SCIgen

SCIgen
Written in Perl
Available in English
Type Parody generator
License GNU General Public License
Website http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

SCIgen is a computer program that uses context-free grammar to randomly generate nonsense in the form of computer science research papers. All elements of the papers are formed, including graphs, diagrams, and citations. Created by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, its stated aim is "to maximize amusement, rather than coherence."[1]

Sample output

Opening abstract of Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy:[2]

Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public/private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.

Prominent results

In 2005 a paper generated by SCIgen, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, was accepted as a non-reviewed paper to the 2005 World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI) and the authors were invited to speak. The authors of SCIgen described their hoax on their website, and it soon received great publicity when picked up by Slashdot. WMSCI withdrew their invitation, but the SCIgen team went anyway, renting space in the hotel separately from the conference and delivering a series of randomly generated talks on their own "track." The organizer of these WMSCI conferences is Professor Nagib Callaos. From 2000 until 2005, the WMSCI was also sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The IEEE stopped granting sponsorship to Callaos from 2006 to 2008.

Submitting the paper was a deliberate attempt to embarrass WMSCI, which the authors claim accepts low-quality papers and sends unsolicited requests for submissions in bulk to academics. As the SCIgen website states:

One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website).
About SCIgen [3]

Computing writer Stan Kelly-Bootle noted in ACM Queue that many sentences in the "Rooter" paper were individually plausible, which he regarded as posing a problem for automated detection of hoax articles. He suggested that even human readers might be taken in by the effective use of jargon ("The pun on root/router is par for MIT-graduate humor, and at least one occurrence of methodology is mandatory") and attribute the paper's apparent incoherence to their own limited knowledge. His conclusion was that "a reliable gibberish filter requires a careful holistic review by several peer domain experts".[4]

Schlangemann

The name of a fictional man named "Herbert Schlangemann" was used to publish false scientific articles in international conferences that are suspected to be, at least partially, frauds. The author is named after the Swedish short film Der Schlangemann.

In all cases, the published papers were withdrawn from the conferences' proceedings, and the conference organizing committee as well as the names of the keynote speakers were removed from their websites.

List of other works with notable acceptance

In conferences

In journals

Spoofing Google Scholar and h-index calculators

Refereeing performed on behalf of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has also been subject to criticism after fake papers were discovered in conference publications, most notably by Labbé and a researcher using the pseudonym of Schlangemann.[21][22][23][24][25][26]

In this 2010 paper by Cyril Labbé from Grenoble University demonstrated the vulnerability of h-index calculations based on Google Scholar output by feeding it a large set of SCIgen-generated documents that were citing each other, effectively an academic link farm. Using this method the author managed to rank "Ike Antkare" ahead of Albert Einstein for instance.[27]

See also

References

  1. SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator
  2. Stribling, Jeremy; Aguayo, Daniel; Krohn, Maxwell. "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" (PDF).
  3. "SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator". MIT.
  4. Stan Kelly-Bootle (July–August 2005). "Call that gibberish?". ACM Queue. 3 (6): 64. doi:10.1145/1080862.1080884.
  5. "CSSE Conference Program" (PDF).
  6. 1 2 "The official Herbert Schlangemann Blog, The whole story behind the paper "Towards the Simulation of E-Commerce"".
  7. kdawson (December 24, 2008). "Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference". slashdot. VA Linux Systems Japan. Retrieved May 5, 2009.
  8. Peter-Michael Ziegler (December 26, 2008). "Dr. Herbert Schlangemann - oder die Geschichte eines pseudowissenschaftlichen Nonsens-Papiers (in German)". heise online. Heise Zeitschriften Verlag. Retrieved May 5, 2009.
  9. Heise Online webpage (in German)
  10. "Mathias Uslar's paper.". Archived from the original on 2009-06-15.
  11. "About Genco Gulan's paper.".
  12. "Duplicate and Fake Publications in the Scientific Literature : How many SCIgen papers in Computer Science?" (PDF). Hal.archives-ouvertes.fr. Retrieved 2014-05-15.
  13. "Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers". Nature. 24 February 2014. Retrieved 25 February 2014.
  14. Rohollah Mosallahnezhad. "Cooperative, Compact Algorithms for Randomized Algorithms" (PDF).
  15. John L. Casti, REMOVED: Cooperative, compact algorithms for randomized algorithms, doi:10.1016/j.amc.2007.03.011
  16. "Mon ordinateur écrit mieux que le tien!". Agence Science-Presse (in French). Canada. 8 September 2009. Retrieved 4 October 2011.
  17. "Rooter invades Russia". SCIgen. 8 January 2009. Retrieved 4 October 2011.
  18. Malozemov, Sergei (7 October 2008). Группа отечественных ученых поставила эксперимент — смешала сложные термины случайным образом, а полученный текст отослала в один из научных журналов. NTV (in Russian). Retrieved 4 October 2011.
  19. "Feedback". New Scientist. 15 August 2009.
  20. Слегка упорядоченные размышления о науке, религии и чайниках. Lenta (in Russian). 18 June 2009. Retrieved 4 October 2011.
  21. Labbé, Cyril; Labbé, Dominique (2013). "Duplicate and fake publications in the scientific literature: how many SCIgen papers in computer science?". Scientometrics. Springer. 94 (1): 379–396. doi:10.1007/s11192-012-0781-y.
  22. Oransky, Ivan (February 24, 2014). "Springer, IEEE withdrawing more than 120 nonsense papers". retractionwatch.com. WordPress.com. Retrieved April 29, 2014.
  23. de Gloucester, Paul Colin (2013). "Referees Often Miss Obvious Errors in Computer and Electronic Publications". Accountability in Research: Policies and Quality Assurance. Taylor & Francis Group. 20 (3): 143–166. doi:10.1080/08989621.2013.788379.
  24. Dawson, K. (December 23, 2008). "Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference". slashdot.org. Dice. Retrieved April 29, 2014.
  25. Hatta, Masayuki (December 24, 2008). "IEEEカンファレンス、自動生成のニセ論文をアクセプト". slashdot.jp. OSDN Corporation. Retrieved April 29, 2014.
  26. Ziegler, Peter-Michael (December 26, 2008). "Dr. Herbert Schlangemann - oder die Geschichte eines pseudowissenschaftlichen Nonsens-Papiers". heise.de. Heise Zeitschriften Verlag. Retrieved April 29, 2014.
  27. "Les rapports de recherche du LIG" (PDF). Rr.liglab.fr. Retrieved 2014-05-15.

Further reading

External links

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