How is it possible that [insert known crackpot] has articles published in Peer-Reviewed Journals?

Question

Note: This question is intended to be a generic version of something that gets asked occasionally on this site. I apologize for making it overly-contrived, but it's intended to be a generic template of this style of question. A previous version of this question was locked due to Personally Identifiable Information (PII), so I'm re-posting the question anew.

I was recently reading about [topic] and I kept finding articles by [crackpot], such as [link] [link], and [link]. How the heck can anyone trust this person? They've been disproven as a crank by [notable person] and [notable news source], as well as people on our own website: [link to some other stackexchange site]. People tend to say really nasty things about them:

[crank] is an idiot who only spouts [expletive]. I wouldn't ride the bus with them, much less be a collaborator on academic work.

How on Earth are trusted academic sources such as [high h-index journal] publishing work from this [amusing yet insulting word]?

Answer 1

I'll note that a "crank" in one field might well be an expert in another. Some incredible racists who spout crap are well respected researchers in, say, math or electronics.

I'll also note that someone who has done important work early on can become a crank later in life. The opposite is also true. Road to Damascus, and all that.

Sometimes a perfectly well respected and published researcher will run in to some idée fixe that they fail to shake off with all of their attempts to follow through rejected by their peers.

I'll also note that the incompetence of reviewers at good journals is probably the least likely explanation. And pressure on reviewers, likewise, is hard to manage with blind reviewing.

But, was Poincaré a crank for not recognizing Einstein's work? Or Einstein for turning aether theory on its head?

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Note that neither the question nor this answer address the issue of how crackpot articles get published. That requires a completely different analysis.

Answer 2

Why would it be impossible? Remember, peer review is only supposed to judge the work that is presented. It's not supposed to judge the reputation of the authors, or the credibility of the author's work that wasn't submitted.

Take any of the papers you linked, then cover up the names of the authors and show it to people in those fields. Will they disapprove of the work? If they only start disapproving when they know who the author is, then we have exactly something which double blind peer review is supposed to stop.

The idea that [crank] is a crackpot and therefore everything they've ever written is untrue falls afoul of ad hominen. Beware.

Answer 3

First, I think it is appropriate to describe peer review by paraphrasing Churchill's famous quote on democracy: It is the worst form of publishing scientific results, except for all the alternatives. Peer review has a high failure rate. I've seen results that can be easily demonstrated to be fundamentally flawed, containing elementary errors in math or reasoning, appear in top-rated journals. I fought and sometimes lost battles with referees whose criticism was obviously nonsensical, but they stuck to it, and eventually I just took the coward's way out and submitted the paper to another journal. Still, when you look at what gets published when there is no effective peer review, clearly peer review helps a great deal, its flaws notwithstanding.

Second, there is a continuous spectrum between mainstream science and utter crackpottery. Revolutionary ideas sometimes appear at first in a form that makes you wonder what the author was smoking. Consider this quote from James Joyce, for instance, "Three quarks for Muster Mark! / Sure he has not got much of a bark / And sure any he has it's all beside the mark." It inspired Murray Gell-Mann to use the word "quark" in his proposed mechanism behind the "eightfold way" involving a new substructure for baryons and mesons, with elementary particles carrying fractional charges. A miracle this paper even got published. Yet it now forms the foundations of the SU(3) part of the Standard Model of particle physics, one of the crowning achievements of modern physics overall.

Finally, it is important to note that no crank or crackpot thinks he is a crank or a crackpot. I am regularly approached by strangers offering their, ahem, unconventional ideas on physics. Many have respectable scientific credentials. They have strong faith in the validity of their concepts and often go to great lengths to explain them in detail, "prove" them, provide background, even propose experimental verification. Most of them are genuinely good, well-meaning people, devoted to what they do, who spent a huge amount of time developing their ideas. This, of course, makes it even harder for them to accept the possibility that they were wrong all along, that what they saw as profound insight was just a symptom of their profound ignorance.

Which sometimes makes me wonder: How do I know that I am not one of them? Indeed, how do you know that you are a crackpot? The answer is, you don't. It's like that German Autobahn joke I heard eons ago, about a driver who listens to his car radio warning travelers that a demented driver is going against traffic on the wrong side of the expressway. "One driver?" he asks rhetorically, pointing through his windshield, "There are hundreds of them!"

Answer 4

Just as an added note: if not all research of said crackpot is bad (and as others have said, it most often isn't), if the review process is double blind, then the only person who could reject the paper simply because they knew the person was a crackpot is the initial editor who accepted the paper for the peer review process. And I really don't know if editors make it a habit to look up every single author of received papers (I guess they rather don't).

Answer 5

Jacques Benaventiste published in Nature an article about (broadly speaking) the "memory of water" in Nature. Nature added a warning about "the incredulity of the many referees", but still went for the publication.

Why? Because Benaventiste was a Famous Scientist That Can Be Trusted (TM).

For anyone else, the article would have been rejected with a roar of laughter, but here rationality went on vacation and Nature wanted to be the first one to publish breakthroughs.

So to answer your question: this happens sometimes because of money and connections.

A special mention to Luc Montagnier, whom I admired and was proud of his Nobel Prize, until he went nuts about homeopathy and vaccines (including his defense of Benaventiste's biased results)

Answer 6

There is of course the alternative possibility that the person being pilloried by

[notable person] and [notable news source], as well as people on our own website:

may simply be correct. It's not a priori reasonable that those authority sources deserve more faith than the published researcher on the topic in question.

People tend to say really nasty things about them

And this is sadly often true about those going against the majority view, the existing power structures, groupthink or vested interests (classic examples: Giodarni Bruno, Galilleo, Darwin).

One can receive opprobrium and still be be correct. If the anonymous work has been peer reviewed and stands up on its own merits, then that may in fact be evidence that the criticism received by the

[amusing yet insulting word]

may not be entirely justified. Suppression of dissenting ideas has often slowed new discoveries and scientific progress, so we should be wary of contributing to it in our own modern way.

Answer 7

The original posting had links to articles with multiple authors. Where there are multiple authors, it is possible that the articles are fine and that most of the authors are fine, but a person somehow insinuated his way into being listed as a co-author but in fact did little or no work on the article. This could happen in a variety of ways from just being friends with the authors, being persistent or doing some favor. I assume that journals accept the list of co-authors submitted, and do not investigate each to see if they actually made -- or could have made -- any substantive contribution.

Answer 8

They've been disproven as a crank by [notable person] and [notable news source].

Because some basic logical fallacies are assumed in such a subjective question, most any answer would have to first address that. They are:

• Argument from authority
• Fallacy of incomplete evidence
• Ad hominem

Addressing evidence for or against the specific claim rather than spending time on reputation of the claimant is the only way to determine the claim's veracity.

Answer 9

One possibility is that the crackpot is a close friend of an editor in chief of a peer-reviewed journal. The editor in chief unethically changes the peer-review process so that the paper is accepted even if it is not worthy of publication.

Answer 10

One of the reasons why "crackpots" can get papers published is because a lot of journals allow authors to suggest potential reviewers. Journals should never do this - the editors should be sufficiently familiar with the topic to be able to select appropriate reviewers for themselves (authors should be able to suggest people that shouldn't be selected as reviewers). I feel extremely uncomfortable every time I am asked to suggest reviewers for my papers, but happily this is fairly uncommon in my field (machine learning).

I (or at least my fictional alter ego, Gavin Cawley) was involved in a case where this led to a comment paper by the journal editors explaining the failure of peer review and the change in the journal's policy (it wasn't the first time this had happened).

Another reason is the lack for academic reward for publishing comments papers, which should be an important element of post-publication peer review or quality control. If people knew their "crackpot" paper would be likely to attract a critical comment, there would be more of an incentive not to do it. I've written a few comments papers and they are a lot of work.

Journals don't seem to do a great deal of checking to see if arguments have been made and refuted before. One of the comments papers was on a study that argued a statistic technique used in a variety of areas in biology was wrong. But of course, it wasn't, the authors just didn't understand it correctly. So I wrote a comment paper, but I have found the authors have published a large number of papers making similar claims in a variety of applications of this technique. Nobody has the energy to refute all of them.

The last reason is that there are a lot of journals these days, so if you get a paper rejected, they can easily be sent somewhere else, and if you test the lottery of peer-review often enough, it will eventually fail. Good authors adapt their papers according to the reviewers suggestions, bad authors just send it off somewhere else with minimal changes.

So there are a couple of practical reasons why it happens.

Some have mentioned Galileo and Darwin and Einstein. It is important to consider though that Galileos, Darwins and Einsteins are vanishingly rare, but crackpots are near ubiquitous. So if you think you are a Galileo the odds really are not in your favour and it is self-skepticism that stand between you and "going emeritus".

Answer 11

Something that doesn't seem to have been mentioned here is that the paper could just have been poorly written, and have enough buzz words from complicated enough fields to intimidate the reviewer. And possibly the reviewers might be junior enough that they aren't confident in their reviewing skills yet or senior enough that they only skim through the papers and fill in gaps with something reasonable rather than what is in the paper.

The first paper that I happened to review was one of these papers, on a complicated field and poorly written so it was hard to assess what the authors had done or were saying. Reading through the appendix made me notice they had defined variable A based on variable B and variable B on variable A in their algorithm. I checked a previously published paper of theirs that they referenced and found the same thing so rejected the paper on writing and this inconsistency (or I think I gave the benefit of the doubt and said resubmit with major corrections). I suspect the first paper was published even with this issue due to it being difficult and intimidating to read the original paper just as it was the one I was reviewing.

But I could easily see the temptation to just let it go through if you feel you couldn't understand the paper and felt you'd bitten off a bit more than you could chew. Alternatively you have the good reviewers decide it isn't worth the time and say they can't review it after accepting (because they know it isn't worth the time) and then if it happens to go to those who are more likely to just rubber stamp due to being intimidated and inexperienced, meaning these kinds of papers could slip through. This is part of the reason I consider it completely valid to go after the clarity of the work when reviewing work, and therefore try to make my own work clear and will make edits if a reviewer misunderstands work I'm a part of.

Answer 12

Among other things, based on observation, sometimes an element of the crank-ery is an exorbitant self-confidence and enthusiasm for self-promotion... even, or perhaps especially, in the face of negative professional feedback.

I can easily visualize personally timid expert people getting worn down by the importunings of a crank they misguidedly tried to help.

I have a little more difficulty visualizing serious journals getting similarly worn down, but it's conceivable to me that it could happen through various event-sequences. "Being pushy" does have its rewards...?!?

I think the relevant dynamic here is that "the crank" "has nothing to lose", and subliminally realizes this, and thus has a much different context in which they operate. The established professionals and journals do "have something to lose", but apart from inhibiting endorsing/publishing doubtful things, there is also a strong social/moral disincentive to be toooooo negative to enthusiastic amateurs, etc. This dynamic is used by con artists more generally, I gather. Playing on the tendency of people to "be nice".

Answer 13

There was this one guy called Galileo Galilei who was considered a crackpot, and a dangerous one, by all the experts at the time he was alive.

He was later proven to be correct, but there are still people believing the erstwhile experts to this day.

He eventually got published, despite being considered a crackpot...

Answer 14

Others have made valid points here, but there is one that seems to be missing. Or, at the least, talked around. And that is the logical fallacy you are engaging in here.

One should never, ever, ever judge a factual, or logical argument based on the person making it. Merit alone is all that matters in the world of knowledge. That is known as the Ad Hominem logical fallacy. All other reasons above are valid. But to those I'd like to add that even an idiot can be correct. Hell, you've heard the saying that a broken watch is correct twice a day.

To put it another way, if a mentally handicapped person (once regarded retarded) were to tell you the sky was blue, would suddenly doubt a lifetime's experience? If a known idiot told you that 2 + 2 equaled four would you assume it equaled 6?

No, of course you wouldn't. Because all that matters are the facts.

And this goes the other way as well. Just as it is a logical fallacy to assume anything a crackpot says is wrong, so too is it a fallacy to assume anything a respected researcher says is correct.

We see this in politics all the time. And it goes beyond simply ignoring anything a Democrat or Republican says simply because they are a Democrat or Republican. It goes beyond ignoring Fox news or MSNBC. Both sides love to hurl names at each other, negatively charged descriptors, very much along the lines of the one you employed: crackpot. But to that they add Nazi, racist, rapist, heartless, supporter of big business etc. etc. etc. All that should matter are the details, ironically the very thing many politicians would die before giving you.

Nor can we assume that, just because someone has a high degree they will be correct. The tobacco companies proved that one conclusively. Sadly, I see this form of the Ad Hominem fallacy the most. The entire world seems to suffer from Wizard of Oz syndrome, acting as if it is the attaining of a piece of paper that somehow imparts knowledge. In truth, the paper is meaningless to any discussion. It is the points presented, and only the points presented that should matter here.

We want the facts, and nothing but the facts, so help us god.