Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Why I Remain Unimpressed by Getting Published by Reputable Academic Presses

A Rutgers assistant prof gets published by the Oxford University Press with a claim that Hamilton was a "living constitutionalist," a judicial philosophy not developed for another 150 years.


On a related note, hot off the Duke University Press:


They Look Back

The Animalization and Self-Articulation of Trans Genitalia




Duke University Press is "peer-reviewed," whatever that means in this day and age. One academic fraud gives another the thumbs up.

Buyer beware. Bigly.

2 comments:

Lex Lata said...

1. I'd agree that peer review is not a perfect guarantor of accuracy or rigor, especially in certain fields. Alan Sokal's ability to get literal nonsense published in an academic journal comes to mind (as well as other more recent events). But some quantity of peer review tends, on the whole, to produce better scholarship than none whatsoever.

2. You might want to edit the first line, Tom. Oxford is publishing Shankman's Original Intents. Stone's publisher is Liveright, part of W.W. Norton.

Tom Van Dyke said...

Thank you kindly. Fixed.

As for peer review, the system is corrupt. reproducibility is a huge problem in the hard sciences

http://retractionwatch.com/2014/03/03/nobel-prize-winner-calls-peer-review-very-distorted-completely-corrupt-and-simply-a-regression-to-the-mean/

and in the soft ones, there is next to zero falsifiability, meaning any clown can spout any ideological bullshit and get a fellow bullshitter to peer-approve it.