Bogus papers in bona fide science journals?

Continuing the discussion from Frontline: United States of Conspiracy:

I saw that paper too, a friend posted it on Facebook. It’s blatantly obvious that it’s patent nonsense (you just have to know the difference between millimetres and nanometres to see that, it doesn’t even take any knowledge in biology and genetics) but what puzzles me is how on earth it got published in a bona fide scientific journal.

I’m aware of predatory journals, and I’m also aware that some people resort to all sorts of tricks to get their research published in peer reviewed journals (one example being a YEC research paper on genetics that got published in a journal about scalable computing by focusing on the software architecture of their flaky DNA comparison tool) but this journal appears to be genuine (though it seems to have a low impact factor) and the subject seems on-topic. So what’s going on here? How did something so obviously cranky get past peer review?

Good question, there is no excuse for such blatant - just in the title - deluded pseudoscientific dross getting in any science journal. I’ll complain to the journal.

Ah, it’s been retracted as it subverted peer review.

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There are some journals with impressive sounding names that are where bad papers go to die, also. And as I understand it, there are online journals with no criteria for inclusion of articles at all. Truthfully, in narrow fields, I doubt whether outsiders have any idea as to what the prominent journals are.

With Coronavirus, the urgency has been to get the information out as quickly as possible, so even the best journals are at risk of having articles fail as better data is gathered.

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And everybody is writing papers on covid-19 now, whether they have any background in the field or not. The flood of papers, many of them crappy, is daunting.

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