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How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

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Re: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

#31

Post by anonymouz »

ngkabra wrote: post #28
kken wrote: post #5

>Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right? No, absolutely not. Looking at the web site immediately raises two red flags: 1) It's a multi-topic conference. Usually these fall into two categories: Undergrad conferences and money-making scams. Participating in neither of them is "a big achievement" 2) The submission d…

Original author here. The two things you pointed out were exactly the two things that first caused me to get suspicious of this conference. However, as notthetup points out, there are lots of people in the Indian education system who don't know this. And the statement I made: Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, righ…

I think it is the job of the advisor of the student to guide him in the choice of conferences to go to or journals to publish in. He should know the truly important ones in his field, and be able to make a judgment of the quality of a conference or journal based on familiarity with the work of the organizers/editors and other participants.

Everybody can put up a conference web page: It is completely hopeless to expect to be able judge the quality of a conference by what they claim on their web page, as the scam ones will be the ones boasting with their internationality and prestige, while the actually prestigious have no need to do so. The same goes for journals. I regularly get "calls for papers" from scammy journals that claim to be world class journals, but which are essentially a money making scheme (usually using some open access author pays model).

Of course, I agree with you that the requirement of having your bachelor's or master's thesis published is idiotic, and driving students into to be victims of these scams. The universities need to stop this practice, and the advisors need to guide the students who have something that is truly worth publishing in their choice of venue.

Re: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

#32

Post by ngkabra »

anonymouz wrote: post #31
ngkabra wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original author here. The two things you pointed out were exactly the two things that first caused me to get suspicious of this conference. However, as notthetup points out, there are lots of people in the Indian education system who don't know this. And the statement I made: Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, righ…

I think it is the job of the advisor of the student to guide him in the choice of conferences to go to or journals to publish in. He should know the truly important ones in his field, and be able to make a judgment of the quality of a conference or journal based on familiarity with the work of the organizers/editors and other participants. Everybody can put up a conference web page: It is completely hopeless to expec…

Don't even get me started on the quality of the advisors... :-(

Re: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

#33

Post by jjoonathan »

notastartup wrote: post #14

could it be possible that there are many scentific papers written by phd and masters which are simply garbage? All this time I thought, "but these guys are smart, they went and got phd and masters and their thesis sounds really intriguing", but reading through the paper, absolutely nothing is presented but just words for the sake of filling up space? Also papers that seems to skew their quantitative results, multiple…

There are probably many that are garbage.

That doesn't mean that the majority of masters/PhD papers aren't scientific and intellectual achievements the likes of which aren't often found outside academia or the upper echelons of industry (nobody else can justify the risk profile of academic research). It also doesn't mean that the aggregate value of the results is small.

Many/most papers present useless (to society) results that only appear meaningful when viewed in a very narrow light. Again, that's not really a problem: just like the startup world, science has a very low yield of very high value results. Scope-narrowing is actually a method which allows us to avoid unjustly punishing legitimate null results. A feature, not a bug. Also, what appears to be narrow scope to an outsider might be of incredible importance to someone who has a better sense of perspective. Many of today's most important innovations would be impossible without thousands of yesterday's "useless" results.

You aren't crazy, but you are missing the big picture.

To work around paywalls, try emailing authors, visiting /r/scholar, making friends at academic institutions, or getting a side-job that will permit you journal access.

Re: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

#34

Post by daemonk »

These parasitic journal/conferences are becoming more prevalent in the biological sciences too.

Here is an account of a guy who attended a conference hosted by the OMICS publishing group: http://cabbagesofdoom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/omics-group-con...

There was also a recent Science magazine's "sting operation" where they submitted tons of shitty papers to journals across the world and found many journals actually accepted the paper: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

The sting was pretty controversial though as they seemed to want to use this evidence to discredit open access publishing rather than to say this is a problem with academia in general. Open access is catching on in the biological sciences (http://biorxiv.org/) and big journals like nature or science are afraid of losing money.

You can argue that they are a natural response to the academic publishing culture where the sole metric of success is the number of papers you publish.

Re: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

#35

Post by shubhamjain »

ngkabra wrote: post #28
kken wrote: post #5

>Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right? No, absolutely not. Looking at the web site immediately raises two red flags: 1) It's a multi-topic conference. Usually these fall into two categories: Undergrad conferences and money-making scams. Participating in neither of them is "a big achievement" 2) The submission d…

Original author here. The two things you pointed out were exactly the two things that first caused me to get suspicious of this conference. However, as notthetup points out, there are lots of people in the Indian education system who don't know this. And the statement I made: Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, righ…

That explains how hollow is the pride of M. Tech teachers in our country who pat their own backs about their papers getting published. So many research papers are just crap and add nothing to the existing knowledge.

Tell me something, is this true for Ph. D. as well? Because that would feel like an opener against people proudly wearing "Dr." in their titles.

Re: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

#36

Post by onetwofiveten »

ngkabra wrote: post #28
kken wrote: post #5

>Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right? No, absolutely not. Looking at the web site immediately raises two red flags: 1) It's a multi-topic conference. Usually these fall into two categories: Undergrad conferences and money-making scams. Participating in neither of them is "a big achievement" 2) The submission d…

Original author here. The two things you pointed out were exactly the two things that first caused me to get suspicious of this conference. However, as notthetup points out, there are lots of people in the Indian education system who don't know this. And the statement I made: Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, righ…

This must be corruption at work. It's unrealistic to demand that Master's level students have two good quality published papers. There's no research benefit in publishing poor quality papers. So the reason must be fake prestige or scamming money. Keep spreading the word about this. If you embarrass your authorities (especially amongst the wider International scientific community), then things will change.

My only feedback would be that to communicate to non-Indians, you need to make it clear early on that this is a widespread problem that students can't avoid because of the pressure to publish. On first reading your post I thought you were just upset about a single fake conference - which didn't seem like big news to me.

Re: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

#37

Post by ngkabra »

onetwofiveten wrote: post #36
ngkabra wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original author here. The two things you pointed out were exactly the two things that first caused me to get suspicious of this conference. However, as notthetup points out, there are lots of people in the Indian education system who don't know this. And the statement I made: Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, righ…

This must be corruption at work. It's unrealistic to demand that Master's level students have two good quality published papers. There's no research benefit in publishing poor quality papers. So the reason must be fake prestige or scamming money. Keep spreading the word about this. If you embarrass your authorities (especially amongst the wider International scientific community), then things will change. My only fee…

Good point. I have that point buried way down in the post. Need to give it prominence somewhere in the beginning.

Re: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

#39

Post by CJefferson »

thirsteh wrote: post #12
userbinator wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The randomly generated talks here are just as hilarious: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks But the sad thing is, you could probably show stuff like this on a TV series as a "this is what research produces" and the majority of people wouldn't know any better.

Then again, the same thing can be said for any of us reading Ph.D. dissertations outside our fields.

Or I imagine getting an expert to describe their process for fixing large industrial machinery.

Re: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

#40

Post by ngkabra »

albertyw wrote: post #10
kken wrote: post #5

>Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right? No, absolutely not. Looking at the web site immediately raises two red flags: 1) It's a multi-topic conference. Usually these fall into two categories: Undergrad conferences and money-making scams. Participating in neither of them is "a big achievement" 2) The submission d…

Another red flag - Is it just me, or is the header image on the conference website an image of Las Vegas?

They did say it's an INTERNATIONAL conference...
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