Publishers Withdraw More Than 120 Fake Papers

bmahersciwriter writes "Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has cataloged 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." Looks like journal trolling is really easy.

Comments

Maybe if academic departments valued quality.

[hey!]

I recently did some literature research into ontology technology, and was shocked by how many papers were pot-boilers that disguised trivial ideas with inflated language. These were papers that had absolutely no discernible academic value other than to pad a resume, and collect but a smattering of citations, mostly from similar papers. In comparison the seminal papers, the ones that get tons of citations for years to come are robust, thought-provoking and well-written.

Granted the well-written part probably has something to do with attracting future citations, but I think the trivial nature of the useless papers probably has something to do with their obscure style.

The key here is "Conference Proceedings"

[JoshuaZ]

In many fields conference proceedings have little to no oversight. These papers don't get noticed at all or cited and for most purposes don't exist. The only real issue I can see here is that a large fraction of these are apparently coming from China and this is consistent with prior reports of serious problems with academic quality coming from China. It is possible that people are using these essentially fake papers to boost their publication counts which may give them some advantages as long as no one looks closely, but any institution that is a serious institution will look at everything one has published. I actually found this point more interesting:

Labbé emphasizes that the nonsense computer science papers all appeared in subscription offerings. In his view, there is little evidence that open-access publishers — which charge fees to publish manuscripts — necessarily have less stringent peer review than subscription publishers.

Considering how many complaints there are about low-quality open-access journals, this suggests that that isn't nearly as much of an issue as some people are claiming.

Re:The key here is "Conference Proceedings"

[Anonymous Coward]

In CS, well-refereed conference proceedings often exceed journal publications in their contemporaneous impact and prestige value to authors. CS journals typically take 2 years to process a manuscript to publication. Way too slow for a fast-moving field. Good conferences will have a 20% manuscript acceptance rate (been there, done that, as author and reviewer, many times) with only useful papers presented and put into proceedings, only a few months after research results have been written up.

I had the privilege of educating a dean about the value of selectively-refereed conference proceedings for academic computer scientists. It worked. Also educated about the adjunct value of releasing research software to the specialized communities, if the usage and impact can be documented.

EXCEPT --- It's worse than THAT!

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Most of these computer generated papers have valuable ideas we need to consider.

Statistics indicate that 1 in 24.3 of these computer generated papers have uniquely valuable scientific advancements. But the real-world ratio is about 1:99.7 --- the 3 sigma rule.

If these computer-generated papers are exceeding the productivity of the actual papers by a 4 to 1 margin, a big opportunity is being missed and it doesn't matter why.

A true case of an unintended result exceed the effectiveness of your average deliberate result. Short version: a 4% rate actually exceeds the real-world discovery rate. This should not be ignored, coincidence or not.