Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

From Nature.com (Feb. 24):

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.

Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply*; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper). [read more]

Even those these fake papers were from a electrical engineering magazine it begs the question could some of the papers on climate change be fakes too? Just wondering.

Here’s a tip: If you are reading a scientific paper and you see 2 or more graphs plot the exact same data for the same experiment being repeated--it’s a fake or at least part of the paper has been faked. You will get similar results for repeating the experiments, but not exactly the same results. Noise will always creep in and make the results fuzzy.

Either way it does not speak well for science. Science is supposed to be about finding the truth.