Do scientific papers ever seem like unreadable gibberish to you? Well, sometimes they really are. 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. As a result they have been pulled from journals that originally published them.
The fake papers are in the fields of computer science and math and have 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."….
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 scientific journals? The man who discovered the recent frauds said it showed slipping standards among scientists….
Maxim Lott, "Over 100 Published Science Journal Articles Just Gibberish," Fox News, March 1, 2014
The fake papers are in the fields of computer science and math and have 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."….
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 scientific journals? The man who discovered the recent frauds said it showed slipping standards among scientists….
Maxim Lott, "Over 100 Published Science Journal Articles Just Gibberish," Fox News, March 1, 2014
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