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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

#41

Post by astrowizicist »

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…

No, it's not.

As an academic myself, we get spam emails advertising conferences just like this. It is not an achievement (of any sort), and what you're doing poorly represents both the academic system, and yourself.

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

#42

Post by kken »

ngkabra wrote: post #37
onetwofiveten wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is definitely important, since I had the same impression and was a bit suprised how you could be that angry about a single conference.

Btw, is it also a requirement for students in India to send out a specific number of applications? I get a lot of phd position applications from indian students as response to my publications. They look like mass emails and are usually absolutely unrelated to the field.

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

#43

Post by ddebernardy »

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…

> could it be possible that there are many scentific papers written by phd and masters which are simply garbage?

Sme of them are OK. Like... Count them on a hand or two.

That's not the point, though. The point is to teach a masters how to write a paper, and the second how to bend over to, think like and behave like their more senior peers -- dog training before allowing you into the herd, if you will.

> Am I crazy for thinking I am making this up in my head?

No. It's mostly hogwash. A large, deep cesspool of ultimately useless noise.

> p.s. is there a way to get access to scientific papers without paying $24 each time or a subscription fee? google scholar is good but some of the papers really insist on you paying. I thought knowledge was supposed to be free!

It mostly is. Visit the researchers' web page, and you'll frequently find the draft paper.

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

#44

Post by tensor »

jjoonathan wrote: post #33
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) r…

In my experience the ratio is no where near that of successful startups to unsuccessful ones. The majority of papers from good universities are valuable. But to put all of this in perspective, the number of startups or companies that try to advance our collective knowledge is close to nonexistent.

Hacker news appears to love to criticize science and cheer industry. Yet almost no one here even attempts to perform the most basic of experiments, let alone write something close to an actual science experiment. On that note, I'd like to address the vocal subgroup of HN that feels science is best left to industry.

There has been absolutely nothing stopping companies from doing science since the scientific revolution hundreds of years ago. Yet the majority advances still come from publicly funded efforts. There is nothing to do to create industry science. Our current state already reflects what happens when you leave science to those who are primarily profit focused. There is almost no science from them.

In the past there were a few great industry research labs, we all know their names, but all of that is long gone. A few of the largest firms still do some basic science, but it's a shadow of the public effort and little to none of it is free, or even for sale at $30 a paper. A single patent will cost you much much more that that and is not even equivalent to a proper paper in utility.

This is because science is not near term profitable, or even profitable in a century necessarily. It's hugely valuable on longer time scales though, possibly more so than any other human endeavour. This is much too long of a time scale for companies to care about, and it's also impractical to allow law to bury research for centuries to allow individuals to massively profit from it. Industry has already proven it is unwilling to perform good basic science on a large scale.

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

#45

Post by [deleted] »

microarchitect wrote: post #16
h0cked wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think if it's IEEE or ACM, they are ok (not good) to publish. Nowadays, I am not so sure after seeing a bunch of low quality "international" conferences in Asian especially in India. ACM seems a little better than IEEE... Now my rule is to only publish in conferences that I know or are well known in the field.... Aslo reject any requests to serve as a TPC or reviewer for conferences from this region..The pa…

You have way too much time on your hands if you are considering review requests from people you don't know.

[deleted]

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

#48

Post by desipenguin »

ngkabra wrote: post #29
DjangoReinhardt wrote: post #26

The second paper in the post should never have made it past any peer-reviewer had they bothered to read the first two paragraphs. It all stems from the (supposedly optional) requirement that a Masters' level student get a paper published. Sure, it is somewhat justified - seeing as how they are partially research students themselves - but the absence of a honest and thorough peer-review kinda puts paid to the justific…

What depressed me the most was seeing the poor, sincere students who had come to the conference to present. Some of them were tweaking their PPTs. Others were going over notes for their talk. They were clearly (I think) under the impression that presenting at this conference was a major achievement. Of the 22 papers accepted by the conference (i.e. 22 people paid to get their papers published), only about 10 came to…

Or remaining 12 couldn't afford to pay for the conference ?? (Rs. 6000 is not a trivial amount for a student.)

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

#49

Post by kamaal »

ragsagar wrote: post #47

The education system in India is unimaginably worse. 57 out 60 students who completed Btech IT(aka Software Engineering) in my batch didn't knew even to a write a program to check if a number is palindrome or not.

I've seen worse.

I had opted for a micro controller elective in a semester. We were only 6 guys in the whole class who did that. I discovered I was pretty good in Assembly language programming(8085) so it made more sense to study and work on that further.

The remain class opted for C++, on the day of the exam I was chatting with a girl as to well she had prepared. She tells she had prepared everything apart from classes(Note this is a C++ exam). I lost all appetite to continue the discussion further.

On a tangential note my cousin is in his 3rd semester currently. He tells me he did bulk of the engineering drawing my merely copy pasting CAD projects from seniors. And tells that's how nearly every one in his class is doing it.

I only imagine how this works at things like Medical courses. Do these kids really seriously study, or is our life all left to chance as to how much syllabus a person covered to score passing marks in the MBBS exams? Or how little they had to simply memorize to just claim qualifying marks to get a degree?

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

#50

Post by jebus989 »

Predatory publishing does exist, but its damage is mitigated by the fact that papers are judged primarily on the reputation of the journal or publication they're in. That is, an academic in a given field will know all the highest-tier journal titles, and have a good knowledge of mid and lower tiers -- new or obscure titles will always draw scepticism.

Previous blogs or reports with the same conclusions:

[0] http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102

[1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151235-predatory-schola...

[2] http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/...

And a(n incomplete) list of predatory publishers is maintained here:

[3] http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

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