Testing editors
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010172
In its issue of March 1965, the British literary journal Critical Quarterly published an article by poet and historian Robert Conquest entitled “Christian symbolism in Lucky Jim.” Lucky Jim was the debut novel by Conquest’s friend Kingsley Amis. Published in 1954, Lucky Jim follows the travails of Jim Dixon, a young and disillusioned historian at the University of Swansea. The novel is bawdy, satirical, farcical, and—as far as I recall—quite devoid of Christian symbolism.
That Conquest’s article is a spoof might be apparent from its opening. After establishing an appropriately high-brow tone in the first paragraph, Conquest goes on to cite imaginary critical studies that are simultaneously plausible and silly:
At one time the attention of critics was directed in the main to the work of an overtly symbolic nature. In recent years, however, we have come to see more clearly than was originally the case that writing which at a superficial level may appear to be simple or “realist” in fact provides equally valuable material for critical research.
That Lucky Jim is essentially a symbolic novel is now, of course, no longer disputed. Interesting work has already been done on its various levels of effect. I need only mention Professor Brezé’s Le Saveur du Néant: Essence et Existence en “Jim-la-chance” (Paris 1962); Dr. James Conrad’s Amis and Ariosto (Leeds 1959); Dr. Uruspiyev’s “Shtastlivetsat Dzhim” ot gledishteto na Marksisticheskyat Dialektik (Sofia 1956); Mrs. Joyce Hackensmith’s The Phallus Theme in Early Amis (Concord 1957) . . .
I have been unable to discover whether the editors of Critical Quarterly were fooled by Conquest’s joke or whether they colluded with him to produce it. But some readers evidently did not see the humor. The editors received so many earnest responses to the article that they had to own up to the spoof in the next issue.
By now, I expect you might be recalling another, more recent spoof. In 1994 physicist Alan Sokal sent a deliberately nonsensical article about gravity to the editors of Social Text. The article appeared after cursory editing, confirming what Sokal had intended to prove: That the treatment of science in Social Text and some other journals of social and cultural criticism is both trivial in its content and obtuse in its expression. He announced his hoax in a famous article in the magazine Lingua Franca.
Math paper retracted because it “contains no scientific content”
Presumably, the editors of scientific journals are rarely the targets of hoaxes. Even so, editors must be vigilant for articles that contain concocted data, stolen ideas, or bad science. Earlier this week, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky of the blog Retraction Watch posted about a paper that was retracted by the journal Computers and Mathematics with Applications because it lacked scientific content.
Clues to the paper’s worthlessness are less subtle than Conquest’s fake references. Its one-sentence abstract reads: “In this study, a computer application was used to solve a mathematical problem.” The second author’s email address is ohm@budweiser.com. And the paper’s main text contains just 348 words. “How on Earth does this stuff get past editors, peer reviewers, and publication staffs?” asked Retraction Watch’s Oransky, “And how did it remain in print for two years?”
Academic publishers, especially commercial ones, are under pressure because of the prices they charge for publishing research that, in some cases, has been funded by taxpayers. Taxpayers, say the critics, ought to have free access to what they’ve already paid for. Publishers counter by arguing that editing adds value to research papers and is correspondingly costly.
That argument is undermined by sloppy or barely existent editing. Ironically, the publisher whose pricing policies have attracted the most criticism and have even provoked a boycott, Elsevier, is responsible for Computers and Mathematics with Applications.
Translated from the French, the title is “The taste of nothingness: essence and existence in Lucky Jim.” Translated from the Bulgarian, the title is Lucky Jim from the standpoint of Marxist dialectic.”