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A Paper By Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel Was Accepted By Two Journals
An anonymous reader writes "A scientific study by Maggie Simpson, Edna Krabappel, and Kim Jong Fun has been accepted by two journals. Of course, none of these fictional characters actually wrote the paper, titled "Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations." Rather, it's a nonsensical text, submitted by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky in an effort to expose scientific journals — the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology."
This should be done all the time, like whitehats and pentesters, culling the ranks of bullshit journals.
Unfortunately, this will just get used by anti-science folks to point out how full of shit "science" is.
With a double blind review system, the identities of the authors should be irrelevant. If the paper itself has merit, then it should not matter if it is written by a well-respected reviewer, a newcomer, someone writing pseudonymously, or even an anonymous author.
The real story here isn't the authors' pseudonyms, but rather the nonsensical content of the paper, and even that aspect of the story is hardly original.
This should be done all the time, like whitehats and pentesters, culling the ranks of bullshit journals.
It is. At this point, I don't even know why "journal publishes nonsense paper" is even a news story any more. It's been happening for close to 20 years now.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Fake and/or predatory journals are an interesting phenomenon with repercussions greater than just whether they accept nonsense papers. Could the poster edit to include some commentary on why this is interesting?
Can't really take the high ground when you accept all the crap that Bennett writes.