BREAKING. Sokal cubed: Is this the biggest academic publishing scandal of all time?

Photo by Julia Koblitz on Unsplash

And they tell us to ‘trust the science’. While mulling over why the publisher of my latest medical journal article would publish such a low-quality response piece I just may have stumbled onto the biggest academic publishing scandal of all time. Hundreds of articles published, thousands even, in proper scientific and medical journals, in mere months. Remember the Sokal affair? This is bigger. Remember Sokal squared? This is bigger. We all had a good laugh at the eventually retracted ‘penis as a social construct’ article and the ‘get me off your fucking mailing list’ article, but this is bigger.

I recently published the last article in an unofficial series of 4 articles in Wiley’s Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. This research got me invited to DC to discuss, even for the US Senate, and was lauded by doctors, scientists, academics, politicians, etc. The topic isn’t so relevant here, but if you are keen I’ve prepared a summary here (do not read it if you would be upset about research indicating that the COVID-19 vaccines’ effectiveness and safety have been exaggerated in the clinical trials and observational studies). What is relevant is that today I discovered that a response to this article was published. Rubbing my hands in anticipation, I prepared myself to either bask in the glory of some expert agreeing with me, or to gleefully end some man’s entire career (relax, it’s a meme).

But the response piece was utter garbage, not really worth acknowledging with another response piece. Not just saying that because they didn’t agree 100% with everything I said. Read it for yourself, here. Before the red-faced editors take it down. It was written by nobodies, from places you’ve never heard of, in countries not known for their academic rigour. Laos. India. Nigeria. Before you cry ‘racist’, and you know you want to, I am a Person of Colour, with East Asian, South Asian, and African heritage (among others). It lacked references. It accused me of doing and not doing irrelevant things, that they ironically did/didn’t do themselves. Best of all, the second half of the essay was a carbon copy of the first half. I couldn’t believe this trash was published. Were the new editors of JECP so desperate to placate Big Pharma that they would so cheaply and hastily go after the articles accepted by the previous editor? After emailing the editors and ripping them a new one, explaining that whatever action is taken here (retraction, granting the right of response, ignoring me altogether), they’ve just embarrassed everyone involved, including myself (University of Sydney) and BMJ editor Peter Doshi (University of Maryland), who also published in the unofficial series. Some of our best work was just published by a journal that seems to have been taken in by some - possibly AI - scam.

Anyway, after I calmed down I decided to so some intense investigating. And by that I mean I hopped onto a search engine, typed in the first author’s name, and clicked on the first link that came up. Literally the first damn link. The Researchgate page for Hinpetch Daungsupawong revealed 93 publications, in proper journals such as Wolters Kluwer’s International Journal of Surgery, Springer’s European Archives of Paediatric Dentistry, and Taylor & Francis’ Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics. This guy/girl/two-spirit pansexual/thing/bot is clearly a heavy hitter, being an expert in all fields of Health, and publishing all this in… about 6 months!

Their co-author Viroj Wiwanitkit is a modern day Albert Einstein, with a whopping 813 publications in about 12 months. Wiwanitkit is buddies with one Amnuay Kleebayoon, who has something like 227 publications in 12 months. And Wiwanitkit has a lot of buddies. This is looking like thousands of publications in proper scientific and medical journals, published by major academic publishers. Trust the science! And if you didn’t realise it by now, the publications are shit. Like they were spat out by some cheap AI software that, if producing photos, would show us a woman with a really pretty face, and 14 fingers. Why are proper medical journals publishing such utter garbage, even when it has been known for years that there are authors aiming to publish large quantities of worthless articles? And especially when they make people like me, who IMHO do good research (duh), jump through all sorts of hoops (like saying, “I don’t know what’s causing all these excess deaths, not saying it’s the jab, correlation isn’t causation, after all…”) to have a hope of getting published?

I don’t know where we go from here. Send this to all the news outlets and academics you know for a start. Academic publishers and editors need to know to watch out for this stuff. And the people need to know that they can’t always trust something just because it was published in a fancy peer-reviewed journal, by people with MD in their list of titles. Some people will probably get fired over this. It’s sad, but at least they’d be fired for incompetence. I was fired, and silenced, for nothing. Well, for practicing bodily autonomy and doing good science. This whole situation sucks, as I and the people I respect publish in the journals. We rely on the journals. And the results of the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials were also published in the journals. Maybe we’re all doomed. A topic for another day…

Okay then.

Extra: The editors of JECP have not yet responded to me.

Update 09/07/2024: While I had to defend my article/s, justice was pretty much done in the end. The horrible little response article was retracted. And major academic publisher Wiley has taken a huge hit to their reputation. Source.