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Hoax-Detecting Software Spots Fake Papers
sciencehabit writes: In 2005, three computer science Ph.D. students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a program to generate nonsensical computer science research papers. The goal was "to expose the lack of peer review at low-quality conferences that essentially scam researchers with publication and conference fees." The program — dubbed SCIgen — soon found users across the globe, and before long its automatically generated creations were being accepted by scientific conferences and published in purportedly peer-reviewed journals. But SCIgen may have finally met its match. Academic publisher Springer this week is releasing SciDetect, an open-source program to automatically detect automatically generated papers. SCIgen uses a "context-free grammar" to create word salad that looks like reasonable text from a distance but is easily spotted as nonsense by a human reader.
The purpose of the scam papers was to expose scam journals.
The purpose of this new software seems to be to all scam journals to continue scammng.
So it's an evil software, that should not have been developed, right?
I mean, if you were doing actual peer review, none of this would pass even a half-sentient peer's inpection.
1. The first thing SCIgen should do is to incorporate SciDetect, to make sure that their random papers pass the SciDetect test.
2. SCIDetect should then improve their algorithms, and SCIgen should again take a snapshot of SciDetect source code and incorporate it.
3. Run this loop a few times and what we'll have is some serious papers
4. Profit!!!