One paper, published in a journal called Sex Roles, said the author had conducted a two-year study involving “thematic analysis of table dialogue’’ to uncover the mystery of why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters.
Another, from a journal of feminist geography, parsed “human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at dog parks in Portland, Ore.,’’ while a third paper, published in a journal of feminist social work and titled “Our Struggle Is My Struggle,’’ simply scattered some up-to-date jargon into passages lifted from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.’’
Such offerings may or may not have raised eyebrows among the journals’ limited readerships. But this week, they unleashed a cascade of mockery — along with a torrent of debate about ethics of hoaxes, the state of peer review and the excesses of academia — when they were revealed to be part of an elaborate prank aimed squarely at what the authors labeled “grievance studies.’’
“Something has gone wrong in the university — especially in certain fields within the humanities,’’ the three authors of the fake papers wrote in an article in the online journal Aero explaining what they had done. “Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields.’’
Their project involved 20 papers, produced every two weeks or so, submitted to various journals over nearly a year.
The authors — Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian — said four papers had been published; three had been accepted but not yet published; seven were under review and six had been rejected.
Embarrassed journal editors quickly stamped the word “Retracted’’ across published papers this week, while the hoax drew appreciation from scholars who tend to be skeptical of work focusing on race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of identity.
“Is there any idea so outlandish that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?’’ psychologist and author Steven Pinker tweeted.
But where some saw a healthy unmasking of pernicious nonsense, others saw a sour, nasty rerun of a culture-wars chestnut that proved little more than that you can always fool some of the people some of the time.
“What strikes me about stunts like this is their fundamental meanness,’’ Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, wrote on Twitter. “No attempt to intellectually engage with ideas you disagree with; just trolling for lulz.’’
In a joint telephone interview, Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University, and Lindsay, a writer with a doctorate in math, described themselves as “on the left,’’ and supportive of social justice “in the common parlance.’’
As for accusations of trolling, they said the scholars engaged in “grievance studies’’ were the ones fanning the flames of the culture wars. Their only goal, they said, was to protect the integrity of scholarship, which they suggested was lower in the fields they targeted.
Several of the duped journals have issued statements decrying the hoax. Ann Garry, an interim co-editor of Hypatia, a leading feminist philosophy journal that published the paper “When the Joke’s on You’’ (a feminist critique of “unethical’’ hoaxes, as it happens), said she was “deeply disappointed.’’
Some critics of the exercise noted that of the journals successfully fooled by the articles, only a few, including Hypatia, have significant standing. Most were interdisciplinary journals in highly niche fields, where there is less agreement about acceptable methodologies and the standards of peer review.
The hoaxers, however, noted that even scholarship that is barely read has consequences.
“Seven papers published over seven years,’’ they wrote in Areo, “is frequently claimed to be the number sufficient to earn tenure.’’