Originally Posted by
MoAlpha
This is all correct. However, conferences often review poster and short talk submissions for quality and often publish them in special issues of otherwise peer-reviewed publications where they become citable, adding to the confusion. And then there are abstracts of published and ostensibly peer-reviewed journal articles, which are a different thing.
This one is worth the electrons it's printed on.
This is the problem with the internet - it makes everything available to everyone, but doesn't teach you how to evaluate it. And even peer review assumes your data are real, so actual fraud can slip through and get published, and only later when nobody can replicate the results will it be exposed.
When I was at Cornell, there was a graduate student who was the star of the department, and published a series of papers in top flight journals, and ALL OF IT was bulls**t. Literally made up from whole cloth, and the data faked, including gels and autorads. He worked hard at it, possibly harder than he'd have had to work to get ACTUAL results.