https://joannenova.com.au/2024/05/so-much-for-peer-review-wiley-shuts-down-19-science-journals-and-retracts-11000-fraudulent-or-gobblygook-papers/

So much for "peer review"

The news here is not that the papers were gobbledlygook, but that Wiley admitted it.

Fake bullshit gets published
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

Real bullshit does not get (re)published. I don't have the reference for this one, but the story is summarized here from the book Profscam (1988!) and is roughly as I remember it:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Profscam/xrpsJcLSXUIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=profscam+paper+resubmission&pg=PA124&printsec=frontcover

Brief summary: 12 papers with above-average citation frequency (in theory, therefore, quality and influential papers) from notable scholars at notable institutions were resubmitted to journals with no changes except that they changed out the name of the scholar and the institution for someone and somewhere unknown. 35 out of 38 peer reviewers failed to recognized that they had seen the paper before. Of the 9 papers that passed that stage, eight were rejected because of their inferior scholarship.

This has been my experience. Getting really good peer review is hard.

One book that I was paid $1000 to provide peer review was excellent, but I had maybe 15 pages of comments and corrections. The author (an excellent and careful scholar) was super thankful and noted that I was the only one of the reviewers who had really returned any worthwhile criticism.

Academic publishing is basically Goodhart's Law in action. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Once actual money and careers were tied to the number of publications (more than quality of the work or to, say, teaching), there was an inevitable shitstorm of junk scholarship. What used to crack me up at conferences is when people described some question of 16th-century history as "an important question." It would have been far far worse had I been in other fields.