More than 120 computer-generated "gibberish" research papers are being removed from the archives of scientific journal publishers Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) after a French computer scientist determined the papers were fakes.
The bogus research papers, it turns out, were created by an automated word generation program that can string random, seemingly sophisticated words together in plausible English syntax.
Scientific papers, especially those dealing with computer science and mathematics, as these fake papers were, feature reams of sophisticated jargon. Even legitimate papers can seem like gibberish to an unfamiliar reader.
The computer scientist who unveiled the fake papers, Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in France,
told Fox News that there is high pressure on research scientists to publish and to do so frequently, which creates an environment where publishing fake research can be incentivized.Among the papers' titles were computer-generated gems such as "Application and Research of Smalltalk Harnessing Based on Game-Theoretic Symmetries"; "An Evaluation of E-Business with Fin"; and "Simulating Flip-Flop Gates Using Peer-to-Peer Methodologies,"according to a Fox News report.
"They all should have been evaluated by a peer-review process. I've no explanation for them being here. I guess each of them needs an investigation," Labbé told Fox News.
Labbé and his colleagues have created a piece of software called SCIgen which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake research papers. They created the software in 2005 to prove how easy it is to fake research, the Nature blog reported. SCIgen is free to download and use, but it is unclear how many people have done so and for what purposes they have used to software.
screen shot of SCIgen
Generated PDF file with fake research paper
They have also build a website that can detect whether a paper has been produced usign SCIgen.
SCIgen research papers detection tool
Timotheos commented on How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia.
"I am an editor of an academic journal (one of the top ones in my field). We solve this (along with a few other problems) via machine based screening of papers in the first instance. More journals do this to catch out these problems. Conferences, however, are lower in the food chain (in my field few people care about conference papers) and hence don't get the investment. So while this sounds 'exciting' and a bit of a damning of areas of scholarship, it is not so rampant that one would want to say that it is more than a curiosity. There are other issues that are even more worrying that relate to the inability to confirm results and direct theft of ideas (particularly coming from places like China where it is difficult to confirm that the work is indeed that of the people who put their name on the papers or books)."
In less than 10 minutes we were able to create three academic papers and have them verified by the program “antiSCIgen”. Seems simple, right?
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