A few weeks ago I have asked a question that I believe is about a major challenge that academia faces today and will increasingly face in the future (I deleted it since then because of the reactions it got):
How can we fight junk science? [closed]
The question was closed as unclear but I think that question is pretty clear and there are some answer-worthy comments with very practical points.
Is there a political correctness component or something else that I'm missing?
I think there might well be a good question in there, but right now, it's way too broad and poorly defined. Some issues that I see are:
The definition of the focus is very broad:
"junk science I mean pseudo-science (i.e. work done with flawed or frivolous methodology), deliberately faked results, and generally very low quality research"
The issue that I have here is that pseudo-science, fraud, and general boring crap appear to arise in different ways, and attempting to address them all together is extremely complex.
The motivation of the question is unclear. Are you more concerned about punishing "bad scientists" or being able to find what you're looking for or about some sort of general societal collapse?
I would thus suggest this might be best addressed not as a single question, but as a collection of more focused questions that tease out particular aspects of the more general topic that are narrow enough to possibly be answerable.
Because it's so broad and vague. It could mean one, some or all of sixty things:
Your question also mutates. You start by saying a) "junk journals and articles... pompous titles, pay-to-publish [etc.]" but then you say b) "by junk science I mean pseudo-science (i.e. work done with flawed or frivolous methodology), deliberately faked results, and generally very low quality research".
These are each very different things, some of which have no answers, some of which have clear well-known answers. There will always be bad or VLQ research. Peer-review can prevent people publishing e.g. bad physics in recognized physics journals, but it totally can't prevent people splintering off and forming a new field/journal/conference. Grant applications are another thing too, and each grant source has different criteria, levels of rigor, punishment for bad behavior (or lack of). (Peer-review is not perfect either: it's slow, political, fallible and ridden with cliques.)
"Deliberately faked results" constitutes academic fraud, but it's comparatively rare, and I submit to you that many papers simply have no results at all, which is again bad but in a different, passive, way, since it obscures scientific method - unless they're review papers, which they're generally not. There is no shortage of such papers, in most fields.
There are also authors who crank out 10+ papers on essentially the exact same finding - would you call that VLQ? Then again, given reject rates and unpredictable backlogs, who can blame them...?
"Pay-to-publish" is again bad in a different way, not per se, but because it sidesteps peer review, disclosure, replicability, standard use of terminology, which are again all cornerstones of scientific method, so it generally results in a tsunami of crap, and cliques who manufacture plausibility by citing each other.
So, you asked at least sixty different and contradictory questions. The tl;dr is clearly we can't prevent someone setting up the Abkhazia Open Institute of Antigravity and spewing out junk, but we can monitor and publicize any misdeeds, and try to limit them getting access to serious funding. But you knew that already. There is no blunt hammer to prevent the rest of the things you list. Wherever there are economic incentives, however slight, people will respond to them...
After reading it, I can tell you exactly why.
According to the article "What questions can't I ask here" in the help menu, there's this powerful quote:
To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …
- .. [four others removed] ..
- your question is just a rant in disguise: “______ sucks, am I right?”
Simply put, your question is a rant in disguise which is specifically on the do-not-ask list.
That's not to say the thing you're ranting about isn't a problem. But the question that is linked here doesn't appear to be a answerable question (at least, not in this venue.)
I think the answer you wrote somewhere else applies here as well:
The voting rules aren't very strict (as opposed to closing for example) but I don't think the fact that a question is hard to answer is a reason to down-vote. A question should "show research effort be useful and clear" to warrant an up-vote but it's also a matter of personal interests.
I don't think that the issue with the questions you mention is that they are "hard" but rather that they look very much like advertisement for your opinions and pet peeves* that you tried too hard to make look like questions.
My guess is that some users doubt that you genuinely think there are possible answers that would fit this site's format but rather hope for extended discussions in comments supporting your opinion.
Sometimes the click-bait works and you gather many votes, sometimes it's too obnoxious and the opinionated undertone triggers down-votes.
*Ok, so you dislike that some people pay to read articles. We get it.
Ps. Many of your other questions are fine in my opinion.
I think that your question on junk science is much more important than the vast majority of questions on this Stack Exchange website. However, my own experience in posting questions and getting >100 of downvotes is that questions pertaining to improving the research system are often not well received.
I wish questions on the research system were posted on a different Stack Exchange.
