Heh, very funny. People can have very little faith in themselves, it seems. If they don't understanding, their first instinct is to assume that they're simply too stupid.

You just can't trust language.

Big words intimidate people, even smart people. Apparently, picking up a dictionary and actually figuring out what the hell someone is trying to say is too much work. So, these faux-papers sometimes fly under the radar and are accepted.

A disgrace to the academy, it is.

With regard to the first paper, everyone seems to be missing the point - it got accepted as a non-reviewed paper - in other words, the reviewers didn't read it, so I'm not sure how that qualifies as pulling the wool over anyone's eyes. There's some information regarding the review process here which directly addresses the issue of bogus submissions.

No wonder.

I was one of the (non-) reviewers of this year's WMSCI conference (i.e. the one in question).

Last year I was asked whether I would like to review submissions for the WMSCI 2004, and I agreed. The review process took place kind of regularly.

This year, however, they sent me papers for review without any prior notice or consent of mine. The papers they sent me were barely related to my field of expertise. I explicitely refused to review the papers three times, requesting to take me off their reviewers' list. To no avail... After that, they sent me two more papers for review, which I completely ignored.

I'm sure I'm not the only reviewer who acted like this...

thanks for checking in Michael, sounds like THEY won't let you check out!

Hey DrPat, you rule, this story is mentioned in the Washington Post today.

Lisa, the information from the MIT site noted that the paper had originally been accepted, then the acceptance was withdrawn when the hoax was revealed.

There is an eMail trail at the SCIgen website.

From: Nagib Callaos

Date: Apr 14, 2005 8:03 AM
Subject: Fw: Accepting random papers?
To: XXXX

Thank you for contacting me, so you can have an explanation from our side.
I am sending you attached a letter I just sent to one of our reviewers who informed me about the same issue.
From the letter you can see why I am not ashamed of myself but having a huge sadneess.

Sincerely,

Nagib Callaos

My spouse once won such a paper contest by submitting the entry that weighed the most. Not kidding here, the judges were literally intimidated at the prospect of plowing through all that information.

Girlymen.

I read the article at MIT, DrPat. My point is that as a non-reviewed paper, it hadn't been read. The fact that it contained gibberish seems irrelevant if the point of the story is to show that people can be flummoxed by jargon. I don't see how that can be the case when the reviewers aren't actually reading the papers; I suspect a chimpanzee at a typewriter could've gotten one accepted under similar circumstances.

It didn't have to be readable to be accepted, Lisa - only plausible. I'd say that made the MIT SCIgen point rather well.

BTW, did you read my paper? Not bad for twelve seconds effort, I think...

Sir:

53423 67090 42156 99398
79806, therefore, 79888
70092 56456 77741, ergo,
71142 66878 55745. QED.

Gene

Subject: Fw: Accepting random papers?
To: GeneN

Thank you for contacting me, so you can have an explanation from our side.
I am sending you attached a letter I just sent to one of our reviewers who informed me about the same issue.
From the letter you can see why I am not ashamed of myself but having a huge sadneess.

The spectrum seems to be a circle:

nonsense - idiocy - basic language - lofty language - techie language - nonsense

The lesson is, if your technical prose is so abstruse it can't be understood, evaluate it to see if it can be simplified without losing the sense. Why should combobulated scientific terminology be preferred over normal words, if they convey the same ideas?

Wood

Here's the upside: There are a lot of people who can write real papers who don't because they are intimidated at the thought of whether they'll be accepted. Perhaps this will encourage those people. Eric has sent "call for papers" requests to the blogcritics list.

Lisa, I understand that there is a distinction between peer-reviewed and non-reviewed papers. However, even non-reviewed papers can't be complete nonsense. Non-reviewed doesn't mean non-read!

They reject *some* papers, right? I couldn't send them my grocery list and expect it to be published as a non-reviewed paper, could I? Given that, it seems that a paper that includes complete nonsense, even less useful than my grocery list, ought to by summarily dismissed by anyone reading even the excerpt.

So I'd say that the submitters made their point very well indeed.

Phillip, my reading of this means that in this particular case, non-reviewed might very likely mean "unread". If the conference organizers accept the papers with literally no feedback from the reviewers, how do we know the papers have been read?

And if they are accepting the papers without having read even the excerpt themselves, then the submitters have made their point very well indeed, as I said. :-)

And my point is still that if the submitters' point is that people are fooled by jargon even when it is meaningless, the acceptance of papers that have not been read makes no point at all. So we will have to agree to disagree here. :-) back at ya.

Okay, let's define the word 'read' then. On what basis exactly do you think that this paper was accepted? Was the envelope ever opened? Was it based on the submitter's name? The number of pages? The pleasant aroma of lavender wafting from the package? Is it possible that the publisher of the journal read the title of the paper? Maybe the abstract? Was the paper submitted electronically, or on paper? Did someone have to format the title and abstract in a list anywhere?

Common sense test: Would a stack of grocery lists have gotten published as well?

From what I understand, the paper was accepted on the basis of its mere submission. Perhaps someone read the title? I don't know, it's not clear to me. These are not the standards of peer review, which are very well understood by me as I have toiled in the vineyards of academic research for more than 25 years now. If this conference has a standard of non-reviewed acceptance based on a criterion of no feedback whatsoever from the reviewers then I am fully prepared to assume that the papers have not been read at all and that the authors are responsible for the validity of their content. Your turn.

Should a paper be accepted unread? Not just unreviewed, but simply unexamined?

If the SCIgen programmers wanted to expose the ease with which anyone can be published by submitting to a laxly-monitored conference, they definitely made their point.

To dismiss that point by saying that the authors are responsible for the validity of their content is to miss the point completely.

Of course a paper shouldn't be accepted unread, DrPat. If the point they were trying to make is that the conference is laxly monitored, then yes, they've made their point. If the point they're trying to make is that the conference reviewers are easily impressed by nonsensical jargon (which is the point I thought they were trying to make), and the papers in question WERE NOT READ BY THE REVIEWERS, then they have not made their point.

If I send you something nonsensical to read that is laden with big words and you tell me it's good without reading it, I haven't proven that you are easily fooled by my impressive vocabulary. I have only proven that you say nice things about stuff without actually reading it.

Gosh, I'm done with this. Have a great weekend, guys!

My Weigh-In: Lisa Scores

Just had a look at this article and the ensuing exchange. I think Lisa proves her point with the reference she provides in comment #15. And I extend my sympathies to her for the obstinate arguments she's gotten.

I don't know anything about the conference, the subject, or norms of conference organizing, but the organizers' explanation for accepting bogus papers is at least superficially plausible.

Hi everyone,

DrPat just pointed me to this discussion of our SCIgen project; I was one of the three authors of the program and paper submitters. Excellent thread. Just wanted to make a few things clear:

1) The reasons we did this were (a) pure annoyance at the volume of WMSCI spam; (b) we expected they had very low standards for admission and wanted to test just how low; and (c) it sounded like a fun project.
2) This was not supposed to be a jab at all of scientific academia or jargon-laden research, although perhaps that's what makes the paper so funny.

Also, I wanted to point out this excellent blog post from Ernie's 3D Pancakes:

http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2005/04/sci_followup.html

It has a very in-depth analysis of why WMSCI's policy of accepting non-reviewed papers is unjustified, and I fully agree with it. Check it out, it's definitely worth a read.

Thanks, Jeremy! Always helpful when the author weighs in...

From Ernie's 3D Pancakes: ...by allowing papers to be accepted without human intervention of any kind -- the WMSCI organizers have destroyed any expectations that the papers they acccept are anything but crap. Anyone who has published a paper in WMSCI now has a large albatross in their CV.

Exactly.

I've responded to the very un-excellent blog post at Ernie's 3D Pancakes:

http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2005/04/sci_followup.html

I might add that the whole prank seems marginally less clever than the "hoax" pulled by the finger-in-the-chili woman at Wendy's (see Finger in Chili Is Called Hoax; Las Vegas Woman Is Charged).

Alan Sokal's famous hoax made fools of self-important bullshit artists who vetted his deliberate nonsense. This prank's achievement appears to have been merely to abuse a system based more or less on trust. That seems kinda juvenile.

So, Uriel, you're okay with WMSCI's hosting a publication conference designed to allow any bullpuckey to be published, provided it "appears" scientific?

This is the same kind of deal as a diploma mill. Is the doctorate one buys from them any different than the bibliography entry one buys from WMSCI? At least with a diploma mill, you know the sheepskin you bought is worth less than the paper it's printed on.

Here's a wooden nickel, friend. See what it buys you.

I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but here's a PDF of another paper submitted to WMSCI. Not as clever, but...

Must say I got to this a little late but I would like to know why the original posting mentioned Buenos Aires, Argentina, seeming to imply a place where bogus papers would be accepted? Or was there a real conference there?