Peer Review

White Coat Crime and Other Dishonesty in Academia

John Wakefield and Prof John Walker-Smith were struck-off the medical register and can no longer call themselves doctors. They were struck off for failing to adhere to research ethics. Their failings were in the area of honesty, not science.

Failure to declare a conflict of interest

Wakefield had a conflict of interest in the form of financial interests in the outcome of the research he was funded to conduct, because he had been paid to prepare evidence for solicitors who intended to instigate legal action against vaccine manufacturers by alleging that MMR caused autism in children.

For the same reason, highly respected publishing houses (such as Taylor and Francis for example who publish their peer review rules for all their journal editors in their author's charter) ardently insist in their charter and other published guidance for their editors that anyone who agrees to peer review a paper in any discipline (including criminology) must declare a conflict of interest. Further, they insist that the process must be one of unbiased and blind review (the paper must be rendered anonymous). This is because reviewers are accepting the power to recommend whether a paper is accepted or rejected and so personal bias must be minimized in the interests of objectivity and honesty.

The progression of veracious human knowledge is dependent, therefore, upon objective peer review. Whereas, bent peer reviews are far more likely to hide the truth, which in turn impedes human progress and restricts all kinds of improvement in our lives while allowing complete claptrap to influence our thinking, teaching, research and decision making.

What might such a conflict of interest amount to in the peer review process of an academic paper submitted to a scholarly journal?

1. The paper directly confirms that their own past research is correct, naming the reviewer as right and their critics wrong.
2. The paper directly establishes that the reviewer made serious errors or spurious claims in their own earlier research - perhaps even naming the reviewer.
3. The reviewer has a financial or major professional reputation/career at stake (one way or the other) in the conclusions reached by the paper - particularly if they are named in it.
4. The reviewer knows who the author of a paper is, even though the process is meant to be a blind (or even double-blind) peer review.
5. The reviewer is a member of the editorial team of the journal in question (so knows who the author is), and has doubly undermined the peer review process by sneakily recruiting a second clearly biased reviewer with a known and undeclared conflict of interest in order to orchestrate the rejection of a paper by bogus peer review.
6. Finally, the worst kind of, hardly imaginable, scenario would be the same as in 5 above, but the editorial team reviewer would also have an undeclared conflict of interest in the conclusion reached by the paper.

A recent review of the peer review process was conducted by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. Their review was concerned with the natural sciences only, but its findings will most certainly be of interest to criminologists concerned with the neglected area of white coat crime and the study of professional deviance committed by editorial teams and peer reviewers within their own field of study.

If you feel that you have been subject to a bent peer review of any kind (from any academic discipline or area) then we would like to hear from you – either by way of the comments section for this post (anonymously or not – it’s up to you) or else you can email us at bentsociety@hotmail.co.uk or crimescience@hotmail.com


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