Over 120 Nonsense Computer-Generated Gibberish Essays Accepted as “Scientific Papers”

The decline of our civilization is marked by the decline of integrity and critical thought in what ought to be our highest disciplines.

THE ACADEMIC publisher Springer and the IEEE will be removing more than 120 academic papers from their subscription services after a researcher found they were computer-generated gibberish.

For a layperson, looking at scientific papers can be an exercise in humility. We know most of those words, and surely they make sense in some capacity, but high concept research uses, by necessity, some very complicated language.

Apparently not even the publishers of these papers are as adept as we thought at gauging their meaning, as the work of one researcher reveals. Computer scientist Cyril Labbé (pictured) of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, spent two years examining published research papers, and found that computer-generated papers made it into more than 30 conferences, and over 120 have been published by academic publishing houses — over 100 by the the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and 16 by Springer.

The papers were generated by a piece of free software called SCIgen, developed in 2005 by scientists at MIT. SCIgen randomly generates nonsense papers, complete with graphs, diagrams and citations, and its purpose was to demonstrate how easily conferences accept meaningless submissions.

Labbé, who has built a website that allows users to check whether a paper was generated using the program, said he did not know why the papers had been submitted. Most of the conferences took place in China, and many of the papers named real authors, some of whom may or may not have known their names were being used in this way. One author claimed he had created the paper to test a conference.

Both publishing houses have pulled the papers in question, although some issues remain. Ruth Springer, UK head of communications for Springer, is running into issues trying to contact the authors, and noted that the conferences in question were, in fact, peer reviewed, which casts a bad light on the current processes. IEEE, however, declined to comment.

Labbé’s research was published in a paper titled “Duplicate and fake publications in the scientific literature: how many SCIgen papers in computer science?”

Labbé is no stranger to fake studies. In April 2010, he used SCIgen to generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antkare [see pdf]. Labbé showed how easy it was to add these fake papers to the Google Scholar database, boosting Ike Antkare’s h-index, a measure of published output, to 94 — at the time, making Antkare the world’s 21st most highly cited scientist. Last year, researchers at the University of Granada, Spain, added to Labbé’s work, boosting their own citation scores in Google Scholar by uploading six fake papers with long lists to their own previous work.

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Source: Cnet Australia and Nature