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Romanian Science Journal Punked By Serbian Academics
schwit1 writes "A group of Serbian academics, disgusted with the poor state of their country's research output, have scammed a Romanian science journal by getting it to accept their completely fabricated hoax article. From the article: 'The paper is replete with transparent gimmicks — obvious, that is, had anyone at the publication been paying attention — including a reference to the scholarship of [singer Michael] Jackson, Weber, [porn star Ron] Jeremy and citations to new studies by Bernoulli and Laplace, both dead more than 180 years (Weber died in 1920). They also throw in references to the "Journal of Modern Illogical Studies," which to the best of our knowledge does not and never has existed (although perhaps it should), and to a researcher named, dubiously, "A.S. Hole." And, we hasten to add, the noted Kazakh polymath B. Sagdiyev, otherwise known as Borat.' Their paper is hilarious and completely ridiculous, and yet it was published in a so-called serious journal without question. The best part is that they list Alan Sokal's hoax paper from 1996 as one of their sources."
In order to get a better bang for their dollar, Serbian government made some radical changes regarding the pay grades of researchers in state universities and institutes. The most important metrics is now the number of publications in the high impact factor journals.
In principle, the idea is not terribly bad. Academic success is being measured by some quantitative objective criteria.
Unfortunately, in practice the system is far from ideal. The problem begins with "impact factor". Too many journals are gaming the system. This is a global international phenomenon.
Upon the introduction of the new system, few unscrupulous Serbian researchers began exploiting the obvious loophole. Namely, there are tons of journals worldwide, who will happily take one's money and publish whatever junk one sends. For whatever reason they carry high impact factor. Few of these "scientists" built entire carriers using this shameful practice.
The prank has been widely publicized in Serbian news outlets and more than served its purpose.
Please check this out:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
This is a random paper generator, and its output has been accepted at a conference.
There are plenty of low-quality conferences and publications.
I know this is /. .... :)
but you really should take a few peeks at the paper. It made me laugh
Some investigators agree that simulation through generating random data is an interesting new topic in the field of information discovery, and more and more researchers concur. On the sceptic side, many scientists would agree that, had it not been for the necessity of providing meaningful results, many of existing solutions would be self-sufficient, and, sensing this, we set to show that randomness is indeed often used as an opportunistic “golden standard” of appositeness to further recycle the subject at hand.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.