Author Topic: Publishers Withdraw More than 120 Gibberish Science and Engineering Papers  (Read 1924 times)

elagache

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Dear WeatherCat observers of scientific practice,

This morning there was a report that should give all of us more than a small worry about how academic practice is conducted these days:

Publishers Withdraw More than 120 Gibberish Science and Engineering Papers: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-science-and-engineering-papers/

Here is an abbreviated introduction of this article:

Quote
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labb? of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labb?, say that they are now removing the papers.
. . . . .
Labb? developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers ? and, as they put it, ?to maximize amusement? (see ?Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper?). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv. SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen?s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.

I'll spare you'all my own personal sufferings at the hands of an academic system that clearly promotes self-ego at the expense of collective understanding.  What is profoundly disturbing is that this situation clearly shows that most academics are not sincerely keeping up with the scientific writings of their peers.  For so many papers to have slipped in without being noticed is a blanket indictment of general academic practice.

There are a number of hot-button topics where the public has been "assured" that they could trust the results of the scientific community - and yet many have continued to harbor doubts.  This catastrophic failure of academic practice to police itself leaves us most uncertain about anything that has been "learned" in recent times.

Definitely discouraging news . . . . . 

Edouard