Predatory publishers that pretend to peer-review your papers (but really accept all comers to maximize their profits) lead to sad-but-funny situations like this one: Onion article about a children's menu found on the back of the original copy of the U.S. Constitution cited seriously by scientific article.

It may be entertaining, but it's not good for the literature for it to be cluttered up with this sort of cargo-cult imitation of research, and it's not good for universities and academics (and the students they teach) to be pressured into publishing this sort of junk in order to keep up a pretense of being a research university. (Also, before you say that impact factors will sort these things out, someone on the post I found this on has already commented that this journal's impact factor is pretty high; impact factors are easily manipulated and there's a lot of motivation for doing so.)




Comments:

itman:
2013-03-10T23:52:54Z
Fact is that peer-reviewing, even though, it does some screening does not prevent us form publishing all kinds of bullshit even in good journals with high impact factors. Of course, it is better than nothing, but I am afraid it mostly works due to delaying a publication. When one resubmits and revises the paper many times, quality usually improves. Some people a lot of trust in "peer-reviewed" publications (as if peer-reviewing has magical powers to fix all the errors) . I wouldn't.
None:
2013-03-12T07:24:49Z
Funny, but what about those MathGen papers? -- http://scientificgems.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/oh-dear/
11011110:
2013-03-12T07:30:51Z
I guess they do expose more clearly how bad some of these journals are — at least with a bad human-written paper one could imagine a sloppy reviewer skimming it and not noticing the problem. But the other side of the equation is missing: the bad journals wouldn't exist if there weren't plenty of researchers willing to fill them.
None:
2013-03-12T07:42:52Z
Indeed, although it's hard to criticise academics who probably just want to feed their children. The third side of the polygon is institutions who tolerate or even reward bad or plagiarised papers.
None:
2013-03-12T21:32:11Z
Actually the journal "Food Science and Quality Management" is not included in the ISI database, and does not have a "standard" impact factor. What is quoted on the journal home page is an "IC impact factor" (IndexCopernicus), whose importance is unclear to me.
11011110:
2013-03-12T21:42:19Z
I think the importance is that people who don't know any better will look at it and think "that must mean it's an ok journal". In that respect, is it any different from the ISI ones? I guess one important difference is that ISI takes steps to punish journals that they discover to be manipulating impact factors, and I have no idea whether indexCopernicus does.
None:
2013-03-13T12:31:19Z
A recently paper http://jech.bmj.com/content/60/1/6.full
11011110:
2013-03-13T14:41:48Z
And they published this as a paper? Wow.