Scientific Journal Fraud

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Fox News has reported that around 120 papers that have been published in established scientific journals over the last few years have been found to be frauds, and these articles have been pulled from the journals that originally published them. This is not the first time that papers have been published that have been revealed to be nonsense. Yet somehow people still remain so trusting!

The phony papers were in the fields of math and computer science and were reported to be created by an automated word generator that strings random, fancy sounding words together in plausible sentence structures.  “Simulating Flip-Flop Gates Using Peer-to-Peer Methodologies,”  “Application and Research of Small talk Harnessing Based on Game-Theoretic Symmetries” and “An Evaluation of E-Business with Fin”; were some of the papers titles.  No one has any explanation as to why the journals published meaningless papers.

  

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Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble France, told FoxNews.com that, “High pressure on scientists leads directly to too prolific and less meaningful publications.” He added that,  “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.”

SCIgen is the program that generates random papers. Fox News reports that Cyril Labbé has made it his mission to detect fake papers. “Our tools are very efficient to detect SCIgen papers and also to detect duplicates and plagiarisms,” reported Labbé. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. According to Nature News, who first reported the journal fraud, the publishers, which were privately informed by Cyril Labbé, and say that they are now removing the papers.

A spokesman for the publisher Springer, Eric Merkel-Sobotta, said “We are in the process of investigating… and taking the papers down as quickly as possible.”

Image credit: www.aps.org