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Randomly Generated Math Article Accepted By 'Open-Access' Journal

call -151 writes "Many years ago, a human-generated intentionally nonsense paper was accepted by the (prominent) literary culture journal Social Text. In August, a randomly-generated nonsense mathematics paper was accepted by one of the many low-tier 'open-access' research mathematics journals. The software Mathgen, which generated the accepted submission, takes as inputs author names (or those can be randomly selected also) and generates nicely TeX'd and impressive-sounding sentences which are grammatically correct but mathematically disconnected nonsense. This was reviewed by a human, (quickly, for math, in 12 days) and the reviewers' comments mention superficial problems with the submission (PDF). The references are also randomly-generated and rather hilarious. For those with concerns about submitting to lower-tier journals in an effort to promote open access, this is not a good sign!"

1 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Literally accept anything. by interkin3tic · · Score: 4, Informative

    The previous incident mentioned was from 1996, the "Sokal affair" as wiki calls it. It was a journal, not a conference, but was not peer reviewed at the time, according to the wiki article.

    The current issue appears to have been peer reviewed, there were some comments for the "author."

    In both cases, the journals were mentioned:Advances in Pure Mathematics for the current one, and "Social text" for the 1996 one.