Notes from a pandemic: An important academic hoax

Over the weekend, I added two new hoax papers to my Stinging the Predators anthology. Having spent a few years curating this thing (it’s one of those little side projects that never seems to end), I have often thought while putting in a new entry, “Another sting paper to show there are bad journals? That’s been done. Do more than your predecessors.”

One of the new entries is interesting because it does more than other stings, and vindicates a lot of previous stings in the process.

The story is laid out in some detail by Michaël, a.k.a. MimiRyudo, on his blog. (If your French is not up to snuff, Google Translate may help.) Here is a very short synopsis.

Certain French politicians and physicians promoted the suggestion that there was a drug that could treat COVID-19. The evidence kept rolling in that this suggestion was not a very good one. But several of the drug enthusiasts wrote a paper about the matter and published it in the Asian Journal of Medicine and Health.

Let me pause here before I continue the narrative. This is the first reason this hoax is interesting, because it is a reaction to exactly the sort of scenario that previous hoaxers have said they were trying to warn us about: someone using a low quality journal to push out dubious information that could have serious public health risks. Global pandemic, politicians writing journal articles, journalists jumping on it and publicizing it, because hey, one of the authors is a nationally recognized person.

(I had always considered this scenario unlikely. But then, 2020 is unlikely in many ways. )

The authors of this paper actually compared the review process at Asian Journal of Medicine and Health to The Lancet. For anyone remotely familiar with medical research, this is a jaw drop claim of false equivalence.

A group of people on Twitter decide to prove that Asian Journal of Medicine and Health is not like The Lancet and that the former will take literally anything. So they write a paper that is as absurd and ridiculous as they can be at every possible turn.

Their absurd paper is, of course, published.

This is the second reason this hoax is interesting. It’s not a generic “some journals take anything” hoax. It’s a hoax with a very clear target: the Asian Journal of Medicine and Health – which published a paper being used to fuel a potentially dangerous drug narrative during a public health crisis – can’t be trusted.

That specificity is what, I think, makes this hoax valuable in a way previous hoaxes of poor journals were not. It’s not a hand-waving hypothetical warning. It’s a specific response of actions that could pose real risk to real people. It undercuts the original paper in a way that mere criticism would not.

External links

Le meilleur article de tous les temps (loosely, "The best paper of all time")

Stinging the Predators