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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?
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.
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.
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.
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!