First I checked, double-checked and triple-checked to see if this was a hoax. Then, once I was confident that it was true, I allowed my head to explode.

The headline to today’s head-blasting post requires a bit of explanation.

As a senior at Arlington High School (Massachusetts), I was editorial editor of the school newspaper, The Arlington High Chronicle. I had to choose, edit and publish the best of the submissions from the staff, and usually wrote the lead editorial myself. Well, one week I was up against a deadline and had nothing to fill an empty space on the page except a dog’s breakfast of miserably written options. Desperate, I decided to turn the crisis into an opportunity. I took the worst of the articles, cut out each line, mixed them up in a bowl and picked them out at random. Then I retyped the incomprehensible result, adding capitals and punctuation, and headlined it “Discrimination in Portugal.” That was how it was published. I always suspected that nobody read the editorials; this was my chance to find out if my suspicions were correct.

Nobody said a word. The paper got one letter from a student saying that he disagreed with the piece, but other than that, there was no evidence that anyone noticed that one of the editorials was complete gibberish.

Now this, from Nature:

“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 Labbé 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 Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.”

The fake papers had titles like  “A Fast Timing Data Mining Technique Based on Grey System,”  “A Novel Wavelet Image Compression Method Based on Zerotree Codec,” “Implementation of Embedded Mobile Database Based on Mobile Agent,” “A Residential District Building Environment information system based on WebGIS,” and  “A Methodology for the Study of Evolutionary Programming.”  

Apparently nobody read them, or if some did, they…

• didn’t understand them but pretended they did, or
• didn’t understand them and were afraid to admit it, or
• realized they were nonsense and didn’t bother to tell anyone,
• or perhaps most frightening of all, did understand them.

Where was peer review? Quality control? Editors? Alert readers? Responsible readers? Who was creating  and submitting these scientific equivalents of “Discrimination in Portugal”? Why?

Part of the phenomenon can be blamed on some MIT wise guys who in 2005 invented a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. The puckish programmers were trying to show that many scientific conferences were just money-making scams, and that submitted “scholarly” papers were barely screened, if at all. A paper titled “Rooter: a methodology for the typical unification of access points and redundancy”, allegedly co-authored with Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, was accepted for the 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics in 2005. It had really been composed by the software and was pure gobbledegook.

Now, however, the 2005 software has fallen into other, unknown hands, and SCIgen is writing and submitting papers all over the world.

This is yet another example of how hoaxes are dangerous and irresponsible. Moreover, the fact that this can occur, and occur so frequently calls into question the diligence, integrity and trustworthiness of…

• Academic conferences, their screening and quality control
• Academic publications, their review process and editing
• Attendees, readers and scholars
• Scientists, scholars and academics
• Academia, and
• Science.

How much of the scientific and scholarly community is faking it? I don’t know, but I think a fair conclusion is: a lot more than we thought, and a lot more than is acceptable.

Meanwhile, as a bowl and out of mixed the incomprehensible on high and published; I was up incomprehensible. I always suspected the best a dog’s breadlington I to fill, and usually wrote- took the submission, an empty space to and usually wrote the submissions. Despected them out. As a deadline worst of the article, I had the editorial my school, I decided the week I always suspected the best of the  articles, cut each line an opportunity. The best out at nobody read editor at now.*

Who can argue with that?

* generated using the thinkzone gibberish generator.

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Pointer: Fox News

Sources: Nature 1,2,3;