Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

Misrepresenting Mises: Quotation Editing and a Rejection of Peer Review at Cambridge University Press

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Abstract

The purpose of peer review is to examine the integrity of research, verifying its quality and reliability. This article discusses a failure in basic peer-review mechanisms at the journal Contemporary European History (CEH). In early 2020, the first of the present authors discovered evidence of quotation editing and misrepresentation of original sources in an article about the economist Ludwig von Mises by historian Quinn Slobodian. After the editors of CEH refused multiple attempts to seek corrections, it came to light that similar problems had been flagged during the referee process for Slobodian’s article. Like the correction request after publication, the referee report was ignored by the journal’s editors. This article chronicles the discovery of the misrepresentations, as well as unsuccessful attempts to obtain a correction to the edited quotations from CEH and its publisher Cambridge University Press.

Podcast related to this article: Phil Magness on Quinn Slobodian on Mises (EJW Audio, July 2022).