Psych (journal)

Psych is a open-access pseudoscience journal founded in 2019 that has attracted racists from the OpenPsych pseudojournals. The latter has been widely discredited and virtually stopped publishing in 2018 after its editorial board including Emil Kirkegaard, John Fuerst and Peter Frost were exposed as eugenicists and white nationalists. All three now publish at Psych and the first issue of the journal is based on race and intelligence and racialism. Psych is published by MDPI,File:Wikipedia's W.svg which has been criticized for publishing other pseudojournals[1][2] and for journals with poor peer review processes that were lacking in rigour.[2]

The colorful pseudoscience
Racialism
Hating thy neighbour
Divide and conquer
Dog-whistlers
v - t - e

As of 2020, the Psych journal no longer publishes controversial papers on race. Those on the current Editorial Board have nothing to do with racialist pseudoscience.[3]

Psych as OpenPsych Version 2

Almost all authors of papers submitted and/or published in the first issue of Pysch (Vol. 1, 2019) are associated with OpenPsych:

In 2019, the Psych journal published 16 papers as part of the "Beyond Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability".[4]

The first issue editor, Bryan Pesta[5], is a proponent of hereditarianism and was on the editorial board of OpenPsych. Pesta is no longer on the editorial board of Psych.

Controversy

One can speculate why Psych no longer publishes racialist pseudoscience. In April, 2019 the journal published Reflections on Sixty-Eight Years of Research on Race and Intelligence by white supremacist Richard Lynn. The paper was controversial and the Editorial Office of Psych issued a public "Expression of Concern"[6], and changed the paper to an "opinion" piece. The Editorial Office reported several concerns:

1.There was no discussion of the correlation and causation, most notably between IQ and GDP. This has been an area of substantial discussion in the field, but this point is not sufficiently mentioned. Given the paper’s overall content, we believe this topic should have been given more prominence.


2.Support is given in the article to several quotations expressing extreme views not widely considered as being supported by current research results. The people making these statements are clearly characterized as ‘victims’. While the author may sincerely hold such a point of view, we do not agree that a scientific journal is the correct place to express such opinions.


3.The mainstream acceptance of the body of research presented has been over-stated. While there are a significant number of scholars who support the research, the topic remains controversial and not accepted by a large proportion of the research community.[7]

Unsurprisingly, Lynn claimed he does not agree with the expression of concern. In regard to this incident, Angela SainiFile:Wikipedia's W.svg noted the shoddy peer review process of Psych:

While it is to be welcomed that the editors are finally calling out poor scholarship from a psychologist such as Richard Lynn, who had his emeritus title withdrawn by his former university just last year for expressing racist and sexist views – following a lifetime of publishing in the notoriously pseudoscientific Mankind Quarterly, co-founded by Nazi race scientists after the war – one had to wonder how a paper of obviously poor quality and making such spurious assertions managed to get published in the first place. What must the peer review process at Psych be like that nobody thought to question the wisdom of publishing a paper like this?[7]

List of pseudoscience papers

2019
  • Biogeographic Ancestry, Cognitive Ability and Socioeconomic Outcomes.[8]
  • Reservations about Rushton.[9]
  • Spearman’s Hypothesis Tested Comparing 47 Regions of Japan Using a Sample of 18 Million Children.[10]
  • The Effect of Biracial Status and Color on Crystallized Intelligence in the U.S.-Born African–European American Population.[11]
  • Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and Intelligence Inferred from Gwas Hits: A Replication of Previous Findings Using Recent Data.[12]
  • The Intelligence of Biracial Children of U.S. Servicemen in Northeast Asia: Results from Japan.[13]
  • A Conversation with Gerhard Meisenberg.[14]
  • Reflections on Sixty-Eight Years of Research on Race and Intelligence.[15]
gollark: yep.
gollark: New players would probably pick up a few random things to see them.
gollark: Unlikely.
gollark: Again, alternative explanations, SnowBear?
gollark: CommonUncommonRareishRare

References
  1. Chinese Publisher MDPI Added to List of Questionable Publishers by Jeffrey Beall (Updated 2014-02-27) Scholarly Open Access' (archived from March 6, 2014).
  2. Beware! Academics are getting reeled in by scam journals by Alex Gillis (Jan 12 2017) University Affairs .
  3. Editorial Board
  4. Special Issue "Beyond Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability"
  5. Psych—An Open Access Journal
  6. https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/33/htm
  7. Prof who lost emeritus status for views on race and intelligence has paper flagged
  8. https://doi.org/10.3390/Psychology1010001
  9. https://doi.org/10.3390/Psychology1010003
  10. https://doi.org/10.3390/Psychology1010002
  11. https://doi.org/10.3390/Psychology1010004
  12. https://doi.org/10.3390/Psychology1010005
  13. https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/10
  14. https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/26
  15. https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/9/htm
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