Peer Review is Pal Review
Hindawi is an Egyptian publishing house focusing on academic papers and instructional materials. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley is an American multinational publishing company that focuses on the same research materials and instructional documents as Hindawi.
Peer review of research papers involves the assessment and evaluation of works by one or more people with the same or similar competencies as those that performed the research. Peer review is carried out in an effort to improve quality, uphold standards, and often provide certification of accuracy and credibility.
Recently, the two companies have discovered hundreds of research papers that have employed a peer-review ring, in other words, the reviews were performed illegitimately or unjustifiably by people who set up a cartel or syndicate of ineligible or unsuitable reviewers. I link a related article here.
After Hindawi’s Chief Editor raised concerns about certain peer review practices, they began an inspection and analysis. After review, they announced, “Through this investigation, the team highlighted a pattern of irregular and concerning reviewer activity and identified potential ‘bad actors’ that were present across many of these publications.” They then produced a “data-driven investigation which resulted in the identification of further published articles”.
The companies are delaying a list of research papers that will be retracted, but I’m sure some advocate climate change scientists are shaking in their sandals. This brings to mind, the many assessment reports by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), especially at the beginning of their venture, when they promised that only peer-reviewed research and data would enter their communiqués.
In a two-year review of an IPCC Assessment Report, with a team of auditors, Canadian writer, photographer, and feminist Donna Laframboise wrote a book called, “The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert”. In that report, the audit team found 5,587 pieces of non-peer-reviewed literature and the unmitigated and prejudicial involvement of several major environmental groups.
I provide a review of this book by Timothy Hulsey of the University of Kentucky:
· The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert, Donna Laframboise blows the lid off the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
· Instead of being a neutral body evaluating whether there has, in fact, been unprecedented global warming, the IPCC started with the premise that global warming was increasing at an alarming rate. Instead of investigating whether this warming was due to natural temperature cycles related to natural phenomena, human-induced production of a trace atmospheric gas, carbon dioxide, was the cause célèbre from the beginning.
· Instead of convening the world's experts, Laframboise exposes many of the IPCC "scientists" as being young, un-degreed, sometimes unpublished fledglings! She shows abundant examples of true world experts, purposely avoided by the UN IPCC, because they disagreed with the anthropogenic global warming party line.
· Surprisingly, instead of gathering scientists with no preconceived notions of climate change, Donna Laframbroise lays bare the high percentage of IPCC scientists who had been closely associated with and many times employed by the powerful and monied environmental activist groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund, The Environmental Defense Fund, and others. Thus, these IPCC staff were following an agenda. They were "more activist than scientist!"
· She exposes The IPCC as a shoddy organization who didn't even follow what few rules it had, but portrayed itself as the indisputable oracle of impending climate disaster backed by the consensus of "thousands" of the world's best scientists!
· The Delinquent Teenager... is a fascinating unraveling of the world's most powerful voice for redistributing trillions of dollars in the name of the unproven theory of anthropogenic global warming, a theory rapidly losing many of its early proponents.
You can imagine that the shenanigans and climate vandalism continue, but the nonsense is being more cleverly hidden – many used to call peer-reviewed papers in anthropogenic climate change with the term “pal reviewed.”