The Currency of the Journal Article Is Collapsing
Weak scholarship was once easy to spot at a glance: The signs included bad writing, a lack of relevant citations, and little engagement with previous scholarship, such as a paper that promised a “novel” conceptual framework without acknowledging the many other papers making similar claims. As an associate editor of a bioethics journal, I’d make a quick “desk reject” decision and not send these articles for peer review, which effectively killed any hope of publication.