Don’t cite sources you haven’t read, and don’t trust when people claim to be reporting something from the literature.

Peter Dorman writes: In case you haven’t seen it, check out this recent piece in Rolling Stone. A key paragraph toward the end: Craig Callender, a philosophy professor at the University of California San Diego and president of the Philosophy of Science Association, agrees with that assessment, observing that “the appearance of legitimacy to non-existent journals is like the logical end product of existing trends.” There are already journals, he explains, that accept spurious articles for profit, or biased ghost-written research meant to benefit the industry that produced it. “The ‘swamp’ in scientific publishing is growing,” he says. “Many practices make existing journals [or] articles that aren’t legitimate look legitimate. So the next step to non-existent journals is horrifying but not too surprising.” The one point I [Peter] would add is that the first step to perdition is citing sources you haven’t actually read or at least looked through yourself, relying instead on what other…