Why Critiquing Crazy Academic Papers Is Important
How post-publication review exposes broken peer review and taxpayer-funded nonsense.
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About the Author
James L. Nuzzo, PhD, is an exercise scientist and men’s health researcher. Dr. Nuzzo has published over 80 research articles in peer-reviewed journals. He writes regularly about exercise, men’s health, and academia at The Nuzzo Letter on Substack. Dr. Nuzzo is also active on X @JamesLNuzzo.
Reality’s Last Stand regularly publishes a particular genre of article: close, often unsparing critiques of academic papers that are incoherent, methodologically flawed, dangerous, morally indefensible, or otherwise deeply problematic—in short, crazy academic papers. Many authors, including myself, have contributed to this genre.
On social media, I sometimes encounter skeptics who argue that critiquing such papers is not worth the time or energy. Some go further, suggesting that these critiques only amplify the visibility of fringe work that would otherwise go unnoticed, making the effort counterproductive.
I understand these concerns. However, critiques of crazy academic papers have important theoretical and practical value that outweighs these objections. Such critiques function as a form of post-publication review, compensating for a peer-review system that is increasingly broken. They also raise public awareness of systemic problems within taxpayer-funded academia. Beyond this broader role, these critiques serve three specific functions. First, they help slow or stop the spread of the ideas in the paper. Second, they can slow or stop the academic advancing those ideas. Third, they can slow or stop the flow of funding that supports both the researcher and their work. (More on these three functions later.)
What Is Post-Publication Review?
When a researcher submits a paper to an academic journal, it typically undergoes peer review. The paper is first assigned to an editor, who determines whether it falls within the journal’s scope. If it does, the editor invites other academics to evaluate the work.
Most papers are appraised by two or three reviewers, though in some cases four or five may be called upon. If the reviewers return a slew of negative assessments, the editor is unlikely to accept the paper for publication. In that case, the paper is rejected, and the author usually submits it to a different journal. If the reviews are largely favorable, however, the editor will typically invite the author to respond to the reviewers’ comments and submit a revised version of the manuscript.
At a given journal, a paper may go through one to four rounds of review before it is published. This entire process is known as “peer review.” But a more precise label is, pre-publication peer review.
Once a paper is published, the paper can still be critiqued and commented on. This is called post-publication review.
Historically, post-publication review has most often taken the form of “letters to the editor.” These are short responses to recently published papers, typically limited to around 500 words and 5–10 references. Thematic analyses of such letters show that they are most commonly used to challenge a paper’s methods or conclusions, identify data errors or inaccurate referencing, dispute definitions or terminology, or raise ethical or safety concerns.
Letters to the editor—whether published in academic journals or in newspapers—play an important role in societies committed to the free exchange of ideas and debate. That said, this format has notable limitations.
First, some journals do not publish letters at all, and others that nominally accept them often do little to advertise or encourage their submission. Letters are also far less common in the humanities than in fields like medicine, leaving humanities papers comparatively insulated from rapid critique. For example, letters are not listed as a submittable article type at journals such as Gender and Education, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.
Second, some journal editors now send letters out for peer review. Historically, as the term implies, letters to the editor were reviewed quickly by the journal’s chief editor, who made a unilateral judgment about whether a letter merited publication. Some journals still follow this model. However, I have submitted multiple letters that were instead subjected to full peer review. This practice reflects a kind of editorial safetyism—an off-loading of personal editorial responsibility when confronted with opinions deemed “controversial.”
I have argued elsewhere that sending letters to the editor out for peer review is unjustifiable. Letters are not original research; they are short opinion pieces. There is no principled reason why the views of anonymous peer reviewers should carry more weight than those of the letter’s author. Worse, this practice significantly delays publication, often for several months. In one case, a letter we submitted in September 2022 did not appear online until June 2023 because the editor sent it out for review. During that time, the problematic ideas we were challenging continued to circulate around academia without opposition, undermining one of the primary purposes of letters in the first place.
In another particularly absurd case, an editor rejected a letter reply that I had been explicitly invited to submit. A group of academics objected to my focus on men’s education in one of my papers and published a letter challenging me in response. Following standard academic practice, the journal’s editor invited me to reply. However, the editor strangely decided to send my invited letter out for peer review. Even more odd, the editor then rejected my invited reply after a peer reviewer expressed disagreement with my views. I was not given the opportunity to address or respond to the reviewer’s comments. Likely, the editor was influenced by their own ideological position and an unwillingness to publish content on anti-male bias in academia.
These examples illustrate that many of the pathologies afflicting pre-publication peer review, and academia more broadly, now also infect post-publication review within journals. As academic publishing becomes increasingly politicized, and editors grow more reluctant to publish non-Woke perspectives on issues such as sex, gender, and race, alternative forms of post-publication review are becoming not merely useful, but necessary.
Stop the Idea
The most important function of post-publication review is to slow or stop the spread of the problematic idea presented in the paper. The longer an idea sits in a journal unchallenged, the more likely it is to be perceived as legitimate or widely supported. After all, the paper has passed through what is presumed to be a rigorous and objective peer-review process.
Slowing or stopping the transmission of the ideas in crazy academic papers matters for several reasons. First, crazy ideas have the potential to change the trajectory of an entire academic field. Other researchers may build additional theories on top of a crazy foundation, compounding the negative impact of original idea. Professors may also assign these papers in courses, shaping the beliefs of the next generation of students.
Second, bad ideas in academia are often used for purposes of circular validation. For example, I have previously discussed a problematic psychological tool known as the Toxic Masculinity Scale. The scale’s authors “validated” the scale by comparing it to a similarly biased tool called the Liberal Feminist Attitude and Ideology Scale, published in 1996. Because that earlier scale passed peer review decades ago and was apparently never adequately challenged through post-publication critique, it remains available for contemporary researchers to cite as a legitimate benchmark to validate their new psychological tools.
Third, academic ideas often spill beyond journals into shaping policy and clinical practice. Crazy ideas do not lay dormant in the world of abstracts, and activist academics rarely want them to. On the contrary, they desire their ideas to have real-world impact in the name of “social justice.” I recently highlighted this risk when discussing the policy implications of the claim that anticipating violence is violence. Without timely critique, such ideas can migrate into workplaces, courtrooms, and hospitals.
Stop the Academic
A second function of critiquing a crazy academic paper is to slow or stop the influence of the academic who wrote it. This matters for several reasons.
First, an academic who advances one crazy idea is likely to advance others. That academic is also typically teaching students, serving on university committees, and acting as a peer reviewer. Their biased or illogical reasoning is therefore unlikely to remain confined to a single publication; it can permeate all their work and service. A public critique of a crazy academic paper sounds the alarm bell that its author may be unfit to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of a university scholar. Given that most professors are employed at taxpayer expense, one is justified in questioning whether an academic has the intellectual skills and abilities necessary to advance human knowledge and educate the next generation students in an objective and rigorous way.
Second, academic papers are meant to function as evidence of scholarly competence and productivity, and they play a central role in decisions about hiring, promotion, and research funding. A well-argued critique that exposes a paper’s flaws can diminish its credibility and impact, which in turn may slow the author’s career progression. This is a desirable and appropriate outcome because positions of authority in academia should not be occupied by crazy individuals who consistently produce incoherent or ideologically driven work.
A concrete example of this dynamic comes from an essay I published in June 2025 critiquing the concept of “mankeeping,” introduced by Angelica Ferrara of Stanford University in the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinities. The essay attracted significant public attention. I was interviewed about it, and several commentators, including Lisa Britton, subsequently covered the issue. Journalist Ari Blaff, who was also infuenced by my essay, later wrote a piece for The Dispatch titled “How ‘Mankeeping’ Entered the Psychological Lexicon.” Blaff’s contribution was unique because he contacted both Ferrara and me for comment.
After becoming aware of the public pushback against her biased conceptualizing of “mankeeping,” Ferrara made remarks suggesting a partial retreat from some of the claims and implications in her original paper. This shift presumably occurred because of the criticism she received. Importantly, none of this post-publication critique took place within academic journals. It occurred primarily on public platforms such as Substack and X. This case illustrates that critiques of crazy academic papers, regardless of where they are published, can shape public perception and sometimes prompt academics to reconsider their claims or ideas.
Stop the Funding
A third function of critiquing a crazy academic paper is to slow or stop the funding that supports both the academic and their work. In his critiques, biologist Colin Wright often highlights when such papers were funded by government grants. Exposing these funding sources is important because it exposes how public funding underwrites the production and dissemination of crazy academic ideas. In this way, post-publication review helps bring questionable uses of taxpayer dollars into public view.
When citizens become aware of how their money is being spent, they rightly become frustrated. That frustration, in turn, can place pressure on university administrations and political officials to take corrective action. For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced efforts to eliminate all things related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This decision stems, in part, from sustained public concern about Woke medicine and its impact on healthcare policy and delivery. Thus, critiques of crazy academic papers can lead to changes in public policy that put a stranglehold on the monies that serve as the lifeblood of wasteful research.
Conclusion
For many years, academics published papers with little oversight from the general public. This was partly because most research appeared in journals run by membership-based professional societies or for-profit publishers, where individual articles typically cost $30–$50 to access—well beyond what most people are willing or able to pay. Together, these barriers helped shield many dubious academic ideas from widespread public scrutiny.
Those barriers are now eroding. Papers are increasingly being published open access, and others are routinely screenshotted and shared on social media by people with university-provided journal subscriptions. My sense is that this increased visibility is harming universities rather than helping them. It is exposing citizens to the intellectual rot that has taken hold in parts of academia.
Notably, the people publishing crazy academic papers are broadly the same people who support university policies that have led academics like Colin Wright and me to be excluded, sidelined, or outright canceled. But what goes around comes around. Those actions are now beginning to backfire on the institutions that enabled them. Some of us on the “outside” are using our firsthand knowledge of academia—including how peer review actually works—to expose the system for what it has become.
These efforts should not be dismissed as a “waste of time.” Had an earlier generation of academics consistently engaged in such efforts, we might have avoided the current state of affairs altogether.
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