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Why a Harvard scientist wrote a bogus paper and submitted it for publication

There is a little problem with the research John Bohannon conducted into a cancer drug he extracted from a kind of lichen. He made it up. The bigger problem is that many scientific journals accepted the bogus research as if it were true....
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The Current25:34Why a Harvard scientist wrote a bogus paper and submitted it for publication - Oct 11, 2013
There is a little problem with the research John Bohannon conducted into a cancer drug he extracted from a kind of lichen. He made it up. The bigger problem is that many scientific journals accepted the bogus research as if it were true.


A Harvard scientist found dozens and dozens of scientific journals were happy to accept his non-scientific junk ... for a fee.

Dear Editor, Please find attached our submission to the British journal of pharmaceutical research. Sincerely, Cordy Engo of the Igitay Health College in Abijan Ivory Coast

The recipient of that letter did not accept the submission. But more than 300 scientific journals received a similar email -- a request to publish a groundbreaking study about an anti-cancer drug.

That study made headlines. Not because of its promise...But because it was a fake. The study is the work of John Bohannon, a biologist and science journalist based at Harvard University.

He wanted to test if the scientific journals that charge a fee to publish articles had adequate peer review to weed out shoddy science. Of the 300 or so journals he approached... only 40 per cent rejected the paper.

• Interactive Map: Places John submitted his bogus article -- SciComm

John Bohannon was in Cambridge, Massachusetts to talk about his scientific sting. He wrote an article about his findings, which appears in the journal Science.

We contacted the four Canadian publications that accepted the fake paper, including the one John mentioned, the International Journal of Herbs and Medicinal Plants. It told us earlier this week that they'd send a response. When we receive it, we'll post it online.

The Journal of Nephrology and Renal Transplantation was the only Canadian publication to send a statement, which reads in part:

"We rely on the feedback from peer reviewers to accept or reject a paper. Unfortunately, peer review has its flaws and such incidents are not avoidable if not identified by the reviewers. We would like to make clear that this paper was not published by the Journal of Nephrology and Renal Transplantation."

John Bohannon says only one journal flagged his paper's ethical and research flaws. And that journal is PLOS ONE... the biggest journal owned by a non-profit publisher of open-access journals called the Public Library of Science. It rejected the paper for its lack of scientific quality.

Michael Eisen is a professor of molecular and cell biology at University of California, Berkeley and he co-founded the Public Library of Science - a non-profit publisher of open access journals. He was in Berkeley.

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This segment was produced by The Current's Shannon Higgins and Josh Bloch.

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