Science Publisher Fooled by Gibberish Papers 27 February 2014, by Richard Ingham and Laurent Banguet

Science publisher fooled by gibberish papers 27 February 2014, by Richard Ingham And Laurent Banguet

Publisher of science journals Springer said Labbe, 41, has been exploring how to detect fake Thursday it would scrap 16 papers from its papers written with a programme called SCIgen. archives after they were revealed to be computer- generated gibberish. At the press of a button, the programme cranks out impressive-looking "studies" stuffed with randomly- The fake papers had been submitted to selected computer and engineering terms. conferences on computer science and engineering whose proceedings were published in specialised, Instant goobledook subscription-only publications, Springer said. Here is an example: "Constant-time technology and "We are in the process of taking down the papers access points have garnered great interest from as quickly as possible," the German-based both futurists and physicists in the last several publisher said in a statement. years. After years of extensive research into superpages, we confirm the appropriate unification "This means that they will be removed, not of 128-bit architectures and checksums." retracted, since they are all nonsense." This "paper" comes complete with fake graphs and Springer added: "We are looking into our citations—essential features in scientific procedures to find the weakness that could allow publishing—that in SCIgen's case includes recent something like this to happen, and we will adapt references to famous scientists who died decades our processes to ensure that it does not happen or centuries ago. again." The programme was devised in 2005 by The embarrassing lapse was exposed by French researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of computer scientist Cyril Labbe of the Joseph Technology. Fourier University in Grenoble. They used it to concoct meaningless papers that He also spotted more than 100 other "nonsense" were accepted by conferences. The researchers papers unwittingly published by the New York- later revealed the hoax to expose flaws in based Institute of Electrical and Electronic safeguards. Engineers (IEEE), the journal Nature reported. SCIgen is freely available online, at In a statement to AFP, the institute said it had pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ been advised "there might have been some conference papers published in our IEEE Xplore Labbe told AFP he spotted the frauds by searching digital library that did not meet our quality for telltale SCIgen vocabulary. standards." In 2010, he used SCIgen to create 102 bogus "We took immediate action to remove those papers by a fictitious scientist and added these to papers, and also refined our processes to prevent the Google Scholar database, an index of science papers not meeting our standards from being prestige. published in the future," it said. The statement gave no further details. For a time, "Ike Antkare" ranked 21st on the database's list of most-cited scientists in the

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world—higher than Einstein, who ranked a lowly Hwang and his team were showered with money 36th. and national honours.

The fake papers detected by Labbe were submitted His findings were later found to have been faked. to conferences between 2008 and 2013. They were No stem cells had been produced. uncovered through research he published in 2012 in Scientometrics—by coincidence, also a Springer © 2014 AFP journal.

In some cases, he said, a paper's introduction or conclusion were rewritten by a human to appear more authentic at first glance—a veneer presumably aimed at fooling superficial scrutiny.

'Peer review' under pressure

Labbe said the fraud struck at the credibility of peer- reviewed systems in which scientific claims are meant to be assessed by independent experts for soundness.

"There are several possible explanations" for the fakes, he said.

"One is that people are just testing the system, but if that's the case, they should reveal who they are and they haven't done so," said Labbe. "Another is that the papers are a deliberate fraud to make money."

Springer said scientific publishing, like other fields, "is not immune to fraud and mistakes".

"The peer-review system is the best system we have so far and this incident will lead to additional measures on the part of Springer to strengthen it."

Also on Thursday, South Korea's Supreme Court upheld an 18-month suspended jail term against Hwang Woo-Suk, accused of embezzlement and abuse of ethics in one of the most notorious frauds in science publishing.

Hwang shot to fame in 2004 when he published papers in the prestigious US journal Science claiming to have created the first stem-cell lines from a cloned human embryo.

The claims raised hopes of new treatments for diseases like cancer, diabetes and Parkinson's, and

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APA citation: Science publisher fooled by gibberish papers (2014, February 27) retrieved 27 September 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2014-02-science-publisher-gibberish-papers.html

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