The Perils of Academic Dishonesty

Excerpt

In our last editorial (Lederman & Lederman, 2015) we provided the annual publication statistics for the Journal of Science Teacher Education (JSTE) and we outlined the peer review process utilized by the journal. In addition, we assured readers that their manuscripts would be reviewed as fairly and as unbiased as possible. That is, our Associate Editors, Editorial Review Board, and we make a concerted effort to insure that professional biases do not impact the review of manuscripts. However, there appears to be an emerging trend/awareness of ways in which the peer review process can be circumvented to the detriment of the academic community. Most recently, Science magazine retracted another published article (LaCour & Green, 2014) for reasons related to misrepresented or fictitious data. This particular article was related to gay equality, but there is a growing list of scientific papers retracted from other prestigious science journals (e.g., Lancet, Nature) on topics ranging from vaccines and autism, stem cell production, heart research, physics discoveries at Bell Labs, and cognition research (Roston, 2015). These unfortunate situations could be blamed on “cracks” in the peer review process, but how realistic is this claim? Reviewers of manuscripts are not privy to the raw data from investigations, but rather summarized or aggregated data sets. And, if authors were required to submit raw data, virtually no reviewers would have the time to carefully sift through the data and re-analyze it. Such a process would not only tax the time of volunteer reviewers, but also exorbitantly increase the already extensive turnaround time from submission to publication. Many science journals are published on a weekly basis, but imagine what would happen to the turnaround time for educational research, which is typically published in journals that are published monthly or less frequently. …