Library Home: Evaluating Sources: Fraud or Flawed?

Peer Review process varies widely. In general, the faster the review, the less trustworthy.

Unfortunately, there are fake publishers and organizations that try to mimic the best journals....like camouflaged insect pests.

Be wary of "too good to be true" FAST peer review and FAST publication for a FEE. They get the fee, and usually publish anything that gets submitted (This ia a variation of Vanity Publishing). Sometimes they even create an "association" that publishes journals.

If you select "Peer-reviewed" from a Library Database, you will get more trustworthy results

Beall's List of suspected Predatory Journals and Publishers

Three Types of Errors in Research

Excerpt from "Confirmation Bias, Ethics, and Mistakes in Forensics"

1. Ethics violation
A. Fabricated prints
B. Dry benching (estimating results without completing an examination)
C. Intentional erroneous results
D. Covering up mistakes

2. Honest errors
A. Lack of training and mentoring
B. Feeling pressure to complete work or being overwhelmed with work
C. Administrative errors or complacency

3. Biased oversight

SCIENTISTS NOT ALWAYS RELIABLE Good reason to get multiple sources of information.

Experimenter gender and replicability in science: analysis should test for experimenter gender effects
According to this paper, there is ample evidence, accumulated over decades of exploration, demonstrating that the gender of an experimenter has significant effects on a range of variables.
Frontiersin.org peer-review is variable. Must judge papers on author by author case.
Not as strict as Nature or Science, but has published many authoritative and accurate articles.
Metaresearchers study how research is done—and why it goes wrong
By Martin Enserink Sep. 21, 2018 , 12:05 PM
A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect
Retraction Watch
When a published paper is discredited, it is usually retracted. This organization tracks retractions as a window into the scientific process.