Politically Tainted Research

Magic and technology
Voodoo dolls and chants
Electricity
We're making
Weird science
--Oingo Bingo

Interesting piece describing various 'hoax' articles published in academic journals. These articles were submitted by authors seeking to rout out political bias of journal editors. Journal editors, and the editorial review boards that support them, are the gatekeepers who decide what manuscripts get published and which ones get rejected.

The basic proposition of hoax authors is this. If we write our manuscript using all of the politically correct concepts and rhetoric that we know that the editorship prefers, then it does not matter whether the article is grounded in good science or not. Instead, we believe that manuscript will be accepted for publication based on style rather than on substance.

This proposition proved correct. The fields targeted by the hoaxers, such as gender studies, critical race theory, and sociology, offer low hanging fruit for demonstrating the house of cards, from a scientific standpoint, that many of these so-called academic disciplines are based.

However, political bias in the article review process is by no means limited to these fields. While it is usually more subtle, political bias is observable in my disciplines as well. For example, I have been working on a project that explores the impact of regulatory uncertainty on operating decisions. Combing through articles published in various journals that focus on regulation, I frequently encounter innuendoes promoting the altruism of the state and the 'fact' of man-made global warming.

From where I sit, the most concerning example in the piece is the one near the end that involves the rejection of an article by a journal after it was published in that journal. Huh? A math prof from Georgia Tech developed a novel mathematical explanation for the 'greater male variability hypotheses' and submitted a paper to a respectable journal that, after peer review, accepted the paper for publication. Once published, however, academics who were offended by the political implications of the paper subsequently pressured the journal editor to 'unpublish' the piece--and write an apology to journal readership to boot. First hand account of this incident of 'academic activism' can be found here.

This case raises an obvious question. How many papers grounded in good science have been rejected by journals because the authors did not kowtow to the political tastes of the editorship? Worse yet, how many studies were never completed or never converted into manuscripts for similar reasons?

Every paper not published because of conflicts with political orthodoxy impedes progress toward truth through inquiry.