“DOG parks are Petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’,” wrote Helen Wilson, of the Portland Ungendering Research Initiative, in her study published in May this year. Her write-up describes how gender interactions in dog parks mirror the interactions and biases of human society. Female dogs, the paper said, are a relatively oppressed class compared with male dogs, and are subjected to threats of canine rape. It argued that the parallels with human society offered insights into how men might be trained out of sexual violence and bigotry. (Literally leashing men might be politically unfeasible, but perhaps metaphorically leashing them would help?)

In the eyes of the publishers of Gender, Place & Culture, an academic journal, Ms Wilson’s findings were worthy of the highest regard. They included them in a special selection of 12 papers to mark the journal’s 25th anniversary. There was just one small glitch. Ms Wilson, her institution, her study and her findings were all the creative brain-spawn of three writers, philosophers and self-styled “thinkers” hellbent on exposing what they see as a broken branch of sociology.

Starting in August 2017, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian wrote 20 entirely fictitious research papers and submitted them to respected journals. Titles included “Stars, planets and gender: a framework for a feminist astronomy” and “Going in through the back door: Challenging male straight homohysteria and transphobia through receptive penetrative sex toy use”. This latter noted that straight men rarely use sex toys for anal penetration and argued that perhaps if they did, this would increase their liberal, feminist and trans-friendly views.

Ms Pluckrose, Mr Lindsay and Mr Boghossian join a long list of gadflies who have successfully conned journals into publishing ridiculous made-up findings, beginning with Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, who submitted a hoax paper to Social Text in 1996. In 2009 Philip Davis of Cornell University published one that was nothing but computer-generated nonsense. And in 2014 another computer scientist wrote and published a paper entitled “Get me off your fucking mailing list”, composed entirely of that phrase repeated from opening paragraph to closing line. Others have similarly used humour and creativity to expose the faulty checks and balances of academic publishing.

For Ms Pluckrose, Mr Lindsay and Mr Boghossian the joke was up when the dog-park paper caught the attention of journalists, who quickly found Ms Wilson to be non-existent. The paper was retracted. This week the trio revealed that of their 20 made-up papers, seven were published, seven were in review when the dog paper was exposed, and just six went nowhere.

Their aim, they say, was to expose the problems with what they term “grievance studies”, a sub-category of race, gender, fat and sexuality studies in which poor science is undermining the real and important work being done elsewhere. It may be that the academics they have in their sights are immune to irony, which is no doubt seen as a manifestation of an elitist, patriarchal comedy culture that excludes the differently humorous. But it is worth a try.

Correction (October 5th, 2018): This piece originally stated that the hoaxers started in mid-2016. In fact they began in August 2017. This has been amended.