General Gibberish research paper quotes movie, tells the reader it's a fake, got accepted anyway.

tom_mai78101

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Via the always excellent Retraction Watch, we learn of the story of Navin Kabra, an entrepreneur in India who was realizing that the requirement placed on many students in India that they must get two papers "published" at various conferences was really just a huge scam to get students to pay the fees for the submissions and the conferences. In order to expose all of this, he created two gibberish papers, mostly using the infamous SCIgen app which generates gibberish scientific sounding text. Both papers were accepted, and he paid the fees to have one "published." You can read Kabra's astounding account of all of this on his own blog, or read the incredible paper that was both accepted and published by the conference.

Kabra even went to extra lengths to find out the criteria for accepting papers to the conference, wondering if they basically just accepted everything from anyone who paid. Yet, the organizers of the conferences insisted they had high standards. According to Kabra's recorded interview with the organizers:
  • The conference received 130 submissions out of which only 60 were selected.
  • All the papers were reviewed by panelists from a panel of international experts using a double-blind review methodology.
  • Only high quality papers were accepted
  • All accepted papers were sent reviews from at least 3 reviewers each and the authors were then asked to update the papers based on the review comments. (No such thing happened with the 2 papers we submitted to the conference.)
Back to the paper, though. In the very second paragraph the paper straight out tells the reader that it's a gibberish paper generated by SCIgen:

As is clear from the title of this paper, this paper deals with the entertainment industry. So, we do provide entertainment in this paper. So, if you are reading this paper for entertainment, we suggest a heuristic that will allow you to read this paper efficiently. You should read any paragraph that starts with the first 4 words in bold and italics – those have been written by the author in painstaking detail. However, if a paragraph does not start with bold and italics, feel free to skip it because it is gibberish auto-generated by the good folks at SCIGen.

 
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Accname

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I support this. Sadly, this wouldnt work at my university...
 

Accname

2D-Graphics enthusiast
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Profs are actually reading those papers. And they are quite annoyed by being forced to read them. This makes them not very pleasant to deal with sometimes.
If you submit a bad paper and force a prof to read that bs they will hate you for the rest of your life and make your student life a pain.
 

Accname

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Because its always nice to see somebody uncover the dark secrets of academic life.
 

Varine

And as the moon rises, we shall prepare for war
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It feels a lot better knowing that you found an easy way through when everyone else had to work their asses off to get to the same spot.
 

tom_mai78101

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If Accname's country is overpopulated, maybe the professors will stop reading them papers, as they would pile up faster than 10 professors finish reading one.
 

Varine

And as the moon rises, we shall prepare for war
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No, they just hate reading his because they make less sense than the fake one.
 

tom_mai78101

The Helper Connoisseur / Ex-MineCraft Host
Staff member
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No, they just hate reading his because they make less sense than the fake one.
I guess by psychological factors, purposefully creating a fake article would require having a lot more attention when going over the details and making sure the logic fallacy is at a minimum.
 
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