Where can I publish a parody (but not hoax) paper with a serious message?

Question

I have written a short paper (six pages) in which I empirically analyse publicly available data. Both the data and my analysis are genuine and without (intentional) errors. Still, by using statistical and argumentative tricks, the paper somewhat convincingly arrives at a conclusion that is obvious nonsense.

My goal is to demonstrate by vivid example how easily this can happen (intentionally or unintentionally) even when obeying the typical scientific procedure and rigor. That message is directed rather at the "interested public" than at the most academic readers. It is not a goal to fool anyone (so it's not a hoax paper), and I have included a "preface" that clearly states the circumstances.

Now my question is: Where should/can I publish such a paper? I thought about a parody journal like the Journal of Irreproducible Results at first, but it does not seem to exist anymore and also its scope was not 100% fitting. Should I try a "real" journal instead and hope for the editor's humor? Or should I just upload the paper to ResearchGate? My "criteria" are:

• It would like it to be published in such a way that I can tell everyone it was accepted by "prestigious and well-known journal XY" (regardless of whether the journal is really prestigious), rather than just "a website".
• The journal should be open-access or similar so that everyone can read the paper.
• It should not be a predatory journal, because I do not want to harm my real academic reputation.
• I do not want to pay publication fees, at least not high fees.
• It should not take a year or so until the paper is published.

Thematically, the paper addresses a question that could be called a politics issue, so it might fit in a corresponding journal. I also thought about journals that deal with good/bad scientific practice in general.

Background: In the recent months to years, I had to read a lot of pseudo papers (mere PDF files I mean that luckily have not been published) about, well, what I and many other people would call conspiracy theories. The main content of such a paper usually was an empirical analysis that resulted in completely absurd conclusions.

My job was to find errors in these analyses and to refute them, but, as always, this proved to be very difficult. However, this is something that people outside academia often do not (or do not want to) understand... So I decided to turn the tables and write an even more obvious junk paper that nevertheless no one will be able to refute.

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As clarification, I'm rather asking in which "category" to publish such papers in general, not concrete journals (except journals like Improbable.com, which however form a category on their own).

Some have expressed concerns that the paper despite all measures will be taken seriously by some groups. I can understand this very well, but my paper is actually about a theory that itself has been made up exactly for the purpose of demonstrating how easy it is to generate believable junk science.

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Update 1: My paper has been accepted! In the end, I chose to submit it to a respected statistics journal that had 1) a relationship to the topic of my paper and 2) an "under debate" section. This prooved to be a good idea it seems. I will link the publication here as soon as the paper is online.

Update 2: The paper has now been published. Since I was asked not to link it here, I linked it in my profile instead.

Answer 1

The sort of paper you mention is very valuable to e.g. use in education to show that statistical analyses cannot be used without also understanding the underlying data. There are several papers like this published with the expressed purpose of making a point about over-interpretation or relying on statistical numbers alone to describe relationships.

The first that comes to mind is Anscombe (1973) (see wikipedia for a picture of the Anscombe quartet) who produced four data sets that are statistically identical (with reference to linear regression statistics) but when plotted indicate four very different types of relationships. The point of this paper was to show the power of graphical representation to complement statistical measures.

Another example is Collins (1965) which shows a correlation between sun spot activity and the stock exchange. Although the analysis is not described in detail regarding the physical relationships between the parameters it is an indication that spurious correlations may arise if one really looks for them.

A third example concerns the issue of p-values. Letters by Baker (2016) and Karpen (2017) can serve as an example voicing the issue of over-interpreting the value of p-values in studies.

As for journals to convey messages like this there are two options as I see it. One is to go for an obviously extraneous journal such as Improbable Research (https://improbable.com/). In the past there was also the Journal of Irreprodicible Research. A second option is to contact the editor of a statistics journal to enquire whether or not a paper such as the suggested could be published in some format in such a journal. To submit the paper as a regular paper is probably not a wise idea but trying to locate an avenue supported by journal editors would be a useful addition to our understanding of limitation of statistical methods. In addition there are journals specifically targetting higher education where publishing around problems as these suggested may be welcome for educational purposes.

References

Anscombe, F.J. 1973. Graphs in Statistical Analysis. American Statistician. 27 (1) 17-21. doi: 10.1080/00031305.1973.10478966

Baker, M. 2016. Statisticians issue warning over misuse of P values. Nature. 531, 151

Collins, C.J. 1965. An Inquiry into the Effect of Sunspot Activity on the Stock Market. Financial Analysts Journal 21 (3) 45-56.

Karpen, S.C. 2017. P-value problems. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education. 81 (9) 93.

Answer 2

The BMJ is a very serious medical journal. It has published two studies related to the use of parachutes when jumping off a plane.

The first one is a review paper. It attempted to find RCT (randomized controlled trials) of parachute use, found none, and "concluded" that there is no evidence for the use of parachutes.

The second one actually did a trial. The abstract confidently states that intervention (parachute) vs. control (no parachute) did not change survival at all. The reason for that is that survival rate was 100% in both groups, because the jumps were performed from a small landed aircraft ("mean altitude 0.6m, mean speed 0km/h").

Those papers actually have serious messages. The first one is about equipoise: there has been no gold-standard trials of parachutes, because nobody seriously doubt they work; it criticizes the rigidity of a "RCT or nothing" mentality. The second is about undue emphasis on statistical methods and abstract-skimming, when important methodological details are buried in the paper. (Also, to me at least, they’re hilarious to read.)

There is thus precedent to publish parody papers in serious journals, fairly recently (2008 and 2018).

Answer 3

If sufficiently useful, papers like this are published in the same journals where their message would be influential. An example would be:

Bennett, C. M., Miller, M. B., & Wolford, G. L. (2009). Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: an argument for multiple comparisons correction. Neuroimage, 47(Suppl 1), S125.

This is a critique of neuroimaging methods published about fMRI of a dead salmon. It's published in a popular journal for fMRI-based and similar research.

Answer 4

I know of one such example, an investigation of correlations between star signs and health conditions. It got somewhat famous after the German "newspaper" BILD fell for it, despite being very much not written as a hoax paper (so be wary, no nonsense is so obviously nonsense that no idiot will fall for it).

The paper was published in what I assume to be a regular epidemiology journal: Testing multiple statistical hypotheses resulted in spurious associations: a study of astrological signs and health

Answer 5

This is a pointless and potentially damaging exercise.

YouTube and the web are filled to the gills with serious analyses debunking accidentally or deliberately badly analyzed data or claims. And you know what? They're basically preaching to the choir because the people who want to believe the claims still believe them and the people who don't agree with the claims are not being told anything they don't know already.

The people you'd reach in a even vaguely professional journal already know how to do a proper analysis. Despite that, some of them will, for whatever reasons of personal bias, happily make conclusions they can easily see are false by e.g. ignoring inconvienent data or taking the result out of context or whatever.

I'm afraid you won't achieve anything by publishing an example of such a paper because unfortunately we have an almost endless supply of such material already out there and being greedily consumed by a target audience that doesn't want to believe it's wrong and won't listen to any proof or educational material explaining why it's false.

Remember you live in a world where the media "balance" debate by putting on the tin-foil hat brigade and giving them equal (if not more) time as actual mainstream scientists. People select their news sources as ones that confirm what they already believe. Who is going to actually benefit from your paper in such a climate?

In addition to this, the reality is publishing such a paper would probably do you more harm than good. It would be forever attached to your name and the "obviously" false conclusion would be leapt on by people who like it for their own reasons. Indeed the paper could later be cited by people who want to debunk one of your own legitimate papers by showing an example of how you messed up before and cannot be trusted.

So it's pointless and potentially personally damaging.

I would not recommend doing this.

Answer 6

If you work at a university, would a university periodical, departmental bulletin or similar be an option? At least here in Japan, these are plentiful (The Kobe City University Journal, Shinshu Studies in Humanities, The Keio Journal of Arts and Letters, etc.) and while lesser to other journals are somewhat respected. Quick to come out, no fees, open access (university repository), you can tell people it's a 'respected journal'... it seems to fit your requirements.

Answer 7

...by using statistical and argumentative tricks, the paper somewhat convincingly arrives at a conclusion that is obvious nonsense.
My goal is to demonstrate by vivid example how easily this can happen (intentionally or unintentionally) even when obeying the typical scientific procedure and rigor.

If your intent is serious and you mean to produce useful science then I'd suggest abandoning the specific example you've proposed and instead focus on generalizing the fallacy(ies) you relied upon to produce said nonsensical result.

You will probably discover that, in generalizing, you can produce a far more useful scientific result than simply examining a single specific case. Leaving it as an exercise for the reader doesn't really provide people with a tool, metric, or algorithm with which to gauge their own methods in search of similar fallacious methods or reasoning, and so has limited value.

Science is about first being intrigued by a counter-intuitive result, but finally is about breaking down that counter-intuitive result until you can come to a place of understanding. In so doing, you may also end up discovering an entire field of research that already focuses on the topic you're just now scratching the surface of. Your work may not be as novel as you think, and you may, in addition, be an entire lit-review away from even having such an idea for the paper.

Answer 8

Depending on your field, I think there's a good chance you may be able to submit such a paper to many (open-access, per your requirement) journals: just not as a research article. As an example, PLOS Biology offers an extensive list of article types published in the journal; looking through the options, your article might fit as a Perspective or an Essay. In mathematics, I recently read a work about citation practices published as a Viewpoint in the Mathematical Intelligencer; it didn't invoke data but was written in a satirical style that strongly reminds me of your goal. The "Applications and Case Studies" article type in the Journal of the American Statistical Association might even fit the bill (although I didn't read its open access policies). As a final case study, the Frontiers In family seems to have a large selection of article types from which you can use; I linked Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics above.

Answer 9

There is only one place to do this - the Journal of Irreproducible Results. It's a Science Humour and Parody magazine, so there is no danger that your parody will be taken seriously.

Answer 10

Have you tought about a Philosophy of Science Journal? That might be an appropriate place to try.