The real lesson learned from those academic hoaxes: a key part of getting a paper published in a scholarly journal is to be able to follow the conventions of the journal. And some people happen to be good at that, irrespective of the content of the papers being submitted.

I wrote this email to a colleague: Someone pointed me to this paper. It’s really bad. It was published by The Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, “the official journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.” Is this a real organization? The whole thing …