Editing Bogdanov affair (section)

==Reflections upon the peer-review system==
During the heyday of this affair, some media coverage cast a negative light on theoretical physics, stating or at least strongly implying that it has become impossible to distinguish a valid paper from a hoax. Overbye's article in ''[[The New York Times]]'' voiced this opinion,<ref name="overbye"/> for example, as did Declan Butler's piece in ''[[Nature (journal)|Nature]].''<ref name="nature"/> Posters on blogs and Usenet used the affair to criticize the present status of [[string theory]]; for the same reason, Peter Woit devoted a chapter of ''[[Not Even Wrong (book)|Not Even Wrong]],'' a book emphatically critical of string theory, to the affair.<ref name="Woit2006" /> On the other hand, George Johnson's report in ''The New York Times'' concludes that physicists have generally decided the papers are "probably just the result of fuzzy thinking, bad writing and journal referees more comfortable with correcting typos than challenging thoughts."<ref name="johnson"/> String theorist Aaron Bergman riposted in a review of ''Not Even Wrong'' that Woit's conclusion
<blockquote>is undermined by a number of important elisions in the telling of the story, the most important of which is that the writings of the Bogdanovs, to the extent that one can make sense of them, ''have almost nothing to do with string theory.'' ... I first learned of the relevant papers in a posting on the internet by Dr. John Baez. Having found a copy of one of the relevant papers available online, I posted that "the referee clearly didn't even glance at it." While the papers were full of rather abstruse prose about a wide variety of technical areas, it was easy to identify outright nonsense in the areas about which I had some expertise. ... A pair of non-string theorists were able to get nonsensical papers generally not about string theory published in journals not generally used by string theorists. This is surely an indictment of something, but its relevance to string theory is marginal at best.<ref>{{cite web |last=Bergman |first=Aaron |date=2006-08-19 | url=http://zippy.ph.utexas.edu/~abergman/Review.pdf |title=Review of ''Not Even Wrong'' | access-date=2006-10-03 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061012043601/http://zippy.ph.utexas.edu/~abergman/Review.pdf |archive-date=12 October 2006}}</ref></blockquote>

[[Jacques Distler]] argued that the tone of the media coverage had more to do with [[journalism ethics and standards|journalistic practices]] than with physics.
<blockquote>The much-anticipated New York Times article on the Bogdanov scandal has appeared. Alas, it suffers from the usual journalistic conceit that a proper newspaper article must cover a "controversy". There must be two sides to the controversy, and the reporter's job is to elicit quotes from both parties and present them side-by-side. Almost inevitably, this "balanced" approach sheds no light on the matter, and leaves the reader shaking his head, ''"There they go again..."''<ref name="distler-2002">{{cite web | author-link=Jacques Distler |last=Distler |first=Jacques | date=2002-11-09 | url=http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000033.html | title=Half Full or Half Empty? | access-date=2019-07-22}}</ref></blockquote>
Distler also suggested that the fact that the Bogdanovs had not uploaded their papers to the [[arXiv]] prior to publication, as was standard practice by that time, meant that the physics community must have paid vanishingly little attention to those papers before the hoax rumors broke.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000017.html |last=Distler |first=Jacques |title=Revenge of the French intellectuals |date=2002-10-25 |access-date=2019-07-23}}</ref>

The affair prompted many comments about the possible shortcomings of the referral system for published articles, and also on the criteria for acceptance of a PhD thesis. [[Frank Wilczek]], who edited ''Annals of Physics'' (and who would later share the 2004 [[Nobel Prize in Physics]]), told the press that the scandal motivated him to correct the journal's slipping standards, partly by assigning more reviewing duties to the editorial board.<ref name="chronicle"/>

Prior to the controversy, the reports on the Bogdanov theses and most of the journal referees' reports spoke favorably of their work, describing it as original and containing interesting ideas. This has been the basis of concerns raised about the efficacy of the [[Peer review|peer-review]] system that the scientific community and academia use to determine the merit of submitted manuscripts for publication; one concern is that over-worked and unpaid referees may not be able to thoroughly judge the value of a paper in the little time they can afford to spend on it. Regarding the Bogdanov publications, physicist [[Steve Carlip]] remarked:

<blockquote><p>Referees are volunteers, who as a whole put in a great deal of work for no credit, no money, and little or no recognition, for the good of the community. Sometimes a referee makes a mistake. Sometimes two referees make mistakes at the same time.</p>
<p>I'm a little surprised that anyone is surprised at this. Surely you've seen bad papers published in good journals before this! ... referees give opinions; the real peer review begins after a paper is published.<ref name="carlip">{{cite newsgroup
  | title = Re: Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax?
  | author = Carlip, Steve
  | date = 2002-11-05
  | newsgroup = sci.physics.research
  |message-id= aq6qve$2ha$1@woodrow.ucdavis.edu
  | url = https://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.research/msg/fece03395ad83755
  | access-date = 2019-07-21 }}</ref></p></blockquote>

Similarly, Richard Monastersky, writing in ''The Chronicle of Higher Education'', observed, "There is one way...for physicists to measure the importance of the Bogdanovs' work. If researchers find merit in the twins' ideas, those thoughts will echo in the references of scientific papers for years to come."<ref name="chronicle" /> Before the controversy over their work arose, the scientific community had shown practically no interest in the Bogdanovs' papers; indeed, according to [[State University of New York at Stony Brook|Stony Brook]] physics professor [[Jacobus Verbaarschot]], who served on Igor Bogdanov's dissertation committee, without the hoax rumors "probably no one would have ever known about their articles."<ref name="chronicle"/> {{As of|2018|October}}, the Bogdanovs' most recent paper was "Thermal Equilibrium and KMS Condition at the Planck Scale", which was submitted to the ''Chinese Annals of Mathematics'' in 2001 and appeared in 2003.<ref name="bogdanov-spires" /> That journal ceased publication in 2005.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/cam |title=Chinese Annals of Mathematics |website=[[World Scientific]] |access-date=2018-10-22}}</ref> One retrospective commented,
:Up to 2007 the databanks mention a total of six citations for the Bogdanovs' publications. Four of them are citations among themselves and only two are by other physicists.<ref>{{cite book|title=The Network Collective: Rise and Fall of a Scientific Paradigm |last=Eichmann |first=Klaus |year=2008 |publisher=[[Birkhäuser]] |isbn=978-3-7643-8372-5 |oclc=233934316}}</ref>