To the Editor:
“Then they came for me”: To me as the editor of one of the papers successfully published by the so-called “Sokal Squared” hoaxers, this is the lesson we all as scholars should take away from this purposeful deception. Because of the hoaxers’ complete lack of integrity, they were able to abuse the editorial processing of a paper alleging research based on a fabricated data collection.
As the editor of Sex Roles, I rejected one of their submissions outright whereas I sent their subsequently submitted ethnography of “breastaurants” out for review to three well-established experts: an expert on masculinity research and qualitative research methods, a researcher who had done complementary work with women servers, and a second methods expert.
Across all three reviewers, central concerns were raised about the “trustworthiness” of their data. We then specified exactly how the authors might address this concern by sharing model published papers and by requesting conventional details appropriate to their purported ethnographic methods. We assumed the integrity of the authors and in essence provided them with a roadmap for bringing their paper up to standards. After three rounds of intensive revisions by the authors and careful editorial checking, the paper was accepted for publication. Indeed, I am so confident in its editorial processing that I am open to sharing the details of it (to the extent possible without unmasking the paper’s good-faith reviewers).
Did the authors scam the system? Obviously they did. But they did so by being so maliciously deceitful that I contend all research involving original data collection is made vulnerable. Although qualitative work (and particularly ethnography) may seem the most vulnerable, what is to stop a researcher from fabricating or intentionally modifying quantitative data and/or their analyses, even if they agree to post their dataset?
All professionals rely on the truthfulness of their colleagues to make informed decisions ranging from what research to publish to what medical treatment plans to offer patients. A handful of hoax papers will not likely change the course of an academic field, but to pay attention to, support, and even celebrate such fraudulence undermines the importance of evidence-based scholarship. By not treating these perpetrators now as the frauds they admit to be, then when ideologues come for all of us in academe, there may indeed be no one left to speak for us.
Janice D. Yoder, Ph.D.
Editor, Sex Roles
(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, not necessarily Sex Roles or its publisher.)
