Scholarly journals are peer-reviewed, i.e., submitted articles are sent out to members of the author’s professional peer group — experts in the same field who are similarly trained and credentialed — for their evaluation. For example, an article on a China-related subject would be sent to sinologists for review; while an article on quantum physics would be sent to quantum physicists for review.
The purpose, of course, is to ensure quality control. If the peer reviewers give their approval, the journal’s editor will then deliver the good news to the author that his or her article is accepted for publication.
At least that’s what is supposed to happen.
But a French computer scientist named Cyril Labbé discovered otherwise.
Maxim Lott reports for Fox News, March 1, 2014, that Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in France found that some 120 papers published in established scientific journals over the last few years have been found to be frauds, created by nothing more than an automated word generator that puts random, fancy-sounding words together in plausible sentence structures.
The fake papers are in the fields of computer science and math and have impressive-sounding titles such as “Application and Research of Smalltalk Harnessing Based on Game-Theoretic Symmetries”; “An Evaluation of E-Business with Fin”; and “Simulating Flip-Flop Gates Using Peer-to-Peer Methodologies.”
Labbé first reported the fraud in the journal Nature.
Labbé has made it his mission to detect fakes, and ironically has published a paper in a Springer journal about how to automatically detect fake papers. He also built a website that detects whether papers are computer generated. “Our tools are very efficient to detect SCIgen papers and also to detect duplicates and plagiarisms,” Labbé said. SCIgen is the program that generates random papers.
This is not the first time nonsense papers have been published.
In 1996, as a test, a physics professor submitted a fake paper to the philosophy journal Social Text. His paper argued that gravity is “postmodern” because it is “free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth.” Yet it was accepted and published.
But how could gibberish end up in respectable science papers?
Labbé said it showed slipping standards among scientists and attributed the fraud to “high pressure on scientists” which “leads directly to too prolific and less meaningful publications.”
Some professors said that pay rules that base professor salaries on the number of papers they publish may lead to fakes. Robert Archibald, a professor of economics at the College of William and Mary, who studies the economics of higher education, told FoxNews.com: “Most schools have merit raise systems of some kind, and a professor’s merit score is affected by his or her success in publishing scholarly papers.” Since other professors may not read the paper, “publishing a paper that was computer-generated might help with merit pay.”
That may explain why the scientists submitted gibberish fraud, but Labbé has no explanation as to why the journals published meaningless papers: “They all should have been evaluated by a peer-review process. I’ve no explanation for them being here. I guess each of them needs an investigation.”
The publishers also could not explain it, admitting that the papers “are all nonsense.”
Meanwhile, the fake articles have been pulled from the journals that originally published them. Eric Merkel-Sobotta, a spokesman for the publisher Springer, which published 16 of the fake papers, told FoxNews.com: “We are in the process of investigating… [and] taking the papers down as quickly as possible. A placeholder notice will be put up once the papers have been removed. Since we publish over 2,200 journals and 8,400 books annually, this will take some time.”
The authors of the gibberish papers did not respond to requests for comment from FoxNews.com.
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The fraudulent journal articles uncovered by Labbé are in computer science and mathematics — disciplines that have OBJECTIVE criteria and standards.
I dread to think the scale and extent of fraud that is being perpetrated in politically-charged subjects like “global warming,” and in softer disciplines like the social sciences and humanities where the criteria and standards are more, if not entirely, SUBJECTIVE and ideological.
~Eowyn
