Dear Ken and all,
In 2005, PhD students at MIT created a formal approach to identify 'fake'
conferences and publishers.
Their approach was to create a program, SCIGen, to computer-generate
nonsensical research papers and test whether they were accepted by journals
and conferences. SCIGen not only generated text, it also generated data ,
flow charts and citations. SCIGen is only one of many similar automated
paper production programs currently available and in use by researchers.
The MIT researchers placed the SCIGen software online as a free service to
researchers and encourage them to use it to test conferences and journals.
It was also taken up by some academics wishing to boost their publishing
profile.
By 2013, many SCIGen papers (and papers from other similar software) had
been published by apparently credible journals and conferences.
The SCIGen and other similar nonsensical papers SHOULD however have been
identified by peer-reviewers.
This implies either that peer reviewers are behaving incompetently and the
peer-review system is broken, or that peer reviewers are not being used, or
some combination of the two.
When it became clear that nonsensical computer-generated papers were being
published, Springer Publishers and the IEEE retracted 122 papers and
Springer developed a program, SCIDetect, to identify SCIGen papers.
This raises the question whether SCIDetect is simply a way to patch up a
broken system?
Full article is at
http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2015/03/hoax-detecting-softw
are-spots-fake-papers
(Original pointer was ACM TechNews March 30 2015)
SCIGen is at http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Postmodern generator is available at http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/
A challenge is whether we need a quality control system for peer review
itself?
It is widely known to those involved in publishing design research papers in
journals and conferences that there are informal lists of good and bad
reviewers circulating amongs organisers. Perhaps we need to make this more
transparenent and create a formal competence assessment of 'ability to
review' for academics and other researchers?
Best regards,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
PhD, B.A. (Hons) Eng, P.G.C.E
School of Design and Art, Curtin University, Western Australia
Honorary Fellow, IEED, Management School, Lancaster University, UK
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks, Western Australia 6030
<mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask] +61 (0)4 3497 5848
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
==
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