We don't talk enough about the substandard research quality of articles published in leading social science journals.
A recent Contemporary Security Policy Journal article (below) (mis)used a policy analysis that I published a few years ago with the NATO Defense College as evidence to support the authors' claim that NATO is a "purveyor of facts and truth."
This represents an obvious case of 'evidence hunting' (having a favorite idea drive a selective data search, instead of doing it the other way around and letting the data lead to the idea). This 'data hunting' effort is rather obvious - the authors did not go beyond the first page, took the ideas out of context, and failed to do the very basic homework of figuring out that the publications of the NDC do not represent the official policy of the Alliance. These are typical scholarly and analytic contributions expressing the views of their authors. In fact, many ideas appear in the NDC publications because they are not part of NATO policy. Many other pieces of 'evidence' in this CSP article are similarly pulled out of thin air, as the presented facts represent phenomena different from the one that the authors invoke.
I am surprised that these details escaped the attention of the journal editors and reviewers.
In reality, my NDC-published analysis generally pointed out that the informational space - a virtual space that does not have national borders and where sovereignty is heavily contested (a positive observation & not a normative one) - is becoming an area of systematic interstate competition, which de facto transforms that space into another operational domain of modern war. Given that it is a policy analysis, the paper provides practical recommendations with justifications for the proposed policy measures.
Methodologically, the CSP article could have been significantly strengthened by examining processes of intentionality in NATO policies and actions, and identifying evidence that is truly indicative of these processes. If evidence to the contrary is prevalent generally, the authors could examine certain narrow issue areas. If evidence again contradicts the initial hypothesis, such a research paper would also have its value. In its current form, however, the CSP article provides manipulated evidence, as it presents it as a distorted image.
