Do you ever question the credibility of scientific papers when you see a huge amount of them floating around? Or do they ever seem like unreadable gibberish to you? Well, it turns out that sometimes they really are.
Over the last few years, some 120 papers published in established scientific journals have been found to be frauds, Fox News reported.
The fake scientific papers are created by nothing more than an automated word generator that puts random, fancy-sounding words together in plausible sentence structures.
According to Fox News, the fake papers are in the fields of computer science and math and have titles such as "Application and Research of Smalltalk Harnessing Based on Game-Theoretic Symmetries"; "An Evaluation of E-Business with Fin"; and "Simulating Flip-Flop Gates Using Peer-to-Peer Methodologies." The authors of those papers did not respond to requests for comment from FoxNews.com.
Now, those fake papers have been pulled from the journals that originally published them.
However, this is not the first time that nonsense papers have been published.
"In 1996, as a test, a physics professor submitted a fake paper to the philosophy journal Social Text," Fox News reported. "His paper argued that gravity is 'postmodern' because it is 'free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth.' Yet it was accepted and published."
But how could respectable science papers allow such gibberish? The man who discovered the recent frauds said it showed slipping standards among scientists, Fox News reported.
"High pressure on scientists leads directly to too prolific and less meaningful publications," computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in France, told FoxNews.com.
But as to why the journals would publish such meaningless papers, he had no explanation.
"They all should have been evaluated by a peer-review process. I've no explanation for them being here. I guess each of them needs an investigation," he said.
The publishers also could not explain it, admitting that the papers "are all nonsense."
"We are in the process of investigating... [and] taking the papers down as quickly as possible. A placeholder notice will be put up once the papers have been removed. Since we publish over 2,200 journals and 8,400 books annually, this will take some time," Eric Merkel-Sobotta, a spokesman for the publisher Springer, which published 16 of the fake papers, told FoxNews.com.
The fraud was first reported in the journal Nature, Fox News reported.
Labbé has made it his mission to detect fakes, and ironically has published a paper in a Springer journal about how to automatically detect fake papers. He also built a website that detects whether papers are computer generated.
"Our tools are very efficient to detect SCIgen papers and also to detect duplicates and plagiarisms," Labbé said. SCIgen is the program that generates random papers.
Pay rules that base professor salaries on the number of papers they publish may lead to fakes, some professors said.
"Most schools have merit raise systems of some kind, and a professor's merit score is affected by his or her success in publishing scholarly papers," Robert Archibald, a professor of economics at the College of William and Mary, who studies the economics of higher education, told FoxNews.com.
He noted that because other professors may not read the paper, "publishing a paper that was computer-generated might help with merit pay."
Labbé also said that overly numerical measures might encourage fraud, Fox News reported.
"In aiming at measuring science it is perturbing science," he said.
