. …as far I can tell, the study (if it really was carried out) is more about workload management than medicinal chemistry… I do not know what the findings were because the results quoted are (deliberately?) inconsistent. I do know that Hajare makes claims about cancer which are totally inappropriate in a scientific context and have no place in the medical literature
According to the title of an article in Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal, "There is no Cure for the Cancer of Stupidity".
Article published in Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal in 2018
The journal claims to be "an open access journal that is committed to publish the papers on various topics of chemistry, especially synthetic organic chemistry, and pharmacology and various other biological specialties, where they are involved with drug design, chemical synthesis and development for market of pharmaceutical agents, or bio-active molecules (drugs)". You may wish to make up your own mind about the extent to which the article I discuss below fits this scope.
The journal is presented as peer reviewed, and offers guidelines for reviewers, suggesting
"Juniper Publishers strives hard towards the spread of scientific knowledge, and the credibility of the published article completely depends upon effective peer reviewing process. Reviewing of manuscript is an important part in the process of publication. Reviewers are asked to make an evaluation and provide recommendations to ensure the scientific quality of the manuscript is on par with our standards."
That is as one would expect from a research journal.
What is the cancer of stupidity?
The author of this article presumably has a particular notion of the 'cancer of stupidity'. This particular article is written by Dr Rahul Hajare who gives his affiliation here as Department of Health Research, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, India. (Perhaps he is the same Rahul Hajare who is listed as an honorary editor of Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal affiliated to Vinayaka Mission University, India? 1)
However, having read the paper, I am not sure what readers are meant to understand the 'cancer of stupidity' actually is. One might well guess that the loaded term 'cancer' is intended metaphorically here, but perhaps not as Hajare talks about both liver 'disorder' and lung cancer in the article.
The article seems to report some kind of experimental study, but I do not know what hypothesis was being tested, and I do not understand the description of the conditions being tested. Of course, unlike someone qualified to referee articles for a journal of organic and medicinal chemistry, I am not an expert in the field. But then, as far as I can tell, the study (if it really was carried out) is more about workload management that medicinal chemistry – but I am not sure of that. I do not know what the findings were because the results quoted are (deliberately?) inconsistent. I do know that Hajare makes claims about cancer which are totally inappropriate in a scientific context and have no place in the medical literature.
A copyright article
'There is no Cure for the Cancer of Stupidity' is copyright of its author, Rahul Hajare, and the article is marked "All rights are reserved". However it is published open-access under creative commons license 4.0 which allows any re-use of the article subject to attribution. So, I am free to reproduce as much of the text as I wish.
I wish to reproduce enough to persuade readers that no intelligent person who reads the article could mistake it for a serious contribution to the scientific literature. If you are convinced I have made my case, then this raises the issue of whether it was published without any editorial scrutiny, or published despite editor(s) and peer reviewers seeing it was worthless as an academic article. This might seem a harsh judgement on Dr Hajare, but actually I suspect he would agree with me. I may be wrong, but I strongly suspect he submitted the article in full knowledge that it was not worth publishing.
The abstract
The abstract of an article should offer a succinct summary of its contents: in the case of an empirical study (which this article seems to report), it should outline the key features of the sample, research design and findings. So what does Dr Hajare write in his abstract?
"The best definition for cancer is the statistic one in six – a reminder that beyond a point, one cannot control or ever completely prepare for the future. Believes cancer afflicts those who have a sinful past, people cannot compensate for the sin against the unseen. But when you see the background, it will be found it was divine justice, nothing else. Lung cancer means no accreditation. Unscientific opinion that illness is only too human to fall back on fantasy, or religion, when there are no rational explanation for random misfortunes."
p.001
So, we have an abstract which is incoherent, and does not seem to be previewing an account of a research study.
Dodgy definition
It starts with a definition of cancer: "The best definition for cancer is the statistic one in six". I would imagine experts differ on the best definition of cancer in the context of medicinal chemistry, but I am pretty sure that 'the statistic one in six' would not be a good contender.
Provocative claims
Next, there is some syntactically challenged material seemingly suggesting that cancer is the outcome of sinning and is divine retribution. An individual is entitled to hold such an opinion – and indeed this view is probably widely shared in some communities – but it has no place in science. Even if a medical scientist believed that at one level this was true- it should have no bearing on their scientific work which should adopt 'methodological naturalism': the assumption that in scientific contexts we look for explanations in terms of natural mechanisms not supernatural ones. 2
'Lung cancer means no accreditation'
Then we have a reference to lung cancer – so an actual medical condition. But it is linked to 'accreditation', without any indication what kind of accreditation is being referred to (accreditation of what, whom?). This does however turn out to be linked to a theme in the main paper (accreditation). Despite that, I doubt any reader coming to this paper fresh would have any idea what it was about from the abstract.
The main text is free of cancer
The main text of the article makes no further reference to cancer, either as a medical condition nor as a metaphor for something else.
The main text is broken up into sections:
Short commentary
Results
Discussion
Recommendation
Limitation
The first of these section titles seems slightly odd, as this article type (in its entirety) is classed by the journal as a 'short communication' and one might rather expect 'Introduction' and 'Research Design' or 'Methodology' here.
The outcome?
The short commentary starts with what seems an overview of the outcomes of the study:
"On the basis of criteria of assessment allotted for NBA work, the total effect has been carried out, which has shown that 9% staffs were moderately improved (17.65%) and 40% staff (78.43%) were mildly improved, while none of the staffs were completely improved."
p.001
NBA has not been defined (no, it is nothing to do with basketball) and we might wonder "what staff?" as this has not been explained. Some web searching suggests that (this) NBA is the organisation that oversees the quality of academic awards in India – the National Board of Accreditation. It is not clear yet what this has to do with lung cancer as mentioned in the abstract.
The alert (or even half-alert?) reader may also spot discrepancies here, which I suspect have been deliberately included by the author.
The aim of the study
We are next told that
"The trial was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of work flow as compared to replacement therapy in the management, along with the assessment of different initiative" .
p.001
So, there seems to have been a trial, but presumably not a cancer drugs trial as it has something to do with 'work flow' (published in a journal of organic and medicinal chemistry?)
After some brief comments about research design this paragraph concluded with
"NBA work cannot be evaluated in terms of file and paper work because investments of biosafety make a profit of privately managed low level transportation facility pharmacy institution make them different."
p.001
Perhaps this makes sense to some readers, but not me. The next paragraph starts:
"Individuals have the power to prevent the occurrence of these diseases by managing their health care and developing healthier food and lifestyle behaviours. How can they be motivated to do so, without providing them with a basic understanding about the important role the liver, the organ under attack, plays in maintaining their health and life itself?"
p.001
Up to this point no diseases have been discussed apart from lung cancer in the abstract. If the focus is lung cancer – why is the liver 'the organ under attack'? And it is not clear what (if anything) this has to do with the NBA or work flow.
Soon we are told
"A positive result does not necessarily mean that the person has body support, as there are certain conditions that may lead to a false positive result for example lyme disease, bacterial leaching, the paternal negativity but who themselves are not infected with liver disorder."
p.001
So, someone struggling to make sense of this study might understand there is some test for liver dysfunction, that can give false positives in some circumstances – so it the study about liver disease (rather than, or as well as, work flow)?
The science of the liver
Hajare refers to the functions of the liver,
"[the liver] is non-complaining complex organ and its miraculous hard working liver cells convert everything they eat breath and absorb through their skin into hundreds of life sustaining body functions 24/7"
p.001
The liver is a pretty remarkable multi-purpose chemical processing organ. But in the context of the scientific/medical literature, should its cells be described as 'miraculous' 2; and in terms of such everyday analogies as eating and breathing and having skin?
Linking liver disease to NBA accreditation
But then Hajare does suggest a link between liver disease and accreditation,
"Similarly staffs receiving liver therapy may have positive test. While showing a positive we general regarded as conclusive for a body life under attack, a negative test does not necessarily rule out. They need to understand how their food and life style choices can lead to reparable NBA accreditation privately managed in remote areas pharmaceutical Instituions [sic]."
p.001
Now, many researchers report their work in English when it is a second (or subsequent) language and this may explain some minor issues with English in any journals that do not have thorough production procedures. But here Hajare seems to be claiming that there is a causal link between the lifestyle choices of patients with liver disease and "reparable [sic] NBA accreditation".
In case the reader is struggling with this, perhaps wondering if they are misreading, Hajare suggests,
"During the early session, positive testing can be undertaken to exclude NBA. In staffs that are near to positive, the level of negative load is used as markers of the like senior staff and principal of progression to ignored."
p.001
Surely, this is just gibberish?
Hajare continues,
"The NBA accreditation is a 90 90 90 formula organization dedicated to promoting healthy food and lifestyle behaviours and prevention of liver related disease through multifaceted liver health education programs. The mission of NBA accreditation initiative is to make education a priority on national agenda. Promoting an education about the NBA to employer individuals to make informed can improve compliance and treatment outcomes for NBA and reduce the incidences of preventable NBA related thought including obesity, fatty liver, early onset diabetes, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Primary prevention of NBA is the key to saving paper and application of green chemistry additional be benefited with zero Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emission in college area."
pp.001-002
As far as I can ascertain, the mission of the NBA is rigorous accreditation standards for technical education programmes in India to ensure teaching is of as high quality as expected in other major countries. It has no particular focus on liver disease! The reference to '90-90-90' seems to be borrowed from UNAIDS, the United Nations initiative to tackle AIDS worldwide.
The paragraph seems to start by suggesting NBA is a positive thing, supporting health educational programmes, but within a few lines there are references to "preventable NBA related thought" (very 1984) and "Primary prevention of NBA" as an ecological goal.
Population and sample
Hajare does not detail the population sampled. From the unspecified population "A total 18 staffs [staff members?] were selected for the study, out of which 13 staffs completed the study" (p.002). The sample is characterised,
"The staffs tended to be lady staffs in middle adulthood regular health. About 80% mentioned irregular habits, and about 60% were unidentified"
p.002
It is not clear what kind of habits are referred to (irregular bowel movements might be relevant to illness, but could it mean drug abuse, or frequently clicking the heels of shoes together three times and thinking of Kansas?), and it is not clear in what sense 60% were 'unidentified'. It is also not clear if these percentages refer to the 18 selected or the 13 completing, as the numbers do not make good sense in either case:
proportion
of n=13
of n=18
80%
10.4 people 10 would be 77% 11 would be 84%
14.4 people 14 would be 78% 15 would be 83%
60%
7.8 people 7 would be 54% 8 would be 62%
10.8 people 10 would be 56% 11 would be 61%
Unless citing to 1 s.f., Hajare's data refer to fractional study participants!
Hajare also tells readers
"A little over half of the staffs (54.17%) were of none of long relation of objective of NBA implementation and 22.92% were of fear with mind."
p.002
It is not clear to me if this nonsensical statement is supposed to be part of a characterisation of the sample, or meant to be a finding. The precision is inappropriate for such a small sample. But none of that matters unless one understands what (if anything) is meant by these statements. I guess that if editors or peer reviewers did read this paper before publication, they felt this made good sense.
The three experimental conditions
We are told that the sample was randomly assigned to three conditions. We are not told how many people completed the study in each condition (it could have been 6 in each of two conditions and only one person in the third condition). The treatments were (p.002):
a) Group A: was treated with conjugated staff seen work flow once daily for 45 days.
b) Group B: was treated with small conjugated staffs seen work flow but ignored once daily for duration of 45 days.
c) Group C: was treated with separately work staffs seen and engaged in their assigned work for 45 days (After 7 days of continuous behavioral objective, a gap of 3 days in between before the next 7 days sitting with 3-3 day's gap after every 7 days).
Surely, at this point, any reader has to suspect that, Hajare is, as they say 'having a laugh'. Although I have no real idea what is meant by any of this, I notice that the main difference between the first two conditions is 'being ignored once daily' – as opposed to what: being observed continuously for 24 hours a day?
The data collection instruments
There is very little detail of the data collection instruments. Of course, this is a 'short communication' which might be a provisional report to be followed up by a fully detailed research report. (I have been looking through a lot of the work Hajare has published in recent years, and typically his papers are no more than about two pages in length.)
Early in the paper we are told that
"Specialized biosafety rating scales like orientation as well as information technology rating scale, were adopted to assess the effect of therapy."
p.001
So that is pretty vague.
Findings
As quoted above, the main text of the paper begins with a preview of findings: "On the basis of criteria of assessment allotted for NBA work, the total effect has been carried out, which has shown that 9% staffs were moderately improved (17.65%) and 40% staff (78.43%) were mildly improved, while none of the staffs were completely improved" (p.001). Perhaps 'mildly' and 'moderately' are understood in specific ways in this study, but that is not explained, and to an uninformed reader it is not clear which, if either, of mild improvement or moderate improvement is a more positive result.
Again, giving results to 4 significant figures is inappropriate (when n<20). But the main issue here is how 9%=17.65% and 40%=78.53%
Later in the article, the results are reported:
"Results of the study based off [not on!] the conjugated staffs rating scale showed that
Group C showed greater relief than the other two groups in flashes (66.66%), sleep problems (80.39%), in depressive mood (72.5%), in irritability (69.81%), and in anxiety (70.90%).
However, Group B showed significant improvement with flashes (62.22%), sleep problems (57.14%), depressive mood (66.66%), irritability (55.31%) and anxiety (50.94%).
Both groups B and C showed a lower benefit in symptoms compared with Group A, which was treated with conjugated staffs but quite unidentified crisis among them."
p.002 (extra line breaks added between sentences)
Again the precision is unjustified: the maximum number of participants in any condition is 6! It is noticeable that large proportions of these adults in "regular health" showed improvements in their (non) conditions. How the "biosafety rating scales like orientation" and "information technology rating scale" measured sleep problems, depressive mood, irritability, and anxiety is left to the imagination of the reader.
Just in case any reader is struggling to interpret all of this, thinking "it must be me, the editor and reviewers clearly understood this paper", Hajare drops in another hint that we should not take this article too seriously: "Group C showed greater relief than the other two groups…[but] Both groups B and C showed a lower benefit in symptoms compared with A Group"
That is: Group C did better than groups A and B, but not as well as group A
Limitations to the study
Hajare points out that 'self-reporting' is a limitation to the study, which is a fair point, but also suggest that "This study was a cross-sectional study; hence, it precludes inferences of causality among such variables." Of course, as it is described, this is not a cross-sectional study but an experimental intervention.
Recommendations
Hajare offers eight recommendations from this study, none of which seem to directly follow from the study (although some are sensible general well-being suggestions such as the value of yoga and education about healthy eating).
In his discussion section Hajare offers a kind of conclusion:
"Due to these limitations in research it is not clear to what degree biosafety treatment may benefit NBA accreditation in sub kind transportation facility remote pharmacy institution, although the smaller studies used in this literary analysis show a definite success rate that supersedes the benefits of biosafety treatment thereby delaying the aging process of staffs in private pharmacy Instituions [sic].
p.002
What literary analysis? Which studies? Hajare only cites 5 other publications: all his own work. He seems to be saying here that
is not clear to what degree biosafety treatment may benefit…
although the smaller studies show a definite success rate that supersedes the benefits of biosafety treatment
So, for any reader still trying to make some sense of the paper, perhaps this means there is inconclusive, but tentative, evidence that biosafety treatment may have sufficient benefits to suggest it should replace…biosafety treatment?
The cancer of the post-truth journals
If this commentary shows evidence of any metaphorical cancer it is the tumour eating away at the academic body. This consists of the explosion of predatory low quality so-called research journals that are prepared to publish any nonsense as long as the author pays a fee. These journals are nourished by submissions (many of which, I am sure, come from well-meaning researchers simply looking for somewhere to publish and who are misled by websites claiming peer review, impact factors, international editorial boards, and the like), and supported by those academics prepared to give such journals a veer of respectability by agreeing to be named as editors and board members.
Of course, it is an honour to be asked to take up such positions (at least by a genuine research journal) but academics need to do due diligence and make sure they are not associating their name with a journal that will knowing publish gibberish and misleading science.
Open access journals are open to the public as well as specialists, and therefore predatory journals are as likely to be a source of information for lay people as trustworthy ones. Someone looking for information on cancer and cancer treatment or liver disease might find this article in Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal and see the host of editors from many different universities 1 (I have appended the current listing below) and assume such a journal must be checking what it is publishing carefully if it is overseen by such an international college of scholars.
Yet Hajare's paper is nonsense.
A very generous interpretation would be that he is meaning well, trying to communicate his work as best he can, but is confused, and needs help in structuring and writing up his work. If this were so, the journal should have told him to come back when he had accessed and benefited from the help he needed.
I would normally tend to a generous interpretation, but not here.
being much shorter than traditional research reports
provocative titles and statements – especially early in the paper (e.g., cancer is divine justice)
titles not reflecting the paper (there is no mention of cancer beyond the abstract)
abstracts that do not actually discuss the study
conflation of unrelated topics (here, liver disease and course accreditation)
irrelevancies (e.g., use of an information technology rating scale to assess liver-related health)
nonsensical 'sentences' that any editor or reviewer should ask to be revised/corrected
glaring inconsistencies (9%=17.65%; improvement under treatment in people who were in good health; groups C did better than, but also not as well as, group A; biosafety treatment may be superior to biosafety treatment)
citing only his own publications
One could explain a few such issues as carelessness, but here there is a multitude of errors that an author should not miss when checking work before submission, and more to the point, that should be easily spotted during editorial and peer review. There are many poor studies in the literature with weaknesses that seem to have been missed – but no one reading "There is no Cure for the Cancer of Stupidity" should think it is ready for publication.
Where is the stupidity? In the people who associate themselves with 'research' of this standard. They seek short term gain by adding a superficially useful affiliation to their curriculum vitae/résumé – but in the longer term these journals and their editorial boards are parasitic on the academic community, and spread low quality, fraudulent and (here) deliberately nonsensical misinformation on scientific and medical matters.
I am pretty convinced that Hajare is a serial hoaxer, who has found it so easy to get below-par material published that he seems to be deliberately testing out just how provocative, incoherent, inconsistent, vague, confusing and apparently pointless an account of a study has to be before a predatory journal will reject it. Clearly, in the case of Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal these particular characteristics are no barrier to publication of a submission.
Hajare throws multiple clues and hints into his work so that a careful reader should not be misled into treating his work as trustworthy. Anybody who reads it should surely see the joke. Does anybody at Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal bother to read material before they publish it? Did anyone read "There is no Cure for the Cancer of Stupidity" before recommending publication?
After all, if it so easy to get published when an author makes it so obvious the work is a hoax, how much easier must it be for authors to publish flawed and fabricated work when they put in a little effort to make it seem coherent and credible.
Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal, at least, seems to have no problem with publishing the incoherent and incredible.
Notes
1 At the time of writing this posting (27th November, 2021) the website of Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal lists a large number of 'honarable editors' from many parts of the world on its website as part of the journal's editorial board. These are academics that have given their name to the journal to give it credence in terms of their reputations as scholars. I have appended the list of honorary editors below.
2 Scientists may be atheists, agnostics or hold any form of religion. A person who holds a view (perhaps based on religious beliefs) that disease is the outcome of personal sin (or indeed the result of human sin more generally or the outcome of Adam and Eve's disobedience, or whatever) can take one of two views about this:
a) sinning is the cause of illness, and no further explanation is necessary
b) sinning is a cause of disease at one (theological) level but divine will works through natural causes (viruses, toxins, etc.)
It would be pointless and inappropriate for someone who took stance (a) to work in a scientific field concerning etiology (causes of diseases).
Someone who took stance (b) could work in such a field as long as they were able to bracket off their personal beliefs and focus on natural causes and scientific explanations in their work (i.e., methodological naturalism).
(Metaphysical naturalism rejects the existence of any supernatural entities, powers or influences and so would not accept sin or divine justice as causes of disease at any level.)
Perhaps the colleagues below joined the editorial team of Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal in good faith – but are they doing due diligence in checking the standards of the journal they (nominally) help edit? Are they happy to remain associated with this journal given its publishing (non)standards?
Honorary Editors
Editor affiliation
Fernando Albericio
University of Barcelona, Spain
Diego A Alonso
University of Alicante, Spain
Carl E. Heltzel
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA
Daniel D Holsworth
Stemnext LLC, USA
Kent Acheson
Kaplan University Online, USA
Rama Suresh Ravi
National Institutes of Health, USA
Syed A A Rizvi
Nova Southeastern University, USA
Alireza Heidari
California South University, USA
Khue Nguyen
University of California, USA
Sonali Kurup
Roosevelt University, USA
Vivek Kumar
Johns Hopkins University, USA
Subrata Deb
Roosevelt Universit, USA
Sridhar Prasad
CalAsia Pharmaceuticals Inc, USA
Loutfy H Madkour
Al Baha University, Saudi Arabia
Gianfranco Balboni
University of Cagliari, Italy
Raja Rizwan Hussain
King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
Ibrahim Abdel-Karim Ahmed Abdel-Rahman
University of Sharjah, UAE
Khalid Hussain Thebo
Institute of Metal research, China
Wenjun Tang
Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, China
Ao Zhang
Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, China
Hengguang Li
Sichuan University, China
Pavel Kocovsky
Charles University, Europe
Hai Feng Ji
Drexel University, Pennsylvania
Wojciech J Kinart
University of Lodz, Poland
David Morales Morales
Instituto de Químic, Mexico
Walter Filgueira de Azevedo Jr
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Chung Yi Chen
Kaohsiung Medical Universit, Taiwan
Ilkay Yildiz
Ankara University, Turkey
Mohamed El Sayed El Khouly
Kafrelsheikh University, Egypt
Mohamed Nageeb Rashed
Aswan University, Egypt
Hanaa Mahrousabd El Ghany Mohamed Rady
Cairo University, Egypt
Kamal Mohamed Dawood
Cairo University, Egypt
Waleed Adbelhakeem Bayoumi
Mansoura University, Egypt
Mohammad Emad Azab Ali El-Fakharany
Ain Shams University, Egypt
Khaled Rashad Ahmed Abdellatif
Beni-Suef University, Egypt
Winston F. Tinto
University of the West Indies, Caribbean
Adnan S Abu-Surrah
Qatar University, Qatar
Djamila Halliche
University of Science and Technology Houari Boumedien, Africa
Maher Aljamal
Al Quds University / Beit Jala Pharmaceutical Company, Palestine
Anna Pratima Nikalje
Y. B. Chavan College of Pharmacy, India
Prabhuodeyara M Gurubasavaraj
Rani Channamma University, India
A Jaya Shree
Osmania University, India
Hari N Pati
Advinus Therapeutics Ltd. (A TATA Enterprise), India
P Mosae Selvakumar
Karunya University, India
Madhuresh Kumar Sethi
Panjab University Chandigarh, India
Sunil Kumar
Pujab Technical University, India
Lallan Mishra
BHU, India
Pinkibala Punjabi
Mohanlal Sukhadia University, India
Maya Shankar Singh
Banaras Hindu University, India
Ajmal Bhat
Sant Baba Bhag Singh University, India
A Venkat Narsaiah
Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, India
Rahul Hajare
Vinayaka Mission University, India
Anshuman Srivastava
Banaras Hindu University, India
Sadaf Jamal Gilani
The Glocal University, India
Ramakrishna Vellalacheruvu
Sri Krishna Devaraya University, India
Ali Gharib
Islamic Azad University, Iran
Mohammad S Mubarak
University of Jordan, Jordan
Vladimir V Kouznetsov
Universidad Industrial de Santander, Colombia
Loai Aljerf
University of Damascus, Syria
Davidson Egirani
Niger Delta University, Nigeria
Branislav Rankovic
University of Kragujevac, Serbia
Fawzi Habeeb Jabrail
University of Mosul, Iraq
Ali A Ensafi
Isfahan University of Technology, Iran
Kian Navaee
American Chemical Society, Iran
Rachid Touzani
Université Mohammed Premier, Morocco
(Dis?)Honarary Editors of Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal
Just let me learn a new research field, and fire up the time machine, and I'll see what I can do
Keith S. Taber
An invitation from a petroleum journal where the editorial board are said to like my work, asking me to send them a unpublished medical article – preferably a couple of weeks before they wrote to me.
Dear Michael
Thank you for your kind message from the journal 'Petroleum and Chemical Industry International' (email, 23rd November, 2021).
Given the title of the journal, I could be forgiven for being somewhat surprised that an article critiquing claims in an educational research study would attract your attention. So, to be told that the editorial board members of Petroleum and Chemical Industry International are "really impressed with [my] articles" is just incredible!
You ask me if I can send you some 'type of medical and clinical article'. I do not really think my work could strictly be described in those terms. Indeed, I initially wondered if my research might even fall outside the scope of Petroleum and Chemical Industry International: yet I see the journal has published some quite diverse material, including the wonderfully titled 'An attempt to Characterize Street Pharmaceutical Teachers Abusing Drugs and Aspect of Allergy Among Adult Men Attending Long Distance Institutions in Pune, India'.1 Moreover, I see an editorial for the journal published a few month ago focused on the conjecture that around the year 1100 CE the Yoruba of west Africa may have used glass beads as a form of currency.2
Is it fair then to assume that the journal has a fairly flexible approach to defining its scope, and that a submission that was outside of the 'medical and clinical' categories might still be considered for publication?
If that is so, I wonder what is currently a typical timescale for publication, should a submission be deemed suitable. Would a submission by your suggested deadline of 8th November, for example, have a reasonable chance of being published by, say, mid October?
Yours…
The journal homepage of Petroleum and Chemical Industry International offers a helpful tutorial for any potential contributors explaining what petroleum is and what it is used for
Notes:
1
A research article in Petroleum and Chemical Industry International
2
An editorial in Petroleum and Chemical Industry International
…of chemistry education…or even a journal of chemistry education
Keith S. Taber
One of these images shows a leading international research journal of chemistry education with academic quality standards and high production values. And the other…is not (any of these things).
I had received one of those unsolicited invitations to publish in the journal: "Write for Us". An editorial assistant wrote to tell me that
"I would appreciate receiving your submission on or before 10th November 2021"
email 'Write for Us – Journal of Chemistry: Education, Research and Practice' recieved on 22nd October
Publish in haste – retract at leisure?
Such requests to submit something, and quickly, but which are not associated with any special or themed issue, tempt me to write back and ask "why [would you so appreciate receiving my submission on or before 10th November 2021]?" Anyone who is a serious scholar or researcher will know both that producing an academic study takes a good deal of time and that decent journals have a rolling programme of submissions, peer review, and publication. So, it should not make any difference to the outcomes of a submission, or the approximate time from submission to publication, if one submitted on 10th November, or the 11th, or any other date when one had a manuscript ready. 1
So, these deadlines are really about marketing. Sometimes, some of these new journals which are struggling to establish themselves (and it is very easy for a publisher to start a journal these days, but very difficult to attract quality work – or well-qualified reviewers – given the extensive number of existing outlets), will offer reduced, or even set aside, publication fees for submissions received by a certain date to attract work, in order to help them start to build up a body of published studies which can convince other authors they have a viable and sustainable journal.
Here, however, if there was any particular motivation for me to respond by the implied deadline of 10th November, this was not shared.
Another journal of chemistry education research and practice?
I recall contacting the so-called Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practicebefore it even started publishing, when I was editor of a well-established and well-regarded journal with a very similar name: 'Chemistry Education Research and Practice' (CERP, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry).
A genuinely leading international journal – and a journal pretending to be one
I suggested that the proposed name risked the two journals being confused. I discussed this in an editorial:
"In October a colleague and former Board member of this journal was invited by the founding editor of the Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice to join that new journal's editorial board. The journal name seemed very close to Chemistry Education Research and Practice, and I wrote to suggest they should avoid confusion by changing the name before they actually started publishing.
The editor replied to acknowledge that "we can understand your doubts" – and asked me to let them know if I wanted to be on the Board.
I wrote back to suggest again that they should modify the name to "allow the academic community to see your new journal as a genuine attempt to add to the range of scholarly publications in the field, rather than simply employing a cheap trick to mislead authors".
Taber, 2018, p.11
In view of the lack of concern about the similarity of name at the soon to be launched journal, I now suspect this similarity was likely deliberate – to conflate a top journal that did not charge publication fees with an unproven outlet that asks for a hefty fee.
A false claim (i.e., lie)
In any case, the journal website made it clear the journal was not actually specifically about chemistry education research and practice but was a general chemistry journal. The journal describes itself as:
"Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice is a leading International Journal for the publication of high quality articles…It welcomes publication of scientific research papers in the fields of Theoretical and Physical Chemistry, Analytical and Inorganic Chemistry, Organic and Biological Chemistry, Applied and Materials Chemistry, Spectroscopy, Chemical physics, Biological, Medicinal, Environmental chemistry, Biochemistry, Petroleum and Petrochemicals, Materials science, Nuclear chemistry, Polymer chemistry, Pharmacognosy & Phytochemistry, Stereochemistry and Clinical chemistry"
Website of OPAST Group LLC, publisher of the dodgy journal
It is certainly not a 'leading International Journal' even if it genuinely aspires to be one. So, that is simply a false claim. Perhaps a reader might wonder if this is just my opinion – but the journal was making such a claim before it had begun publishing when there could be absolutely no basis for the lie.
"I wrote back pointing out that the statement on their website that the 'Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice is a leading International Journal for the publication of high quality articles' had to be seen as a deliberately misleading claim given that the journal had not yet published a single article."
Taber, 2018, p.11
Who would want their scientific work published in an outlet which has such limited respect for truth? Is this meant to persuade researchers in the field – "it must be a leading journal, even though my colleagues in the field have never heard of it, because it says so there on the website". Or, are potential authors being invited to join in the conceit, perhaps, once having published in the journal, noting in their applications for scholarships, posts, promotions and so forth, that their work was published in one of the leading international journals?
A broad scope
The scope of the journal is clearly not just 'Chemistry: Education Research and Practice' if that is read to mean that it covers educational research and practice in chemistry. Perhaps they meant something more like – chemistry: education; research; and practice?
Indeed, chemistry education does not appear in the list above, although it does feature as one of a good many 'subject categories':
So that's pretty much 'chemistry' – with education research as very much one theme among many.
Parasitic, predatory, journals
To my eye, then, the so-called 'Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice' looks like one of those many new journals that has been set up by people who do not really know about the relevant field, and who seek to charge authors for publishing their work without any substantive concern for scientific quality or scholarly values.
That is, the business model is about attracting enough submissions to make a profit. (Which is not in itself wicked, of course, as long as profit is made by offering an honest and competent service.) That requires publishing a lot of papers. That could be seen as motivation to have a very light touch editorial and peer review policy – after all, if submitted work is rejected or authors are asked to make major revisions this will reduce, and slow, the flow of funds into the publisher.
Respected academic journals, even when published by commercial publishing houses, have high quality criteria (rejecting much work, requiring substantial revisions before publication for most that are accepted), and know their reputations depend upon the field evaluating the work that is published as being (at least generally) of high quality.
Leading journals publish significant, original articles: other respectable journals may have to settle for well-motivated, well-designed, carefully executed and thoroughly reported work that adds incrementally to a field (even if not in a seminal way).
Some of the new journals being launched to publish for a fee are not only not yet 'leading' in their fields, but are not even worthy of respect. They provide a means of publication regardless of academic quality. They accept work which authors should (and perhaps later will) be embarrassed about and they do not offer the rigorous review process that helps authors appreciate weaknesses in their work and improve it.2 They are not contributing to a field, but parasitic on it.
That is a pattern I see quite a lot these days.
A prejudiced view?
However, it is unfair to prejudge the journal without looking to see if what it is publishing is actually quality work.
I decided to take look at the paper to see if I thought this article might indeed be of 'publishable quality' by one of the journals taken seriously in the field. Of course, all editors have bad days, and it would be wrong to scrutinse one education paper among many, and use that to characterise the general standard of work in a journal. So, I also looked back at previous issues, but found only a handful of other articles that seemed to be located in the field of education:
I also noticed a couple of articles on general chemical themes which looked like they might be of wider interest (and accessible to a non-specialist like myself).
So, I decided to take a quick look at these seven articles. I was aware I approached these studies with an existing bias based on the rather 'un-scholarly' and dishonest way in which this journal went about the business of attracting submissions. But I was also aware that even if a journal does not have careful procedures and proper editorial processes, this does not mean that it might not sometimes attract excellent work. I am only going to make brief comments here on most of these articles, but I have included links to more detailed discussions of them.
An invalid research instrument
The most noteworthy thing about the study 'Chemistry Laboratory Safety Signs Awareness Among Undergraduate Students in Rivers State' was that it used a data collection instrument which was invalid. The authors seemed to want to know if students would reognise the hazards signified by different laboratory signs, but provided a test instrument which told respondents the answer to this question as each sign was labelled with its meaning. The authors tested instead – inadvertently it seemed – whether students knew the hazards associated with a range of laboratory reagents.
The study tested a hypothesis that there would not be a gender difference in student perceptions, and, indeed, found no statistically significant difference. (I suspected that I would not be visited by a fire inspector as I read his paper, and this also proved to be correct.) But then, no rationale have been given for thinking there was any reason to consider gender might be a factor – leaving a reader wondering what had motivated the test.
The study 'An overview of the first year Undergraduate Medical Students Feedback on the Point of Care Ultrasound Curriculum' was very short, and did not fit in the scope of journal as it was not about chemistry/chemistry education but medical education. The paper was incomplete in several senses – it did not have a full methodology section, and indeed did not seem to actually have any meaningful data analysis. It was also incomplete as it referred readers to figures which were not there: something that the author, the editor, and any peer reviewers who might have been invited to evaluate the work, seem to have all missed.
Indeed the article, which the journal bizarrely considered a review article (it was not), seemed to be the text of a conference poster which had been presented under a somewhat different authorship at different conferences. To see something so thin and insubstantial published in a supposed research journal is quite surprising.
This activity is claimed to have a wide range of benefits at the levels of the undergraduates, their future teaching, and society more widely, but no evidence is presented for any of the claims. It seems to be suggested that these students will later want to use Raman spectroscopy in their primary school teaching. This is rather ambitious, and serious research journals would be unlikely to publish such a speculative proposal without any evaluation of the idea being put into practice.
The article 'Assessment of Chemistry Laboratory Equipment Availability and Practice: A Comparative Study Between Damot and Jiga Secondary Schools' uses a rather dubious questionnaire to survey chemistry teachers and students in two schools (supposedly chosen as they have different approaches to chemistry lab. work, although nothing more is offered about what these approaches are) about their perceptions of aspects of chemistry practical work. The authors conclude that both schools have very low levels of both lab equipment and laboratory practice – although this seems to be based on an entirely arbitrary guess about what should be considered an average level.
The authors seem to want their study to be considered as comparative education, seemingly on the basis that they compare chemistry practical work in two neighbouring schools. There are problems with both the data collection and analysis aspects of the study.
The article 'Nature of Chemical Elements' makes claims that are potentially of great interest to chemists and chemistry teachers everywhere: that there are errors in the periodic table as chemists have got the atomic numbers wrong for many of the chemical elements; a new model of nuclear structure explains the proton:neutron ratio in different atoms; and there are new elements to be discovered to fit the gaps that had not been noticed in the periodic table.
These are pretty major claims (were they to be substantiated, probably several Nobel prizes' worth!), and any respectable research journal would engage in very careful peer review before publishing such claims. However, the journal managed to complete editorial and peer review processes in four days, apparently not spotting or being concerned about a range of conceptual issues that I felt needed correction or clarification. Like most of the articles examined, the published study contains various sloppy errors which should have been questioned or corrected by the journal's production department.
I found 'The Chemistry of Indigenous Peoples' most disappointing as it was very brief and yet incoherent in places. It made the illogical claim that the survival of the way of life of indigenous people that live in the rainforest depends upon deforestation! There seemed to be odd errors and discontinuities (that seemingly had not been spotted by the editor or any peer reviewers asked to evaluate the work). After a while, I found the cause of this: a combination of poor translations and plagiarism.
Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as your own. This paper in 'Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice' that is supposed to be by one author, is actually a patchwork of paragraphs copied from three other published works by others.
This was the most disappointing read of the sample. I felt most of the studies at least represented honest attempts to contribute to the research literature even if all seemed to suffer from limited significance (although the article which wanted to overturn a good deal of canonical physics and chemistry was at least potentially significant), most raised unexplored issues of generalisation, and most included conceptual, logical and/or methodological weaknesses as well as language/typographical errors. However, stealing other people's scholarship, and presenting it as your own work is not just poor scholarship but academic malpractice.
This incoherent montage of other people's scholarship was also submitted to another journal two days before it was submitted to the 'Journal of Chemistry: Education, Research and Practice': it is also published in an outlet called 'Acta Scientific Pharmaceutical Sciences'.
In summary, from the papers I looked at, that is those in the journal that I felt most qualified to evaluate, the work in Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice is not of 'publishable quality'. Some of the articles might be useful starting points for a publication, and may have been suitable for improvement and development through the peer review process. However, if there was any meaningful peer review of some of these papers, it was clearly not by anyone who was both qualified to, and prepared to, carefully evaluate the manuscripts.
This lets down the community as poor quality work appears in the literature. This journal also lets down the authors as they should expect their work to be challenged and so improved, through rigorous peer review – which clearly has not operated here. The exception is the author who simply translated and pasted segments of other people's work into an incoherent composite. That is not a matter of needing editorial support, but simply of learning that it is wrong to steal. That author let themselves down.
Work cited:
Taber, K. S. (2018). The end of academic standards? A lament on the erosion of scholarly values in the post-truth world. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 19(1), 9-14. doi:10.1039/C7RP90012K
Notes
1 Of course, there is the matter of claiming priority by publishing first. In the mythology of science this is very important – though in practice this is seldom as critical as the myth suggests. In science education someone would have to be incredibly unlucky to miss winning a major award or getting that dream job because they published a week or two after a colleague made substantially the same claim – I doubt this has ever occurred.
2 Peer review (psychologically, at least) can seem to be a bit like an irregular verb, in that my work does not really need peer review, but yours will benefit from it; the requests I get to change my submitted manuscripts are misguided, unhelpful or petty, but the recommendations I make about improving other people's work are appropriate, necessary and insightful.
Will Raman spectroscopy provide future primary teachers with "a dynamic and attractive vision of science, technology and innovation"?
Keith S. Taber
…a proposal of methodology for the subject of experimental sciences for teachers in training, which will introduce real scientific instrumentation such as Raman spectroscopy, which can be of great interest to perform significant learning and to design teaching-learning activities
Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020, p.17
I am going to offer a critical take on a proposal to teach future primary teachers to use Raman spectroscopy. That is, a proposal published in a leading international research journal (well, that is how the journal describes itself).
I do have some reservations about doing this: it is very easy to find fault in others' work (and a cynic might suggest that being an academic is basically a perpetual ongoing training in that skill). And there are features of the proposal that are appealing.
For a start, I like spectroscopy. I sometimes joke that my first degree was in spectroscopy and some of its applications (although the degree certificate refers to this as chemistry). I also like the way the paper refers to principles of models of learning, and refers to "combining concepts of chemistry and physics" (Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020: 17).
However, I do wonder how closely (and critically) the editor and peer reviewers (assuming there really was peer review) actually read the submitted manuscript – given the range of questions one would expect to have arisen in review.
I will, below, question whether this contribution, a proposed teaching scheme, should really be considered a 'research' article. Even if one thinks it should be, I suggest the authors could have been better supported by the journal in getting their work ready for publication.
A predatory journal
I have been reading some papers in a journal that I believed, on the basis of its misleading title and website details, was an example of a poor-quality predatory journal. That is, a journal which encourages submissions simply to be able to charge a publication fee (currently $1519, according to the website), without doing the proper job of editorial scrutiny. I wanted to test this initial evaluation by looking at the quality of some of the work published.
Although the journal is called the Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice (not to be confused, even if the publishers would like it to be, with the well-established journal Chemistry Education Research and Practice) only a few of the papers published are actually education studies. One of the articles that IS on an educational topic is called 'Raman Spectroscopy: A Proposal for Didactic Innovation (IKD Model) In the Experimental Science Subject of the 3rd Year of the Primary Education Degree' (Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020).
A 'research article' in "a leading International Journal for the publication of high quality articles"
Like other work I have examined in this journal, the published article raises issues and questions which one would imagine should have arisen during peer review – that is when expert evaluators look to see if a manuscript has the importance and quality to be worthy of journal publication.
Below I very briefly outline the nature of the proposed innovation, and then offer some critique.
A proposal for didactic innovation in the primary education degree
Morillas and Etxabe-Urbieta (i) propose a sequence of practical science work for inclusion in the curriculum of undergraduate students who are preparing for primary school teaching, (ii) link this, in broad terms at least, to pedagogic principles, and (iii) make claims about the benefits of the mooted proposal.
The authors consider their proposal has originality, as they could not find other literature recommending the use of Raman spectroscopy in the preparation of primary school teachers,
"…the fact that there are no works related to Raman spectroscopy to work on concepts developed in experimental science class for Teacher training in Primary Education in formation, makes the proposal that is presented more important."
Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020: 17
What exactly is proposed?
Morillas and Etxabe-Urbieta suggest an extended sequence of laboratory work with three main stages:
students are provided with three compounds (sodium nitrate; potassium nitrate; ammonium dihydrogen phosphate) from which they will prepare saturated solutions, from which crystals will grow ;
the resulting crystals will be inspected, and examples of crystals with clear shapes will be selected and analysed in terms of their geometries – showing how different compounds lead to different crystal structures
examples of ill-formed crystals will be subjected to Raman spectroscopy, where the three different compounds will give rise to different 'fingerprints'.
Pedagogic theory
Morillas and Etxabe-Urbieta report that their work is based on the 'IKD model' which equates to "new innovative teaching methodologies":
"In recent years, new innovative teaching methodologies have been used in the Basque Country University (IKD model) for experimental science classes for teachers of Primary Education in formation. This IKD model is based on a cooperative and dynamic learning. It is an own [?], cooperative, multilingual and inclusive model that emphasizes that students are the owners of their learning and are formed in a comprehensive, flexible and adapted to the needs of society. Training students according to IKD model requires creating new ways of teaching and learning more active and cooperative (curriculum development). Therefore, the fact of combining more theoretical master classes with more practical classes is a trend that is increasingly used."
Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020: abstract
The authors name check constructivism, meaningful learning, and the notion of learning cycles, without offering much detail of what they mean by these terms.
"The students can put into practice the solubility concepts in master classes, through activities based on the IKD didactic model of the University of the Basque Country and in constructivist models of teaching and learning. Learning cycles have been developed and in a group, dynamic and cooperative way, the students explore their previous knowledge about solubility and crystallization, reflect on these ideas, make meaningful learning and apply these new learning in research contexts in the laboratory. In particular it has been discussed in the classroom about the amount of salt (compound) that can be dissolved in water and has been investigated on the factors that influence the solubility and on the crystallization process."
Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020: 18
There is very little detail of how these pedagogic principles are built upon in the proposed teaching scheme, and the 'IKD model' is not explained in any more detail (e.g., how does 'multilingual' learning fit with this proposal?) After all, school children have been making saturated solutions and growing crystals for generations without this being understood as part of some innovative educational practice.
What is claimed?
Overall, the sequence is said to help link scientific theory to practice, teach geological concepts and provide hands-on experience of using modern scientific instruments,
"the first part, where the crystallization of various chemical compounds is carried out, will help to pinpoint possible doubts arising in the master classes of the chemistry part. Next, it is analyzed how to differentiate the crystals by means of their type of geometry in its crystallization based on geological concepts. Finally, the crystals are differentiated by another method based on the Raman spectroscopy…where students can observe concepts of light treated in physics class such as lasers, and electromagnetic lengths [sic?], where for the case in which some crystals that are not perfectly crystallized, this portable equipment will be used. In this way, the students have their first experience of this type, and use real scientific instrumentation."
Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020: 18
Stage one: preparing crystals
But the authors suggest the approach has further impacts. Dissolving the salts, and then observing the crystals grow, "can help the student
to encourage possible scientific vocations,
better understanding of theoretical master classes and
letting them know how is [what it is like?] working in the scientific field and
spreading the importance of crystallography in our society" (p.18)
So, in addition to linking to theory classes ("students will begin to use the laboratory material studied in the theoretical classes, using and observing its characteristics, and in the same way trying to correlate the concepts of chemical saturation previously learnt in master classes", p.18), this simple practical work, is expected to change student views about science careers, give authentic experience of doing science, and increase social awareness of crystallography as a scientific field. Perhaps, but this seems a lot to expect from what is a pretty standard school practical activity.
However, in case we are not convinced, the authors reinforce their claims: students will experience principles they have been taught about saturated solutions, and how solubility [often] changes with temperature, and
"the students begin to experience the first fundamental concepts of crystallography and subsequently the fact of observing week after week the growth of the crystals themselves, can help the student to encourage possible scientific vocations, better understanding of theoretical master classes and letting them know how is working in the scientific field and spreading the importance of crystallography in our society."
Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020: 19
Some of this is perfectly reasonable, but some of these claims seem speculative. (Simply repeating an unsupported claim again on the following page does not make it more convincing.) Authentic scientific activity would surely involve extended engagement, developing and testing a procedure over time to hone a process – crystallising solutions does not become an authentic science activity simply because the evaporation takes place over several weeks.
An editor or peer reviewer might reasonably ask "how do you know this activity will have these effects?"
In the second stage, students examine the three types of crystals formed and notice and document that they have different shapes/geometries. This requires careful observation, and measurement (of angles),
In a second phase, once that month passed, the students will observe the crystals that have grown inside their containers. Firstly, one of the objectives will be to observe what kind of crystals have formed. For the observation methodology and subsequent for the description of them, teacher will give some guidelines to distinguish the formed crystals according to their geometry based on the geological morphology.
Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020: 19
Growing and examining crystals seems a worthwhile topic in primary school as it can encourage awe and wonder in nature, and close observation of natural phenomena: the kinds of activities one might employ to engage young minds with the world of science (Taber, 2019). The authors expect (undergraduate) students to recognise the different crystal systems ("trigonal … orthorombic … tetragonal") and associated angles between faces. 1 This phase of the work is reasonably said to be able to
"promote skills such as visual and spatial perception"
It is the third stage of the work which seems to go beyond the scope of traditional work in preparing primary school teachers.
Stage 3: Using Raman spectroscopy to (i) identify compounds / (ii) appreciate particle movements
In this stage, groups of students are given samples of each of the compounds (from any of the students' specimens that did not crystallise well enough to be identified from the crystal shape), and they obtain Raman spectra from the samples, and so identify them based on being informed that the main spectral peak falls at a different wavenumber for each salt.
An inauthentic activity?
There is a sense that this rather falls down as an inquiry activity, as the students knew what the samples were, because they made the solutions and set up the crystallisations – and so presumably labelled their specimens as would be usual good scientific practice. The only reason they may now need to identity samples is because the teaching staff have deliberately mixed them up. Most school practical work is artificial in that sense, but it seems a little forced as an excuse to use spectroscopy. A flame test would surely have done the job more readily?
Now the way the procedure is explained in the article, the spectrometer works as a black box that leads to spectra that (if all has gone well) have characteristics peaks at 1067 cm-1, 1048 cm-1 or 921 cm-1 allowing the samples to be distinguished. After all, a forensics expert does not have to understand how and why we all form unique fingerprints to be able to compare fingerprints found at a crime scene with those taken from suspects. (They simply need to know that fingerprints vary between people, and have skills in making valid matches.)
Yet Morillas and Etxabe-Urbieta (p.21) claim more: that undertaking this third part of the sequence will enable students to
"relate the type of movements that occur in the materials particles, in this case crystals, where the concept of particles movement…
the fact of lasers use in a realistic way helps also students to understand how these kinds of concepts exist in the reality and are not science fiction
…the use of this type of instrumentation in television series such as CSI, for example, means that students pay more attention in classrooms
and help them to grow a basic scientific curiosity in their professional work, that is, in the Primary Education classrooms"
Again, perhaps, but where is the evidence for this? If one wanted to persuade future teachers that lasers are not just science fiction, one could refer to a laser pointer, or a CD, DVD or Blu-ray player.
Final claims
The authors end their proposal with some final claims
"The methodology proposal presented in this work, based on IKD model explained [sic, I do not think it was – at least not in any detailed way] above, will offer to Primary Education degree students a great possibility of applicability as a teaching resource, in which the fact of using Raman spectroscopy as a real scientific instrumentation can fill them with curiosity, amazement and interest. Moreover, this technique cannot only be used as a complement to this type of work [?], but also for didactic innovation projects and research projects. Thus, the fact of being able to use this type of tools means that the students are stimulated by their curiosity and desire to advance and learn, progressing in their scientific concern and therefore, improving the delivery of their future classes in a more motivated, didactic and rigorous way."
Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020: 21
A devil's advocate might counter that an activity to identify poorly crystallised salts by subjecting them to a black box apparatus that produces messy graphs which are interrogated in terms of some mysterious catalogue of spectral lines will do very little to encourage "curiosity, amazement and interest" among any future primary school teachers who already lack confidence and enthusiasm for science. Indeed, without a good understanding of a range of underlying physical principles, the activity can offer about as much insight into science as predicting the outcome of a football match from a guide to interpreting tea leaves.
So, perhaps less like identifying fingerprints, and more like reading palms.
Palm image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay; Raman spectrum from Schmälzlin et al., 2014.
The references to "offer to Primary Education degree students a great possibility of applicability as a teaching resource" and "improving the delivery of their future classes in a more motivated, didactic and rigorous way" seems to mean 1 that the authors are not just suggesting that the undergraduates might benefit from this as learners, but also that they may want to introduce Raman spectroscopy into their own future teaching in primary schools.
That seems ambitious.
Spectroscopy in the school curriculum
Spectroscopy does appear in the upper levels of the secondary school curriculum, but not usually Raman spectroscopy.
Arguably, mass spectrometry 2 is most accessible as a general idea as it can be explained in terms of basic physical principles that are emphasised in school physics – mass, charge, force, acceleration… 'Mass spec.' – the chemist's elemental analyser – also offers a nice context for talking about the evidence for the existence of elements with distinct atomic numbers, and for looking at isotopic composition, as well as distinguishing elements and compounds, and testing for chemical changes (Taber, 2012).
'Mass spec.' is, however, rather different to the other main types of spectroscopy in which samples are subjected to electromagnetic radiation and the outcome of any interaction detected. 2
Most spectroscopy involves firing a beam of radiation at a sample, shifting gradually through a frequency range, to see which frequencies are absorbed or re-emitted. Visible spectroscopy is perhaps the most accessible form as the principle can initially be introduced with simple hand-held spectroscopes that can be used to examine different visible light sources – rather than having to interpret chart recorder or computer screen graphics. Once students are familiar with these spectroscopes, more sophisticated spectrometers can be introduced. UV-Visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy can be related to teaching about electronic energy levels, for example in simple models of atomic structure.
Infrared (IR) spectroscopy has similar principles, and can be related to the vibrations in molecules due to the presence of different bonds. Vibrational energy levels tend to be much closer together than discrete 3 electronic levels
In these types of spectroscopy, some broad ranges of frequencies of radiation are largely unaffected by the test sample but within these bands are narrow ranges of radiation that are being absorbed to a considerable extent. These 'spectral peaks' of frequencies* of the radiation being removed (or heavily attenuated) from the spectrum reflect energy transitions due to electrons or bonds being excited to higher energy levels. (Although energy absorbed will often then be re-emitted, it will be emitted in arbitrary directions so very little will end up aligned with the detector.)
[* Traditionally in spectroscopy the peaks are labelled not with radiation frequency by with wavenumber in cm-1 (waves per cm). This is the reciprocal of wavelength, λ, (in cm), and so directly proportional to frequency, as speed of the radiation c = fλ.]
A more subtle kind of spectrocsopy
Raman spectroscopy is inherently more complex, and relies on interactions between the material under test and a very small proportion of the incident radiation. Raman spectroscopy relies on a scattering effect, so as a simple analogy it is like UV/Visible or IR spectroscopy but involving something more like a Doppler shift than simple absorption. Thus the need for a monochromatic light source (the laser) as the detector is seeking shifts from the original frequency.
So, if introducing spectroscopy one would be better advised to start with UV-Vis (or IR) where there is a strong contrast in absorption between unaffected and affected frequencies, and where there is a direct relationship between the energy of the affected radiation and the energy transitions being indirectly detected (rather than Raman spectroscopy where there is only a marginal difference between affected and unaffected frequencies, and the scattered radiation does not directly give the frequencies of the energy shifts being indirectly detected).
Learning quanta – teaching through an Aufbau principle
As learning tends to be an incremental process, building on existing knowledge, it would probably make sense to
introduce spectroscopy in terms of UV-Vis, first with hand held spectroscopes, then spectrometers
then extend this to IR which is similar in terms of basic principles and so would reinforce that learning.
Only later, once this basic understanding had been sufficiently revisited and consolidated, would it seem to make sense to
move onto the more complex nature of Raman spectroscopy (or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy which involves similar complications).
This, at least, would seem to be a constructivist approach – which would align with Morillas and Etxabe-Urbieta's claim of employing "Teaching and Learning processes based on Constructivism theories and IKD model of the Basque Country University" (p.18).
That is, of course, if it is felt important enough to teach primary school teachers about spectroscopy.
…and as if by magic…
Actually, I am not at all convinced that
"thanks to the visualization of these spectra, students can relate the type of movements that occur in the materials particles, in this case crystals, where the concept of particles movement, which is quite abstract, can be understood"
The future teachers could certainly be taught that
"this type of technique consists in that the laser of the equipment (in our case red laser) when striking on the crystals promotes an excitation of the molecules [sic, ions?] of the own crystal, that can vibrate, rotate [sic 4] etc. This type of excitation is translated into a spectrum (different peaks) that is displayed on the screen of a computer connected to the Raman spectrometer. These peaks refer to different vibrational modes of the molecules [sic], so that each of the bands of each spectrum, corresponds to different parts of the molecule [sic], so as it has been mentioned above, each of the crystals has its own fingerprint"
Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020: 20
Yet that seems some way short of actually relating the spectra to the "type of movements that occur in the materials particles". (In terms of my fingerprint analogy, this is like being taught that the unique fingerprint reflects the epigenetic development of the individual, and so appreciating why different people have different fingerprints, but still not being able to relate the specific fingerprints of individual to any specific events in their development.)
Not a research paper – or even a practice paper?
I do not think this article would been publishable in a serious research journal, as it does not seem to report any actual research. It discusses educational practice, but it is not clear if this is practice that currently takes place or is simply being proposed. Even if this is reporting actual teaching practice, there is no evaluation of that practice.
The idea that Raman spectroscopy might be beneficial to future primary school teachers seems somewhat speculative. I have no doubt it could potentially be of some value. All other things being equal, the more science that primary school teachers know, understand, and are confident about, the better for them and their future pupils.
But of course, all other things are seldom equal. In general, teaching something new means less time for something else. Either Raman spectroscopy replaces something, or it squeezes the time available, and therefore the engagement and depth of treatment possible, in some other curriculum content.
So, rather than making great claims about how including Raman spectroscopy in the curriculum will help learn theory (will they really understand how a laser produces coherent monochromatic light, and how and why scattering takes place?), provide experience of scientific work (with an artificial exercise?), lead to scientific vocations (instead of becoming primary teachers?), and raise social awareness of crystallography, etc., what is needed is evidence that some of these educational aims and objectives are being met. And, ideally, that there is more educational gain with this activity than whatever it replaced.
I am certainly not looking to reject this proposal out of hand. I can see the sequence could engage students and be enjoyable, and may well have positive outcomes. But simply making a range of unsubstantiated claims is not research. A speculative proposal offering tenuous arguments for knowledge claims is not sufficient for a research paper.
Evaluating these claims would not be that easy (some of the effects claimed are pretty long term and indirect) but it is only when a claim is closely argued, and preferably based on empirical evidence, that it become science and ready for publication in a research journal.
Peer review
Now the editor of Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice may disagree with me (at least, assuming she scrutinised the article before it was published). 5 But supposedly this journal undertakes formal peer review – that is experts in a topic are asked to evaluate submissions for suitability for publication – not only to make a recommendation on whether something should be published, but to raise any issues that need addressing before such publication.
I wonder who reviewed this submission (were they experts in primary teacher education?) and what, if any, suggestions for revisions these referees may have made. There are a good many points where one would expect a referee to ask for something to be explained or justified or corrected (e.g., molecules and rotations in salt crystals). Some of these points should be obvious to any careful reader (like asking what exactly is the IKD model that informs this proposal, and where are different features of the model enacted in the teaching sequence?) There are also places where the authors could have been supported to hone their text to make their intended meanings clearer. (I have considerable respect for authors writing in a second language, but that is not an excuse for journal editors and production staff to ignore incorrect or confusing expressions.)
The editor decided the manuscript was ready for publication about 10 days after initial submission
Yet, based on any peer reviews reports, and the authors' responses to them, the editor was able to decide the manuscript was ready for publication about 10 days after initial submission.
A brave conjecture?
Given that the proposal here is likely to seem, on the face of it, quite bizarre to many of those working in primary teacher education, who are charged with ensuring future primary teachers have a good grounding of the most basic scientific concepts, values and practices, and feel confident about teaching science to children, it risks being dismissed out of hand unless very closely and carefully argued.
"…the fact that there are no works related to Raman spectroscopy to work on concepts developed in experimental science class for Teacher training in Primary Education in formation, makes the proposal that is presented more important [but also puts a high burden on the proposer to make a convincing argument for the proposal]"
Morillas & Etxabe-Urbieta, 2020: 17
So, even if the editor felt that an unproved pedagogic proposal was of itself suitable to be the basis of a research article, there is much that could have been done in editorial and peer review to support the authors in improving their manuscript to give a stronger article. After all, I suspect very few academics working in initial teacher education with future primary teachers would inherently think that Raman spectroscopy is a strong candidate for adding to the curriculum, so the case needs all the argumentation, logic and evidential support it can muster if it is be taken seriously.
Work cited:
IUPAC. Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"). Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997). Online version (2019-) created by S. J. Chalk. ISBN 0-9678550-9-8. https://doi.org/10.1351/goldbook.
Morillas, H., & Etxabe-Urbieta, J. M. (2020). Raman Spectroscopy: A Proposal for Didactic Innovation (IKD Model) In the Experimental Science Subject of the 3rd Year of the Primary Education Degree. Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice, 4(1), 17-21.
Rajawat, J., & Jhingan, G. (2019). Chapter 1 – Mass spectroscopy. In G. Misra (Ed.), Data Processing Handbook for Complex Biological Data Sources (pp. 1-20): Academic Press.
Schmälzlin, E., Moralejo, B., Rutowska, M., Monreal-Ibero, A., Sandin, C., Tarcea, N., Popp, L. and Roth, M.M. (2014). Raman Imaging with a Fiber-Coupled Multichannel Spectrograph. Sensors 14, no. 11: 21968-21980. https://doi.org/10.3390/s141121968
Taber, K. S. (2012). Key concepts in chemistry. In K. S. Taber (Ed.), Teaching Secondary Chemistry (2nd ed., pp. 1-47). London: Hodder Education.
Taber, K. S. (2019). Exploring, imagining, sharing: Early development and education in science. In D. Whitebread, V. Grau, K. Kumpulainen, M. M. McClelland, N. E. Perry, & D. Pino-Pasternak (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Developmental Psychology and Early Childhood Education (pp. 348-364). London: Sage.
Xu, J., Yu, T., Zois, C. E., Cheng, J.-X., Tang, Y., Harris, A. L., & Huang, W. E. (2021). Unveiling Cancer Metabolism through Spontaneous and Coherent Raman Spectroscopy and Stable Isotope Probing. Cancers, 13(7), 1718.
Notes
1 Throughout the paper I would have appreciated an indication of which aspects of the activity were intended purely for the education of the future teachers themselves and which aspects were meant to be modelled for future use in primary classrooms.
2 Is spectroscopy the same as spectrometry? Strictly these terms have different meanings. According to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC, 2019-):
spectroscopy is "the study of physical systems by the electromagnetic radiation with which they interact or that they produce"
whereas
"spectrometry is the measurement of such radiations as a means of obtaining information about the systems and their components."
And
mass spectroscopy is "the study of systems by causing the formation of gaseous ions, with or without fragmentation, which are then characterized by their mass-to-charge ratios and relative abundances."
mass spectrometry is "the branch of science dealing with all aspects of mass spectroscopes and the results obtained with these instruments"
a mass spectrograph is "an instrument in which beams of ions are separated (analysed) according to the quotient mass/charge, and in which the deflection and intensity of the beams are recorded directly on photographic plate or film"
So that has cleared that up!
In practice the terms spectroscopy and spectrometry are often used synonymously, even in relation to mass spectrometry (e.g., Rajawat & Jhingan, 2019) which strictly does not involve the interaction of matter with radiation.
3 Discrete, as this would not apply to the near continuum bands of energy levels found in metals for example.
4 Although I am not convinced that rotational modes of excitation can be detected in a solid crystal.
5 The editor of a research journal is the person who makes publication decisions. However, predatory journals do not always operate like serious research journals – and it may be that sometimes these decisions are made by admin. staff and the editor's name is just used as a sop to respectability. I do not know if that is the case with this journal, but I think by any normal academic standards some very dubious editorial decisions are being made by someone!
I have just read a paper in a research journal which compares the level of chemistry laboratory equipment and 'practice' in two schools in the "west Gojjam Administrative zone" (which according to a quick web-search is in the Amhara Region in Ethiopia). According to Yesgat and Yibeltal (2021),
"From the analysis of Chemistry laboratory equipment availability and laboratory practice in both … secondary school and … secondary school were found in very low level and much far less than the average availability of chemistry laboratory equipment and status of laboratory practice. From the data analysis average chemistry laboratory equipment availability and status of laboratory practice of … secondary school is better than that of Jiga secondary school."
Yesgat and Yibeltal, 2021: abstract [I was tempted to omit the school names in this posting as I was not convinced the schools had been treated reasonably, but the schools are named in the very title of the article]
Now that would seem to be something that could clearly be of interest to teachers, pupils, parents and education administrators in those two particular schools, but it raises the question that can be posed in relation to any research: 'so what?' The findings might be a useful outcome of enquiry in its own context, but what generalisable knowledge does this offer that justifies its place in the research literature? Why should anyone outside of West Gojjam care?
The authors tell us,
"There are two secondary schools (Damot and Jiga) with having different approach of teaching chemistry in practical approach"
Yesgat and Yibeltal, 2021: 96
So, this suggests a possible motivation.
If these two approaches reflect approaches that are common in schools more widely, and
if these two schools can be considered representative of schools that adopt these two approaches, and
if 'Chemistry Laboratory Equipment Availability and Practice' can be considered to be related to (a factor influencing? an effect of?) these different approaches, and
if the study validly and reliably measures 'Chemistry Laboratory Equipment Availability and Practice', and
if substantive differences are found between the schools
then the findings might well be of wider interest. As always in research, the importance we give to findings depends upon a whole logical chain of connections that collectively make an argument.
Spoiler alert!
At the end of the paper, I was none the wiser what these 'different approaches' actually were.
A predatory journal
I have been reading some papers in a journal that I believed, on the basis of its misleading title and website details, was an example of a poor-quality 'predatory journal'. That is, a journal which encourages submissions simply to be able to charge a publication fee (currently $1519, according to the website), without doing the proper job of editorial scrutiny. I wanted to test this initial evaluation by looking at the quality of some of the work published.
Although the journal is called the Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice (not to be confused, even if the publishers would like it to be, with the well-established journal Chemistry Education Research and Practice) only a few of the papers published are actually education studies. One of the articles that IS on an educational topic is called 'Assessment of Chemistry Laboratory Equipment Availability and Practice: A Comparative Study Between Damot and Jiga Secondary Schools' (Yesgat & Yibeltal, 2021).
Comparative education?
Yesgat and Yibeltal imply that their study falls in the field of comparative education. 1 They inform readers that 2,
"One purpose of comparative education is to stimulate critical reflection about our educational system, its success and failures, strengths and weaknesses. This critical reflection facilitates self-evaluation of our work and is the basis for determining appropriate courses of action. Another purpose of comparative education is to expose us to educational innovations and systems that have positive outcomes. Most compartivest states [sic] that comparative education has four main purposes. These are:
To describe educational systems, processes or outcomes
To assist in development of educational institutions and practices
To highlight the relationship between education and society
To establish generalized statements about education that are valid in more than one country
Yesgat & Yibeltal, 2021: 95-96
Comparative education studies look to characterise (national) education systems in relation to their social/cultural contexts (Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
Of course, like any social construct, 'comparative education' is open to interpretation and debate: for example, "that comparative education brings together data about two or more national systems of education, and comparing and contrasting those data" has been characterised as an "a naive and obvious answer to the question of what constitutes comparative education" (Turner, 2019, p.100).
There is then some room for discussion over whether particular research outputs should count as 'comparative education' studies or not. Many comparative education studies do not actually compare two educational systems, but rather report in detail from a single system (making possible subsequent comparisons based across several such studies). These educational systems are usually understood as national systems, although there may be a good case to explore regional differences within a nation if regions have autonomous education systems and these can be understood in terms of broader regional differences.
Yet, studying one aspect of education within one curriculum subject at two schools in one educational educational administrative area of one region of one country cannot be understood as comparative education without doing excessive violence to the notion. This work does not characterise an educational system at national, regional or even local level.
My best assumption is that as the study is comparing something (in this case an aspect of chemistry education in two different schools) the authors feel that makes it 'comparative education', by which account of course any educational experiment (comparing some innovation with some kind of comparison condition) would automatically be a comparative education study. We all make errors sometimes, assuming terms have broader or different meanings than their actual conventional usage – and may indeed continue to misuse a term till someone points this out to us.
This article was published in what claims to be a peer reviewed research journal, so the paper was supposedly evaluated by expert reviewers who would have provided the editor with a report on strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript, and highlighted areas that would need to be addressed before possible publication. Such a reviewer would surely have reported that 'this work is not comparative education, so the paragraph on comparative education should either be removed, or authors should contextualise it to explain why it is relevant to their study'.
The weak links in the chain
A research report makes certain claims that derive from a chain of argument. To be convinced about the conclusions you have to be convinced about all the links in the chain, such as:
sampling (were the right people asked?)
methodology (is the right type of research design used to answer the research question?)
instrumentation (is the data collection instrument valid and reliable?)
analysis (have appropriate analytical techniques been carried out?)
These considerations cannot be averaged: if, for example, a data collection instrument does not measure what it is said to measure, then it does not matter how good the sample, or how careful the analysis, the study is undermined and no convincing logical claims can be built. No matter how skilled I am in using a tape measure, I will not be able to obtain accurate weights with it.
Sampling
The authors report the make up of their sample – all the chemistry teachers in each school (13 in one, 11 in the other), plus ten students from each of grades 9, 10 and 11 in each school. They report that "… 30 natural science students from Damot secondary school have been selected randomly. With the same technique … 30 natural sciences students from Jiga secondary school were selected".
Random selection is useful to know there is no bias in a sample, but it is helpful if the technique for randomisation is briefly reported to assure readers that 'random' is not being used as a synonym for 'arbitrary' and that the technique applied was adequate (Taber, 2013b).
A random selection across a pooled sample is unlikely to lead to equal representation in each subgroup (From Taber, 2013a)
Actually, if 30 students had been chosen at random from the population of students taking natural sciences in one of the schools, it would be extremely unlikely they would be evenly spread, 10 from each year group. Presumably, the authors made random selectionswithin these grade levels (which would be eminently sensible, but is not quite what they report).
To collect data the authors constructed a questionnaire with Likert-type items.
"…questionnaire was used as data collecting instruments. Closed ended questionnaires with 23 items from which 8 items for availability of laboratory equipment and 15 items for laboratory practice were set in the form of "Likert" rating scale with four options (4=strongly agree, 3=agree, 2=disagree and 1=strongly disagree)"
Yesgat & Yibeltal, 2021: 96
These categories were further broken down (Yesgat & Yibeltal, 2021: 96): "8 items of availability of equipment were again sub grouped in to
physical facility (4 items),
chemical availability (2 items), and
laboratory apparatus (2 items)
whereas 15 items of laboratory practice were further categorized as
before actual laboratory (4 items),
during actual laboratory practice (6 items) and
after actual laboratory (5 items)
Internal coherence
So, there were two basic constructs, each broken down into three sub-constructs. This instrument was piloted,
"And to assure the reliability of the questionnaire a pilot study on a [sic] non-sampled teachers and students were conducted and Cronbach's Alpha was applied to measure the coefficient of internal consistency. A reliability coefficient of 0.71 was obtained and considered high enough for the instruments to be used for this research"
Yesgat & Yibeltal, 2021: 96
Running a pilot study can be very useful as it can highlight issues about items. However, although simply asking people to complete a questionnaire might highlight items people could not make any sense of, it may not be as useful as interviewing them about how they understood items to check that respondents understand items in the same way as researchers.
The authors cite the value of Cronbach's alpha to demonstrate their instrument has internal consistency. However, they seem to be quoting the value obtained in the pilot study, where the statistic strictly applies to a particular administration of an instrument (so the value from the main study is more relevant to the results reported).
More problematic, the authors appear to cite a value of alpha from across all 23 items (n.b., the value of alpha tends to increase as the number of items increases, so what is considered an acceptable value needs to allow for the number of items included) when these are actually two distinct scales: 'availability of laboratory equipment' and 'laboratory practice'. Alpha should be quoted separately for each scale – values across distinct scales are not useful (Taber, 2018). 3
Do the items have face validity?
The items in the questionnaire are reported in appendices (pp.102-103), so I have tabulated them here, so readers can consider
(a) whether they feel these items reflect the constructs of 'availability of equipment' and 'laboratory practice';
(b) whether the items are phrased in a clear way for both teachers and students (the authors report "conceptually the same questionnaires with different forms were prepared" (p.101) but if this means different wording fro teachers than students this is not elaborated – teachers were also asked demographic questions about their educational level)); and
(c) whether they are all reasonable things to expect both teachers and students to be able to rate.
'Availability of equipment' items
'Laboratory practice' items
Structured and well- equipped laboratory room
You test the experiments before your work with students
Availability of electric system in laboratory room
You give laboratory manuals to student before practical work
Availability of water system in laboratory room
You group and arrange students before they are coming to laboratory room
Availability of laboratory chemicals are available [sic]
You set up apparatus and arrange chemicals for activities
No interruption due to lack of lab equipment
You follow and supervise students when they perform activities
Isolated bench to each student during laboratory activities
You work with the lab technician during performing activity
Chemicals are arranged in a logical order.
You are interested to perform activities?
Laboratory apparatus are arranged in a logical order
You check appropriate accomplishment of your students' work
Check your students' interpretation, conclusion and recommendations
Give feedbacks to all your students work
Check whether the lab report is individual work or group
There is a time table to teachers to conduct laboratory activities.
Wear safety goggles, eye goggles, and other safety equipment in doing so
Work again if your experiment is failed
Active participant during laboratory activity
Items teachers and students were asked to rate on a four point scale (agree / strongly agree / disagree / strongly disagree)
Perceptions
One obvious limitation of this study is that it relies on reported perceptions.
One way to find out about the availability of laboratory equipment might be to visit teaching laboratories and survey them with an observation schedule – and perhaps even make a photographic record. The questionnaire assumes that teacher and student perceptions are accurate and that honest reports would be given (might teachers have had an interest in offering a particular impression of their work?)
Sometimes researchers are actually interested in impressions (e.g., for some purposes whether a students considers themselves a good chemistry student may be more relevant than an objective assessment), and sometimes researchers have no direct access to a focus of interest and must rely on other people's reports. Here it might be suggested that a survey by questionnaire is not really the best way to, for example, "evaluate laboratory equipment facilities for carrying out practical activities" (p.96).
Findings
The authors describe their main findings as,
"Chemistry laboratory equipment availability in both Damot secondary school and Jiga secondary school were found in very low level and much far less than the average availability of chemistry laboratory equipment. This finding supported by the analysis of one sample t-values and as it indicated the average availability of laboratory equipment are very much less than the test value and the p-value which is less than 0.05 indicating the presence of significant difference between the actual availability of equipment to the expected test value (2.5).
Chemistry laboratory practice in both Damot secondary school and Jiga secondary school were found in very low leveland much far less than the average chemistry laboratory practice. This finding supported by the analysis of one sample t-values and as it indicated the average chemistry laboratory practice are very much less than the test value and the p-value which is less than 0.05 indicating the presence of significant difference between the actual chemistry laboratory practice to the expected test value."
Yesgat & Yibeltal, 2021: 101 (emphasis added)
This is the basis for the claim in the abstract that "From the analysis of Chemistry laboratory equipment availability and laboratory practice in both Damot secondary school and Jiga secondary school were found in very low level and much far less than the average availability of chemistry laboratory equipment and status of laboratory practice."
'The average …': what is the standard?
But this raises a key question – how do the authors know what the "the average availability of chemistry laboratory equipment and status of laboratory practice" is, if they have only used their questionnaire in two schools (which are both found to be below average)?
Yesgat & Yibeltal have run a comparison between the average ratings they get from the two schools on their two scales and the 'average test value' rating of 2.5. As far as I can see, this is not an empirical value at all. It seems the authors have just assumed that if people are asked to use a four point scale – 1, 2, 3, 4 – then the average rating will be…2.5. Of course, that is a completely arbitrary assumption. (Consider the question – 'how much would you like to be beaten and robbed today?': would the average response be likely to be nominal mid-point of a ratings scale?) Perhaps if a much wider survey had been undertaken the actual average rating would have been 1.9 0r 2.7 or …
That is even assuming that 'average' is a meaningful concept here. A four point Likert scale is an ordinal scale ('agree' is always less agreement than 'strongly agree' and more than 'disagree') but not a ratio scale (that is, it cannot be assumed that the perceived 'agreement' gap (i) from 'strongly disagree' to 'disagree' is the same for each respondent and the same as that (ii) from 'disagree' to 'agree' and (iii) from 'agree' to 'strongly agree'). Strictly, Likert scale ratings cannot be averaged (better being presented as bar charts showing frequencies of response) – so although the authors carry out a great deal of analysis, much of this is, strictly, invalid.
So what has been found out from this study?
I would very much like to know what peer reviewers made of this study. Expert reviewers would surely have identified some very serious weaknesses in the study and would have been expected to have recommended some quite major revisions even if they thought it might eventually be publishable in a research journal.
An editor is expected to take on board referee evaluations and ask authors to make such revisions as are needed to persuade the editor the submission is ready for publication. It is the job of the editor of a research journal, supported by the peer reviewers, to
a) ensure work of insufficient quality is not published
b) help authors strengthen their paper to correct errors and address weaknesses
Sometimes this process takes some time, with a number of cycles of revision and review. Here, however, the editor was able to move to a decision to publish in 5 days.
The study reflects a substantive amount of work by the authors. Yet, it is hard to see how this study, at least as reported in this journal, makes a substantive contribution to public knowledge. The study finds that one school has somewhat higher survey ratings on an instrument that has not been fully validated than another school, and is based on a pooling of student and teacher perceptions, and which guesses that both rate lower than a hypothetical 'average' school. The two schools were supposed to represent a "different approach[es] of teaching chemistry in practical approach" – but even if that is the case, the authors have not shared with their readers what these different approaches are meant to be. So, there would be no possibility of generalising from the schools to 'approach[es] of teaching chemistry', even if that was logically justifiable. And comparative education it is not.
This study, at least as published, does not seem to offer useful new knowledge to the chemistry education community that could support teaching practice or further research. Even in the very specific context of the two specific schools it is not clear what can be done with the findings which simply reflect back to the informants what they have told the researchers, without exploring the reasons behind the ratings (how do different teachers and students understand what counts as 'Chemicals are arranged in a logical order') or the values the participants are bringing to the study (is 'Check whether the lab report is individual work or group' meant to imply that it is seen as important to ensure that students work cooperatively or to ensure they work independently or …?)
If there is a problem highlighted here by the "very low levels" (based on a completely arbitrary interpretation of the scales) there is no indication of whether this is due to resourcing of the schools, teacher preparation, levels of technician support, teacher attitudes or pedagogic commitments, timetabling problems, …
This seems to be a study which has highlighted two schools, invited teachers and students to complete a dubious questionnaire, and simply used this to arbitrarily characterise the practical chemistry education in the schools as very poor, without contextualising any challenges or offering any advice on how to address the issues.
Work cited:
Mbozi, E. H. (2017). Comparative Education. Nairobi, Kenya: African Virtual University.
Turner, D. A. (2019). What Is Comparative Education? In A. W. Wiseman (Ed.), Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2018 (Vol. 37, pp. 99-114): Emerald Publishing Limited.
Yesgat, D., & Yibeltal, J. (2021). Assessment of Chemistry Laboratory Equipment Availability and Practice: A Comparative Study Between Damot and Jiga Secondary Schools. Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice, 5(2), 95-103.
Note:
1 'Imply' as Yesgat and Yibeltal do not actually state that they have carried out comparative education. However, if they do not think so, then the paragraph on comparative education in their introduction has no clear relationship with the rest of the study and is not more than a gratuitous reference, like suddenly mentioning Nottingham Forest's European Cup triumphs or noting a preferred flavour of tea.
2 This seemed an intriguing segment of the text as it was largely written in a more sophisticated form of English than the rest of the paper, apart from the odd reference to "Most compartivest [comparative education specialists?] states…" which seemed to stand out from the rest of the segment. Yesgat and Yibeltal do not present this as a quote, but cite a source informing their text (their reference [4] :Joubish, 2009). However, their text is very similar to that in another publication:
Quote from Mbozi, 2017, p.21
Quote from Yesgat and Yibeltal, 2021, pp.95-96
"One purpose of comparative education is to stimulate critical reflection about our educational system, its success and failures, strengths and weaknesses.
"One purpose of comparative education is to stimulate critical reflection about our educational system, its success and failures, strengths and weaknesses.
This critical reflection facilitates self-evaluation of our work and is the basis for determining appropriate courses of action.
This critical reflection facilitates self-evaluation of our work and is the basis for determining appropriate courses of action.
Another purpose of comparative education is to expose us to educational innovations and systems that have positive outcomes.
Another purpose of comparative education is to expose us to educational innovations and systems that have positive outcomes.
The exposure facilitates our adoption of best practices.
Some purposes of comparative education were not covered in your exercise above.
Purposes of comparative education suggested by two authors Noah (1985) and Kidd (1975) are presented below to broaden your understanding of the purposes of comparative education.
Noah, (1985) states that comparative education has four main purposes [4] and these are:
Most compartivest states that comparative education has four main purposes. These are:
1. To describe educational systems, processes or outcomes
• To describe educational systems, processes or outcomes
2. To assist in development of educational institutions and practices
• To assist in development of educational institutions and practices
3. To highlight the relationship between education and society
• To highlight the relationship between education and society
4. To establish generalized statements about education, that are valid in more than one country."
• To establish generalized statements about education that are valid in more than one country"
Comparing text (broken into sentences to aid comparison) from two sources
3 There are more sophisticated techniques which can be used to check whether items do 'cluster' as expected for a particular sample of respondents.
4 As suggested above, researchers can pilot instruments with interviews or 'think aloud' protocols to check if items are understood as intended. Asking assumed experts to read through and check 'face validity' is of itself quite a limited process, but can be a useful initial screen to identify items of dubious relevance.
