Bad research, junk papers and spam

Three links to bloggers commenting on bad papers -- whatever be the cause of their badness -- from the point of view of peer reviewers:

1. Matt Welsh at Volatile and Decentralized: Who pays for conference reviews?. He suggests a remedy: make the authors pay at the time of submitting their articles to a journal or a conference.

2. Jon Katz at Random Bits: Reviewing crappy journal submissions. He poses this question: "is spending even 15-20 minutes performing this “service” worthwhile?"

3. Suresh Venkatasubramanian at The Geomblog: Bad research as spam. Posed this way, here are his thoughts on 'spam blocking':

   1. we can block spam by filtering certain domains. We also tend to ignore certain kinds of conferences

   2. we can block spam by blocking certain email addresses. We also might ignore certain researchers, or at least downweight their work after a series of bad experiences.

   3. More explicit spam blocking policies create a false-negative problem. False-negatives are also a big problem in research.

   Hat tip to Suresh for the other two links!