How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

Questions and research help requests. Student surveys may be posted here.
#14369459

How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia


Wednesday 26 February 2014

The Guardian

More and more academic papers that are essentially gobbledegook are being written by computer programs – and accepted at conferences

Image
'I've written five PhDs on Heidegger just this afternoon. What next?' Photograph: Blutgruppe

Like all the best hoaxes, there was a serious point to be made. Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees.

It took only a handful of days. The students wrote a simple computer program that churned out gobbledegook and presented it as an academic paper. They put their names on one of the papers, sent it to a conference, and promptly had it accepted. The sting, in 2005, revealed a farce that lay at the heart of science.

But this is the hoax that keeps on giving. The creators of the automatic nonsense generator, Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, have made the SCIgen program free to download. And scientists have been using it in their droves. This week, Nature reported, French researcher Cyril Labbé revealed that 16 gobbledegook papers created by SCIgen had been used by German academic publisher Springer. More than 100 more fake SCIgen papers were published by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Both organisations have now taken steps to remove the papers.

Hoaxes in academia are nothing new. In 1996, mathematician Alan Sokal riled postmodernists by publishing a nonsense paper in the leading US journal, Social Text. It was laden with meaningless phrases but, as Sokal said, it sounded good to them. Other fields have not been immune. In 1964, critics of modern art were wowed by the work of Pierre Brassau, who turned out to be a four-year-old chimpanzee. In a more convoluted case, Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France's best-known philosophers, was left to ponder his own expertise after quoting the lectures of Jean-Baptiste Botul as evidence that Kant was a fake, only to find out that Botul was the fake, an invention of a French reporter.

Just as the students wrote a quick and dirty program to churn out nonsense papers, so Labbé has written one to spot the papers. He has made it freely available, so publishers and conference organisers have no excuse for accepting nonsense work in future.

Krohn, who has now founded a startup called Keybase.io in New York that provides encryption to programmers, said Labbé's detective work revealed how deep the problem ran. Academics are under intense pressure to publish, conferences and journals want to turn their papers into profits, and universities want them published. "This ought to be a shock to people," Krohn said. "There's this whole academic underground where everyone seems to benefit, but they are wasting time and money and adding nothing to science. The institutions are being ripped off, because they pay publishers huge subscriptions for this stuff."

Krohn sees an arms race brewing, in which computers churn out ever more convincing papers, while other programs are designed to sniff them out. Does he regret the beast he helped unleash, or is he proud that it is still exposing weaknesses in the world of science? "I'm psyched, it's so great. These papers are so funny, you read them and can't help but laugh. They are total bullshit. And I don't see this going away."

• This article was amended on 27 February 2014, to cite Nature as the source of the story


http://www.theguardian.com/technology/s ... g-academia
#14369613
So he creates a program that makes fake papers and is selling the program to catch them, I doubt he is regretting it.

Honestly though, so what? As long as there are human beings there will be cheaters, the peer review process and future research has always ended up discarding the trash.
#14369629
mikema63 wrote:Honestly though, so what? As long as there are human beings there will be cheaters, the peer review process and future research has always ended up discarding the trash.

It wasn't the peer-review process that recognised the fakes mentioned in the article. Rather, some of the papers were apparently accepted after being peer-reviewed which is one reason why this is somewhat troubling. From Nature:
Nature wrote:Ruth Francis, UK head of communications at Springer, says that the company has contacted editors, and is trying to contact authors, about the issues surrounding the articles that are coming down. The relevant conference proceedings were peer reviewed, she confirms — making it more mystifying that the papers were accepted.
#14369649
It wasn't the peer-review process that recognised the fakes mentioned in the article. Rather, some of the papers were apparently accepted after being peer-reviewed which is one reason why this is somewhat troubling.

I don't see how this could be possible in one of the hard sciences. An expert in the field (as all reviewers must be) would instantly spot a fake paper as soon as he read it. It suggests that they hadn't actually read the papers.
#14369666
Potemkin wrote:I don't see how this could be possible in one of the hard sciences. An expert in the field (as all reviewers must be) would instantly spot a fake paper as soon as he read it. It suggests that they hadn't actually read the papers.

I had hope that this wouldn't be possible in any science branch. Oh well, ...

Another example:
MIT wrote:Students at Sharif University get a paper accepted
Tuesday, June 26, 2007, 11:01 AM
I just wanted to take a moment to sum up a little SCIgen-related story out of Iran that's come to my attention. PhD students at Sharif University, apparently fed up with their school's policies regarding how published papers are considered for their thesis requirements, used SCIgen to submit a paper to the Elsevier journal, Applied Mathematics and Computation:

Cooperative, Compact Algorithms for Randomized Algorithms
by Rohollah Mosallahnezhad, Iran Institute of Technology

I'm told that the author's name roughly translates to "from armed breed (race)" in Farsi (apparently as a jab against the European and US editors about the alleged nuclear threat of Iran), and that the institution is fictional as well. Anyhow, as you might guess, this paper was accepted by the journal as an "article in proof," and they even provided an edited and formatted article proof, along with an awesome set of corrections to be resolved. For several weeks it was listed as being in an editing phase.

However, the Iranian students felt that by getting the paper accepted, they had made their point, and announced to their colleagues that the paper was accepted, as proof to their university that the AMC journal did not really have any quality control, and that publications in that journal shouldn't be considered as seriously when judging the performance of PhD students. Presumably, one of these colleagues alerted the journal to their error, and now the journal has retracted the acceptance of the paper, complete with a note of apology from the editor.


SciGen website
#14369964
Writing papers in Uni became assembly line work after the first year. It was the same mold to produce a paper each year, regardless of the teacher and it was good enough for somewhere between a B & an A. It just became too tedious and boring. I never actually spent time reading texts for quotes as Google had plenty of quotes from books. Just a quick copy/paste and add the footer note and done. I never understood the value of the the diploma at the time, but I guess I put as much effort into it as value I received from it in the end.
#14369980
Writing papers in Uni became assembly line work after the first year. It was the same mold to produce a paper each year, regardless of the teacher and it was good enough for somewhere between a B & an A. It just became too tedious and boring. I never actually spent time reading texts for quotes as Google had plenty of quotes from books. Just a quick copy/paste and add the footer note and done. I never understood the value of the the diploma at the time, but I guess I put as much effort into it as value I received from it in the end.

That works at undergraduate level, where you're not expected to come up with anything original. At postgraduate level, however, unless you actually do the reading and then think about what you've read then you will simply be rehashing what other people have thought on that topic, and no-one is going to give you a PhD for that. These papers were supposed to represent the fruits of original research. This is what is so disturbing about the whole thing.
#14369987
Potemkin wrote:These papers were supposed to represent the fruits of original research. This is what is so disturbing about the whole thing.
Well, now we know it really doesn't matter whether you put full effort into it or not. I should be a PhD by now with all my amazing undergrad essays.
#14369996
Potemkin wrote:The only problem with that plan is that someone will actually read your PhD thesis.
Oh... didn't think about that... Let's hope for my sake that the person is drunk or stoned during that time.
#14370021
Here's a question for everyone to ponder, and I hope I'm not told off for intentionally taking a thread down the garden path...but..have Tertiary Institutions and the 'service' they provide become "too big to fail?"

Hypothetically speaking (or literally speaking I don't mind which) if we had to choose between 'saving' the psychological construct of the banking sector or the concept of University's being institutions of integrity that dispense qualifications of exception, which would we defend as a priority?

Please note, I understand that on a practical level we could do both as the miracles of quantitative easing and a culture of 'saving ones ass' could attest, and I wouldn't be surprised if in true war game mentality some bogans have already tried it on for size.

But what does everyone else think? Would a failure of our University's and a thorough investigation into their practices call everything they have let through the ranks into question hence triggering another financial crisis?
#14370022
Basically, a group of MIT students tried to prove that fake computer-science papers produced by SCIgen could be accepted by the conferences and more than 100 papers ended up being published by peer-reviewed journals. Those papers were accepted without raising eyebrows because the conferences took place in China, where Chinese graduate students submitted the fake papers generated by the computer programme, and Chinese scholars failed to find any inconsistency perhaps because of the language barrier or lower academic standards in China. It's no surprise that academia was trolled by authors with Chinese affiliations as China is home to numerous counterfeit products and this controversy does not undermine the credibility of academic papers written at Western academic research institutions but any papers originated in China should face more scrutiny.


Image
Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations. Labbé has emailed editors and authors named in many of the papers and related conferences but received scant replies; one editor said that he did not work as a program chair at a particular conference, even though he was named as doing so, and another author claimed his paper was submitted on purpose to test out a conference, but did not respond on follow-up. Nature has not heard anything from a few enquiries.
http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763

Moving on to the next misuse of language that sho[…]

@JohnRawls What if your assumption is wrong??? […]

Israel-Palestinian War 2023

Only Zionists believe that bollocks and you lot ar[…]

There is no reason to have a state at all unless w[…]