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A current question here reminded me on the Sokal affair/hoax initiated by physicist Alan Sokal in 1996 by publishing a nonsense article in an social journal. I am wondering whether this triggered any major changes of the peer-review practices among journals or new categories of peer review (number of reviewers, can read review of other reviewer, reviewer suggested by author, etc....)

Reading the wiki article I could not see which type of peer review (single, double-blind,...) was applied by the journal Social Text at this time. The wiki article also suggests to me that the problem was maybe rather the choice of the reviewers (no physicists, although physics is "somehow" a topic of this article).

user48953094
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    I removed your sidenote questions since we prefer to have only one question per question. Feel free to ask them separately, but if you do, please clarify “the type of review system applied by a journal […] is more important and put more weight on by the editors”. I fail to make sense of this since the editors do not choose the journal. – Wrzlprmft Feb 21 '19 at 18:26
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    The linked wiki page says At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. – StrongBad Feb 21 '19 at 18:26
  • @StrongBad which I don't believe quite and I'm in general skeptical on wikipedia articles, otherwise why should have Sokal send the hoax, if he knew this. Some kind of review probably was in place which he wanted to disprove? But this doesn't change the title question... – user48953094 Feb 21 '19 at 18:30
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    @MichaelSchmidt A big part of Sokal's point was to show that, in spite of Social Text being considered a top journal, it did not have meaningful standards of review. The editors actually did ask him to revise and improve the article, but they did not understand it enough to recognize that it was entirely nonsense. Moreover, when Sokal refused to make changes, the editors decided that it was more valuable to have a physicist's participation than to have the article's writing made more comprehensible. – Buzz Feb 21 '19 at 18:34
  • @Buzz I see, but quite shocked a top journal could have no apparent standard at all in 1996?! So the editors where famous crocodiles which reviewed the articles also or sometimes? They should call it socal myth :-) – user48953094 Feb 21 '19 at 18:55
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    Reviewer reports and author responses can be openly available, which is called open peer-review. There is open single blind peer-review, e.g. the publisher Copernicus uses this type. – FuzzyLeapfrog Feb 21 '19 at 19:11
  • Check out this oral history of the Sokol Affair, which includes quotes from one of the editors explaining their process: Ruark, J. (2017, January 6). Anatomy of a Hoax. Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. B6–B10. – BennyProfane Feb 25 '19 at 01:19
  • Could you make the question clearer? What is it exactly that you are asking here? – Federico Poloni Feb 25 '19 at 07:25

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