Academic Publishers Retract More Than 120 Papers After Learning They Were “Computer-Generated Nonsense”

Nature has the
lede of the week:

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 researcher is Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist who “has
catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30
published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013.” According
to Nature, he

developed a way to
automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software
called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce
fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by
researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in
Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless
papers—and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement”….SCIgen is
free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have
done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen’s output has occasionally
popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense
papers and then revealed the trick.

Labbé does not know why the papers were submitted—or even if the
authors were aware of them. Most of the conferences took place in
China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese
affiliations. Labbé has emailed editors and authors named in many
of the papers and related conferences but received scant replies;
one editor said that he did not work as a program chair at a
particular conference, even though he was named as doing so, and
another author claimed his paper was submitted on purpose to test
out a conference, but did not respond on follow-up.

Retraction Watch
notes that this story undercuts some of the conclusions people
have drawn from a feature that Science published last
fall. In that report, a researcher posing as a scholar at an
imaginary African institute managed to publish nonsense papers in
304 open-access journals, a result
touted in some quarters as showing a link between the
open-access world and crappy quality control. (Open-access
publications allow anyone to read their papers online, while
conventional academic outlets charge high fees.) But Bohannon
didn’t submit his faux study to any traditional journals, so his
results don’t really allow you to compare the old and new models.
All of the outlets that Labbé exposed were traditional
subscription-based publishers.

[Hat tip: Bryan
Alexander.]