Peer review is the gold standard for papers. It is intended to vet papers to see they are sound and acceptable for publication. However, many well qualified scientists are very busy men/women so they have little time available to do it properly. I do it for one Journal and it may take me hrs to properly review a paper, but then I am thorough and have lots of free time. In the cases referred to here, they were submitted to conferences where standards may not be so high, yet there has been a complete failure to properly review these papers. Surely a competant scientist could detect gibberish but apparently not. If I were a dishonest scientist, and there are a few out there, I would be severely tempted to get my publication rate up using the computer programme used to generate the papers referred to here.
Science publisher fooled by gibberish papers
AFP March 01, 2014 12:00AM
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SPRINGER, the publisher of science journals, has been forced to scrap 16 papers from its archives after they were revealed to be computer-generated gibberish.
The fake papers had been submitted to conferences on computer science and engineering whose proceedings were published in specialised, subscription-only publications, Springer said.
“We are in the process of taking down the papers as quickly as possible,” the German-based publisher said.
“This means that they will be removed, not retracted, since they are all nonsense.
“We are looking into our procedures to find the weakness that could allow something like this to happen, and we will adapt our processes to ensure that it does not happen again.”
The embarrassing lapse was exposed by French computer scientist Cyril Labbe of the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble.
He also spotted more than 100 other “nonsense” papers unwittingly published by the New York-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the journal Nature reported.
The institute said it had been advised “there might have been some conference papers published in our IEEE Xplore digital library that did not meet our quality standards”.
“We took immediate action to remove those papers, and also refined our processes to prevent papers not meeting our standards from being published in the future,” the institute said, without giving further details.
Dr Labbe, 41, has been exploring how to detect fake papers written with a program called SCIgen. At the press of a button, the program cranks out impressive-looking “studies” stuffed with randomly selected computer and engineering terms.
For example: “Constant-time technology and access points have garnered great interest from both futurists and physicists in the last several years. After years of extensive research into superpages, we confirm the appropriate unification of 128-bit architectures and checksums.” This “paper” comes complete with fake graphs and citations - essential features in scientific publishing - that in SCIgen’s case includes recent references to famous scientists who died decades or centuries ago.
The program was devised in 2005 by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They used it to concoct meaningless papers that were accepted by conferences. The researchers later revealed the hoax to expose flaws in safeguards.
SCIgen is freely available at http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ - though the site was too busy yesterday when The Australian tried to generate its own paper.
The website says: “Our aim here is to maximise amusement, rather than coherence.”
Dr Labbe said he had spotted the frauds by searching for telltale SCIgen vocabulary.
In 2010, he used SCIgen to create 102 bogus papers by a fictitious scientist and added these to the Google Scholar database, an index of science prestige.
For a time, “Ike Antkare” ranked 21st on the database’s list of most-cited scientists in the world - Einstein ranked a lowly 36th.
The fake papers detected by Dr Labbe were submitted to conferences between 2008 and 2013. They were uncovered through research he published in 2012 in Scientometrics - by coincidence, also a Springer journal.
Dr Labbe said the fraud struck at the credibility of peer-reviewed systems in which scientific claims are meant to be assessed by independent experts for soundness.
He said there were several possible explanations for the fakes. “One is that people are just testing the system, but if that’s the case, they should reveal who they are and they haven’t done so,” he said. “Another is the papers are a deliberate fraud to make money.”
Springer said scientific publishing, like other fields, “is not immune to fraud and mistakes. The peer-review system is the best system we have so far and this incident will lead to additional measures on the part of Springer to strengthen it.”
