Three MIT graduate students, Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn, and Dan Aguayo, have cracked the "publish or perish" code.
Sometimes jargon really is gibberish.
Take the "scientific" papers generated by a computer program and submitted by three MIT computer science students to a scientific conference. One of the papers, "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy," was accepted by World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 2005 as a non-reviewed paper. "The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking" was rejected...
[Their] paper's acceptance proves their point, Stribling said. Their computer program generates research papers using "context-free grammar" and includes graphs, figures and citations. The program takes real words and places them correctly in sentences, but the words used don't make sense together....
Their once-accepted paper's abstract says: "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."
Random gibberish, just like it sounds.
The students may be lauded by their fellows at the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, but they were not as successful as the famous 1996 prank in which physicist Alan Sokal persuaded a Duke University journal called Social Text to publish a bogus article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."
Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, existence itself — become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.
Sokal's purpose was reportedly to "see if they would publish any nonsense which 'flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions'." Stribling, et al set their targets a bit lower. "Our aim is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence."
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Leoniceno
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.
2 - RJ
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.
3 - Lisa McKay
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.
4 - Michael Schmidt
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...
5 - Eric Olsen
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.
6 - DrPat
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.
7 - DrPat
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.
8 - Lisa McKay
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.
9 - DrPat
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...
10 - GeneN
Sir:
53423 67090 42156 99398
79806, therefore, 79888
70092 56456 77741, ergo,
71142 66878 55745. QED.
Gene
11 - DrPat
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.
12 - Woody Brison
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
13 - Justene
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.
14 - Phillip Winn
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.
15 - Lisa McKay
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?
16 - Phillip Winn
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. :-)
17 - Lisa McKay
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.
18 - Phillip Winn
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?
19 - Lisa McKay
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.
20 - DrPat
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.
21 - Lisa McKay
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!
22 - Uriel
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.
23 - Jeremy
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.
24 - DrPat
Thanks, Jeremy! Always helpful when the author weighs in...
25 - DrPat
From Ernie's 3D Pancakes: ...by allowing papers to be accepted without human intervention of any kind â€" 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.