The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and Springer have removed over 120 fake, computer-generated research papers that were created and published online out of pressure.
A French computer scientist, named Cyril Labbé, who was working with Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has created a website where users can see if research papers have been created through SCIgen-a program developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that generates random computer science research papers. Furthermore, he found that many research papers published online in conference proceedings from 2008 to 2013 are "gibberish" and was created using the program.
Labbé indexed the computer-generated papers and discovered that over 100 were found published by the IEEE while 16 were published by Springer. He informed both publishers and was told that the papers are now removed.
Monika Stickel, director of IEEE's corporate communications, told Nature News that the publisher "took immediate action to remove the papers" and "refined our processes to prevent papers not meeting our standards from being published in the future."
However, Cyril couldn't explain the reason these papers were accepted. He was also uncertain if the authors were aware of the papers, or at least real. He tried to contact the conference organizers and authors of the papers but only one author replied saying that he wasn't aware that his name was listed as a co-author on a paper, at least not until his university was informed in December 2013.
Furthermore, he noticed that most of the conferences were held in China, and most of the authors of the fake papers have Chinese affiliations.
When asked about the matter, SCIgen co-author Jeremy Stribling, told Nature News that, "I wasn't aware of the scale of the problem, but I knew it definitely happens. We do get occasional e-mails from good citizens letting us know where SCIgen papers show up."
Full report of this study was published in the Feb. 24 issue of Nature.
