Tomatoes roaming the fields: another embarrassing paper for MDPI
13 comments
·January 19, 2025verdverm
Springer has had issues for a long time. During my PhD, within the research field of Genetic Programming, there is an author who only published to Springer. This author always had the best results in the field. Reliably, when ever some new results would come out, this person would publish to Springer with better results. Vague methods, no reproducibility. So when I went and built a non-GP algorithm and improve the state-of-art by orders of magnitude, low and behold this person was able to improve upon my results. It seems as though there is no actual editorial activity over there at all
When Docker first came out, one of my advisors and I pondered how we might use it to aid in the reproducibility crisis in academic research. I don't think anything ever came of it, certainly the situation seems to have deteriorated since. There are a lot of good researchers out there, but I fear many of them do the same dealing with the dumb system we find in large bureaucracies in the private sector
In some ways it is worse. Reviewers are expected to put in free labor for the journals and then we have to either put our own work behind a paywall or "pay for the privilege" to have it be open access.
Perhaps we should take a stab at building open-review features, reviewers, journals, reproducibility, and transparency around Arxiv. They have a survey banner on the site right now, lets suggest some ideas! (edit: sadly, the survey is quite limited and irrelevant to improving the practice of research)
PaulHoule
Back in the late 2000s I had my second encounter with the FBI (my first was talked about in another comment I wrote earlier today) I was hanging out with the world's leading web spammers and in those circles the 'replace words with synonyms' method was known but considered too low quality for web spam. Works for scientific literature though, where standards are lower.
sva_
I was looking for such 'tortured phrases' on Google scholar recently and also found an article from MDPI:
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/4/1792
> There is a requirement to assist various types of solar radiation and wind speed measurement and predictions, such as the iterative approach, counterfeit consciousness method, and so on.
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feoren
Can anyone offer some insight as to why that junk paper was submitted in the first place? Are the authors trying to farm reputation somehow? To what end, and does it actually work? Are the authors even real people? What's their goal?
jpeloquin
Well, the authors' byline says they're from Northeastern University, Shenyang 110169, China and Faculty of Management and Economics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China. I've heard that Chinese universities sometimes have explicit publication quotas or offer cash bonuses for publications. Having never worked at a university in China, I cannot personally verify that though.
MDPI also spams anyone it thinks might be willing to submit a paper or serve as an editor, and does not seem to care much about the quality of the submissions it receives.
luma
Same as every other academic: publish or perish. Collect more citations and note them in your next grant proposal.
The modern academy is fucked, the whole system is being gamed and very little is being done about the mess created. The author here is fighting a tough battle and I wish them continued success.
porcoda
Publication metrics. This has been a problem for at least the last few decades, especially when it comes to papers from some parts of the world. Before the current breed of low quality journals, we saw this happening with conferences that were often branded with professional societies like IEEE, but if you looked carefully it would be “IEEE Section of (random place in Asia)” and not a conference sanctioned by IEEE itself. Those used to be full of garbage plagiarized papers and junk. I think the idea is that nobody usually reads the papers when they make a decision based on publication metrics, so pumping a CV with garbage often goes unnoticed. It’s not a wise practice: in many places getting caught doing this would be a career ender.
mondobe
I hope the incoming administration takes "tomato government assistance" seriously. A lot of my closest tomato friends have fallen on hard times.
belinder
Who would have thought that tomatoes are creatures that can be herded by a shepherd.
Fraud is on the rise everywhere it seems. Not sure what can be done to stop it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI
> MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) is a publisher of open-access scientific journals.
I first thought it was a criticism on the MDPI Android resource resolution but oh boy was I wrong.