Via Wired Science: the good folks at Answers in Genesis, who brought you the Creation Museum, are now launching the Answers Research Journal, an attempt to coat six-day Creationist dogma with a thin veneer of peer-review and slick web design. The premier volume contains a whopping three papers, one of which is the proceedings of a forum from June 2007. Topics include

• Granite can form really fast! Therefore, Earth is six thousand years old.
• Microbes are cool! What day they were created on? and
• Mutation can’t possibly create new adaptations (given the author’s definition of “new,” “adaptation,” and “can’t”), so evolution is impossible!

The “peer-review” at ARJ is as laughable as the content: two contributers to the “forum” do so under pseudonyms, because, says a footnote,

The writers, who hold PhDs in fields related to the topics of their abstracts, are scientists at prominent research facilities in the eastern part of North America. They prefer to keep their creationist credentials hidden for the moment until they achieve more seniority.

In other words, ARJ‘s editor(s) are asserting that it is more important to help their contributors lie to tenure committees than to provide the journal’s readers with information necessary to evaluate the content (authorship, that is). That’s just scummy.

The most positive thing I have to say about ARJ is that they don’t ask you to pay to read their nonsense. It’s all free for download in PDF form, just like a real journal! But, in a move that probably says a lot about the journal’s producers and their intended audience, there’s no citation manager import.