Gibberish Science

Oh yes, you read right. There really are gibberish science generated by computers. And they are published in highly respected journals. It is an easy way for a lazy ‘scientist’ to increase the number of publications… In 2014, the publishers Springer and IEEE have removed more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. 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 have removed the papers. Labbé does not know why the papers were submitted — or even if the authors were aware of them. 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 inquiries.

Oh well, maybe some invisible beings or aliens are doing this embarrassing science!