well stricker actually has a finding of research misconduct against him he fudged data to get an nejm paper that was retracted by his three co authors when they found out what he did as a consequence was barred by the ori from receiving or applying for federal grants for three years in the s so he's previously gotten into serious trouble for throwing out data that doesn't fit his preferred hypothesis in recent years his publications seem to be almost exclusively low impact papers opinion bits and letters related to morgellons and the related dubious diagnosis of chronic lyme disease i suppose it's possible that he might be leading his field but if so it's taking an awfully long time for anyone to start following it's looking much more like he's just wandering in the wilderness and the advent of the open peer review journals where the journal publicly posts the identities and sometimes the comments of peer reviewers opens a window on at least some mild shenanigans regarding reviewer selection in some of his recent papers this f paper has a publisher's note about an undisclosed conflict of interest where one of the reviewers was co authoring another manuscript with the paper's authors while reviewing the f paper and one of the reviewers of the current paper bmc dermatology was robert bransfield who is actually acknowledged in the paper for his contributions this sort of thing has a couple of likely explanations stricker et al are deliberately pointing journal editors at very friendly peer reviewers and these mostly crappy low impact journals don't do much due diligence potential conflicts of interest be damned or these papers are so far out on the fringe that it's very difficult for journal editors to find anyone who is willing to waste time on reviewing manuscripts on these topics so they're relaxed about their reviewer standards or both talk