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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.
Sheesh. What kind of journal accepts a paper written by a baby?
The 'author' should have been Lisa Simpson
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?
It'd be a lot more newsworthy if it was a journal with an extant impact factor. Neither of these even show up on search.
Everyone knows Marge and Maggie simpson are totally unqualified authors for a journal on the combinational properties of Ethernet and websites. And Edna? oh id laugh to think she would be capable of reading or even WRITING something so absurdly complex. Shes deceased (gvoy). But that isnt however to say that other journals arent worth READING from these and other outlets (mmhey). Why for example I myself wrote a paper on a device i call the Sarcasm detector, and as you know my work on the hamburger earmuffs are also published science. Lets not also forget my published conference proceedings on general properties of Operation Hoyviiin Mayviiin!!
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Can't really take the high ground when you accept all the crap that Bennett writes.
This example was about predatory journals. There are also predatory "vanity publishers" that convince aspiring authors to pay money to get their book published.
A group of science fiction authors put together a complete novel to sting one such vanity press. The result, Atlanta Nights, is a hoot!
In one chapter, Bruce Lucent is a young hotshot software developer; in another, he is an old, broken-down shell of a man. Some chapters have new characters that are never heard from again. Near the end of the book, the full text of the first chapter appears again as a new chapter. Also, someone wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream... and then the book continues for a few more chapters. And my favorite: the last chapter was written by feeding other chapters into a Markov Chain nonsense generator. Example: "Bruce Lucent walked around anymore."
Rather than using Simpsons names, they chose a fake name "Travis Tea" that sounds like the word "travesty".
Atlanta Nights was accepted for publication, but after the authors had their press release the publisher changed its mind.
http://www.sfwa.org/members/travistea/backstory.htm
They got a bunch of famous authors to give tongue-in-cheek blurbs about the book. Jerry Pournelle: "Don't fail to miss it if you can!"
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I'm more concerned about the "papers" that contain gibberish nonsense than one where the author isn't correct. Those are both names that could easily exist, but even if they didn't, it shouldn't be a problem to publish an article by Anonymous as long as it's peer-reviewed and contains good material.
Relatively accurate. It's about the same as "racist nonsense published on right-wing 'news' site."
The journals they got the stuff into are about as reliable and factual as, say, youngcons or breitbart.
Could it be a take on Kim Jong-un I don't get that reference - I agree he should have used Ralph Wiggum instead. That said - it shouldn't be based on the names in the title (I would hate for any Maggie Simpsons out there being denied publication) but rather the fact that it was a completely junk paper.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Indeed. When someone manages to get something like this past, say, Computational Linguistics, then we'll have something newsworthy. This is akin to announcing "House without door has lock picked!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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This is a terrible summary, and should clearly state that this was a joke effort to expose two essentially fake journals (that no one in the field thinks are real) as predatory and accepting papers for money without peer review. The summary makes it sound like this is a big deal or that these might have been important journals, but really as an academic (or anyone with a university email address) you get at least 10 of these offers to publish papers in random fake journals for money in your inbox every day.
For non-academics, these "journals" are basically the difference between a guy in a trench coat coming up to you on the street and offering to "publish" your book for money, and a real and respected publishing house like the MIT Press offering to publish your book after a laborious review process. If a real journal or publisher accepted a paper or book that was fake or had genuine errors, this would be substantial news (and it does happen occasionally that things do get past the reviewers, they're only human), but that is very far from the case here.
I think it's great to see more women of all ages in the STEM fields. Good show!
I noticed that the title of the summary only had two of the three names. What, Kim Jong Fun not sounding female enough for the New Improved Slashdot?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Of course, the guys from Futurama would have written an actual paper.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Or, it will be used by pro-science folks to point out how full of shit the peer "review" system is -- or can be.
sig: sauer
Note the lack of a space in "Fun,Edna" in the acceptance letter.
Also, using a gmail address doesn't exactly seem professional. You would think a legitimate professional journal could splurge a few bucks for their own domain-name. Oh wait....
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
No, it's proof that those journals your university pays a fortune to stock in their libraries, and which often charge researchers for the privilege of submitting their papers could for a lot less money be replaced by wiki sites where researchers could submit their papers and solicit peer review. A simple account registration process would filter out most pranksters.
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"Is it possible to justify the great pains we took in our implementation? No. With these considerations in mind, we ran four novel experiments: (1) we measured Web server and DNS latency on our decommissioned Macintosh SEs; "
Now that's hilarious.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology are perfectly cromulent journals.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
What you need to do is look at the impact factor of each journal -- a measure of how often articles in that journal are cited. What constitutes a "good" IF varies from field to field, so you want to compare the IF of a journal to the leading journals in that field. In this case the IF for the journals in question are 1.47 (0.3 for a five year period) and 1.15.. By comparison, the ACM Transaction on Intelligent Systems and Technology has an impact factor of 9.39.
There have always been low quality journals, but recently I'm seeing an uptick in pseudo-science advocates like anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists citing "published research" that makes absurdly broad claims. It's important to look up the IF for the journals referenced, they're often predatory journals that function like a "vanity press" for unpublishable papers.
The site http://scholarlyoa.com/ is also very useful. It maintains a list both of predatory journals and predatory publishers in the business of giving a platform to junk scholarship. Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems is not on the list of standalone predatory journals, nor is the publisher American Scientific Publishers on the list of predatory publishers -- yet. Aperito *is* on the list of suspect publishers.
Unforutnately IF isn't infallible. You can't automatically dismiss a paper because it's published in a low IF journal. You have to look at the whole pattern. A new paper making unusual claims is a lot more credible if it's published in a high IF journal like Nature. If it's published in Fred's Research Journal, you have to wait and see whether the paper gets cited by reputable scholars or by papers in more mainline journals.
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Hah!
Dark Reflection
I don't know how things are done now, but back when I was in school, we were assigned to write essays by word count, not page count for exactly that reason. And, that's why writers talk about how many words they've written recently, not how many pages because page counts are much easier to inflate than word counts. (Double spacing, large fonts and bigger margins can make the same number of words fill more pages.)
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I am really not sure what this says about me... -Milhouse
Why anyone buys into the academic racket is beyond me. You spend a decade or more of your life working at-or-below minimum wage paying high tuition costs to do some cool science. To advance your academic career, you must publish your findings, which means turning over all rights to your findings to the journals. And if you're lucky, you might be one of the 8% who get a tenure track position, the rest are screwed.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/
Did you know the UC system pays around $4 billion per year in journal subscriptions, primarily to have access to the publications published at their own institutions? And those costs are rapidly accelerating:
http://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/scholpub/journalcosts
It's all a massive money-racket.
States that Edna has a Masters from Bryn Mawr College, so I'd say she's more than qualified to get published. Now don't you feel silly?
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that there are several Journals doing pay for play. In that context the summary is fine.
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This is akin to announcing "House without door has lock picked!"
Not to be pedantic, but actually that would be pretty interesting. What's the lock attached to and what was keeping the bugler from gaining entry that required the lock to be circumvented?
This is akin to announcing "House without door has lock picked!"
Not to be pedantic, but actually that would be pretty interesting. What's the lock attached to and what was keeping the bugler from gaining entry that required the lock to be circumvented?
Perhaps a safe inside the house with no door had its lock picked? That should still constitute the house having its lock picked, since the safe was part of the house, and therefore so was the safe's lock.
Of course, it could later be revealed that not only did the house not have a door, but there was no opening anywhere where a door would have been, meaning the one breaking into the house had to either go through a window, bash a hole in a wall, or squeeze down the chimney.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Story titles are limited to 80 Latin-1 characters, comment subjects to 50. How would you rewrite the headline?
You can bet the Simpsons articles will be analysed and will be cited. Number of citations might also include often used examples of a failure.
es, I'm serious. He's a freind of mine, and he's had the name since long before the show went on air. My point is that having the name 'Maggie Simpson' means nothing -- unlike the bogus content. I don't know if they did this, butit seems that a properly juried work should have the name removed from it during the review process.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
You were right. I found the reference, but I don't understand why you were modded down to oblivion. Perhaps it was Bing shills, who objected to your use of the "Google is your friend" meme.
Also in my search, I found this reference to a video that went viral in China poking fun at Kim Jong Un, and I found it entertaining: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...
I read TFA, and it broke me up! I laughed so hard I almost pissed myself. Seriously...
Unfortunately, this will just get used by anti-science folks to point out how full of shit "science" is.
Yes, but those idiots aren't actually capable of forming rational arguments. They only know how to recite dogma, and their faith doesn't require proof. Just stating something and believing make it true.
The reality is that this exposes the strength of science: Anyone can publish a pile of rubbish and call it fact, but the scientific community will quickly call it out, discuss it, and dismiss the rubbish as such.
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
In both cases, it would still be at least somewhat interesting. Which was my point. Certainly more so than what passes for news some days.
A house with no door for entry that has a safe with a keyed lock. Generally ones that are large enough to be part of the house have combination locks that you either crack or have to cut through. Certainly not one that can be picked.
And a house that either requires such security that there is no door, or had a contractor so incompetent that they forgot the door. That's would be interesting in its humor at the very least.