Overview

Braude served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration during a critical period in the history of anomalistics publishing. The JSE, founded in 1987, occupies a unique position: it welcomes serious scholarship on phenomena that mainstream science often dismisses, yet it maintains the same standards of evidence, argumentation, and integrity expected in any rigorous scientific journal. Braude’s tenure from 2009 to 2021 was marked by his effort to strengthen those standards while defending the legitimacy of frontier science against both careless scholarship and reflexive skepticism.

His editorials reveal a consistent concern with three interconnected problems: the quality and honesty of published work, the conceptual clarity of parapsychological claims, and the institutional vulnerability of anomalistics research. Rather than treating these as separate issues, Braude understood them as aspects of a single challenge: how to build and maintain a scholarly community capable of investigating genuinely anomalous phenomena without either abandoning rigor or capitulating to dogmatic skepticism.

Editorial vision and scholarly rigor

Braude’s approach to editorial leadership was shaped by his conviction that frontier science deserves the same intellectual standards as mainstream science—and perhaps even greater scrutiny, given the controversial nature of its subject matter. In his editorials, he repeatedly emphasized that openness to anomalous phenomena must be paired with uncompromising demands for evidence, logical consistency, and honest argumentation.

One of Braude’s notable editorial initiatives was his solicitation of comprehensive, detailed reviews of specific research domains. He recognized that the field needed more than individual empirical studies; it needed synthetic overviews that could guide both newcomers and experienced researchers through complex bodies of evidence. In his farewell editorial, he praised Bryan Williams for delivering “a detailed review of a specific line of anomalistic research—the kind of article that would be useful to both veterans and newcomers to edge science,” noting that he had long sought such contributions from colleagues at Society for Scientific Exploration conferences.⁴

Braude also demonstrated editorial sophistication in handling cases that required careful conceptual analysis rather than simple empirical adjudication. His discussion of Michael Sudduth’s examination of the James Leininger reincarnation case illustrates this approach. Rather than treating all survival-type cases as equivalent, Braude recognized that different categories of evidence—mediumship cases, reincarnation cases, apparitions—pose distinct investigative and interpretive challenges. He introduced the concept of “the Problem of Investigative Intricacy” to capture the methodological difficulties inherent in cases-of-the-reincarnation-type (CORT), where establishing reliable facts requires extensive interviews with multiple witnesses whose memories and motivations may be compromised.⁴

Integrity standards and plagiarism

Perhaps Braude’s most consequential editorial action was his establishment of formal plagiarism detection and retraction procedures. In 2021, the JSE published its first official retraction—a paper by Alejandro Parra that contained extensive plagiarism. This was a watershed moment for the journal and for anomalistics publishing more broadly. Braude’s handling of the case demonstrated that frontier science journals could and must enforce the same standards of intellectual honesty as mainstream journals.

In his editorial announcing the retraction, Braude contextualized the problem within the broader landscape of scientific retractions. He cited a 2011 survey by R. Grant Steen in the Journal of Medical Ethics showing that between 2000 and 2010, 788 papers in the PubMed database were retracted, with plagiarism classified as a form of “error” rather than “fraud” in the taxonomy of retraction reasons.¹ This framing was important: it suggested that plagiarism, while serious, was not unique to anomalistics and that the field’s response should be proportionate and professional rather than defensive.

Braude’s subsequent commentary on the Parra case provided additional detail about the plagiarist’s attempts to submit work under false authorship. In one instance, Parra submitted a paper by Argentinian author Anna Conforte as his own work, apparently auto-translating it from Spanish to English without attribution. When confronted, Parra’s responses betrayed “a shocking failure to grasp the seriousness of his actions.”⁷ Braude’s willingness to document these failures publicly, and to require routine plagiarism testing of all accepted manuscripts, signaled that the JSE would not tolerate such breaches of scholarly ethics.

Conceptual clarity and methodological critique

Beyond questions of integrity, Braude used his editorials to address conceptual and methodological problems that he believed were endemic to parapsychological research. His editorial on “Cosmic Aesthetics” exemplifies this approach. Drawing on William James’s observations about mediumship, Braude explored the problem that the best mediumistic cases present a “maddening mixture” of material suggesting survival, material suggesting psi among the living, and apparent rubbish or irrelevance.²

Rather than treating this mixture as evidence against survival, Braude argued that it might actually provide clues about the underlying processes involved in mediumship. He suggested that even the “debris” of mediumistic communications could be theoretically informative if properly interpreted. This approach—taking seriously the full complexity of anomalous phenomena rather than cherry-picking the most impressive cases—reflected Braude’s broader commitment to intellectual honesty in frontier science.

Similarly, in his editorial on apparitions, Braude criticized the prevailing tendency to explain all apparitional phenomena through a single mechanism (typically telepathy). He argued that “different sorts of cases pose different sorts of theoretical problems, and explanations that work neatly for one sort may be cumbersome or implausible when extended to another.”³ This insistence on conceptual differentiation—on recognizing that phenomena grouped under a single name might require distinct explanations—was characteristic of Braude’s philosophical approach to parapsychology.

Archival stewardship and institutional memory

Braude recognized that anomalistics research faces a distinctive institutional vulnerability: the organizations that house research materials and archives are often financially precarious and may not survive long enough to preserve valuable collections. In an editorial reflecting on his efforts to preserve the papers and materials of psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud—who had investigated Ted Serios’s psychic photography—Braude documented the challenges facing parapsychological archives.

The Society for Psychical Research in London had been forced to divide its collection and deposit rare items in the Cambridge University Library when financial pressures required relocation. The Rhine Research Center in Durham had moved its archives to safer quarters but remained in precarious financial condition. The Parapsychology Foundation in New York City faced serious financial trouble that threatened its library.⁶ These institutional vulnerabilities meant that researchers like Braude had to take personal responsibility for preserving important materials, a burden that should not have fallen on individual scholars.

Braude’s concern with archival preservation was not merely administrative; it reflected his conviction that parapsychology’s historical record—its cases, investigations, and scholarly debates—constituted a valuable intellectual inheritance that must be protected. The loss of such materials would impoverish the field and make it impossible for future researchers to evaluate the evidence on which contemporary claims rest.

Engagement with skeptical critique

Braude’s editorials also addressed the problem of reflexive skepticism in mainstream science and academia. He distinguished between legitimate critical engagement with parapsychological claims and what he called “intransigent skepticism”—the dogmatic dismissal of anomalous phenomena regardless of evidence. In one editorial, he documented how Wikipedia biographies of parapsychologists had been “hijacked by a collection of Wikipedia insiders who have rewritten the biographies, replaced accurate information with falsehoods, and thwarted all attempts to correct the misrepresentations.”⁵

Braude also criticized the rhetorical tactics employed by some skeptics. In his response to Keith Augustine’s critique of the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies essay contest on survival evidence, Braude and his co-authors argued that Augustine’s review “mixes reasonable criticisms of the BICS contest and many of the winning essays with lazy reliance on some of the most tired and shallow critiques of parapsychological research.” They noted that Augustine himself employed straw-man arguments and cherry-picked evidence while accusing the winning essays of the same errors.⁸

This willingness to engage skeptical critique directly, while maintaining high standards for argumentation on both sides, exemplified Braude’s vision of how frontier science should operate. The goal was not to silence skeptics but to insist that they meet the same standards of evidence and logical rigor that parapsychologists themselves must meet. A representative example of the strong skeptical position Braude engaged is the argument by psychologists Arthur Reber and James Alcock that parapsychology’s central claims conflict with foundational scientific principles and should therefore be rejected independently of any particular experimental result.⁹