We've never Hoaxed

We've published a hundred or so magazine articles in the last 15 years. Some of them are at the top right of this blog.

A goodly portion of writing a military history magazine article is fact checking assertions, units, equipment, etc. Author contracts make clear that the author is responsible for the content therein. 

We've always assumed that the guy editing, say, Civil War Magazine, is an expert on the Civil War and knows what he is reading about when he reads a submission. But who knows?

Why we could...

Via Drudge we have yet another academic hoax, this time by an alleged 'sex doctor', one Damien Sendler who hoaxed a slew of magazines, trendy websites and amazingly enough, academic journals:

Sendler’s recent papers are published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, meaning they were presumably assessed by experts in a related field. Some of the publications have a high-impact factor, meaning they’re influential in their field, based on how often their articles are cited in other papers. But Ivan Oransky—co-founder of Retraction Watch, a site that monitors scientific journals retractions and reports on scientific integrity—told me, “Peer review is not a magic wand, it’s not a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. It’s a filter.

That last bit, 'it's a filter' is a lot of excuse making crap. 

We've published most of our articles in popular magazines, but we've landed a few pieces in scholarly journals. The first was Otho Holland  Williams in the Journal of the Maryland Historical Society. Like most of our early magazine articles, this was originally a term paper for a class at American Public University.

We had to make a few minor changes here and there but otherwise the editors took the piece as is. 

We guess it was 'peer reviewed'. 

Who knows?

Why we could have...