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 the journals that originally published them.
Source.
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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...
...“The papers are quite easy to spot,” says Labbé, who has built a website where users can test whether papers have been created using SCIgen. His detection technique, described in a study published in Scientometrics in 2012, involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by SCIgen. Shortly before that paper was published, Labbé informed the IEEE of 85 fake papers he had found. Monika Stickel, director of corporate communications at IEEE, says that the publisher “took immediate action to remove the papers” and “refined our processes to prevent papers not meeting our standards from being published in the future”. In December 2013, Labbé informed the IEEE of another batch of apparent SCIgen articles he had found. Last week, those were also taken down, but the web pages for the removed articles give no explanation for their absence...
...Labbé adds that the nonsense papers were easy to detect using his tools,
much like the plagiarism checkers that many publishers already employ.
Source.