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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

#71

Post by h0cked »

ngkabra wrote: post #64
kken wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks. I've updated the intro of the post to make this clearer. The PhD applications problem is a different issue. We're churning out a million engineers every year, and a good fraction of them are convinced that getting into a Masters/PhD program in the US is the gateway to riches and a better life. A few of these students are smart enough to know where to apply and how to apply, but most of them are clueless enoug…

Well, I do agree that students can have different quality, and we shouldn't discriminate Indian students. But the problem is that enough Indian students have made bad reputation for all Indian students here (U.S), and to avoid future loss (time and effort of the faculties), we just start to reject any Indian students (at least in my own circle).

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

#72

Post by h0cked »

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.

I don't, but I do review papers for people that I don't know if they have a good reputation.

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

#73

Post by nilkn »

crocowhile wrote: post #68
ngkabra wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure I understand what you're saying. I know that getting a paper in a conference like this is not an achievement. However, I know lots of students who do not know this. I know faculty in Engineering colleges who do not know this. I know many people who actually pay money to get published in such conferences because they really believe it's an achievement. Hence, this expose to improve awareness. I am not su…

What astrowizicist is trying to say is that any student - let alone faculty - who is falling for a spamference is clearly too stupid to work in academia.

I think the real point of this article is that it's not realistic to expect every one of these students to have two high-quality published papers as a graduation requirement. This leads to and fuels the bogus conferences.

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

#74

Post by jrochkind1 »

ct1 wrote: post #69
ngkabra wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure I understand what you're saying. I know that getting a paper in a conference like this is not an achievement. However, I know lots of students who do not know this. I know faculty in Engineering colleges who do not know this. I know many people who actually pay money to get published in such conferences because they really believe it's an achievement. Hence, this expose to improve awareness. I am not su…

I may elaborate, in the hope it is useful. You should never submit any work to a conference or journal you do not know and follow beforehand. To be more explicit: a good rule of thumb is that if you are not familiar with the publications of at least some of the committee or, if you were asked to suggest reviewers for you research out of the scientific committee members, you'd be hard pressed to name a few, you should…

Why shouldn't you submit to such a conference? Because you don't know if it's legit or not?

I don't think the students care if it's legit or not. They care about getting papers published so they can graduate. And apparently their schools don't care if the conferences are legit or not either. So everyone is happy, we all win!

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

#75

Post by chattoraj »

ngkabra wrote: post #40
albertyw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Fergusson College recently hosted a "NATIONAL conference on Emerging Trends in Computer Science and Applications".

Needless to say, every participant was from Pune...

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

#76

Post by ngkabra »

h0cked wrote: post #71
ngkabra wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I've updated the intro of the post to make this clearer. The PhD applications problem is a different issue. We're churning out a million engineers every year, and a good fraction of them are convinced that getting into a Masters/PhD program in the US is the gateway to riches and a better life. A few of these students are smart enough to know where to apply and how to apply, but most of them are clueless enoug…

Well, I do agree that students can have different quality, and we shouldn't discriminate Indian students. But the problem is that enough Indian students have made bad reputation for all Indian students here (U.S), and to avoid future loss (time and effort of the faculties), we just start to reject any Indian students (at least in my own circle).

I know that this is a problem, and I don't blame you.

However, one of the admissions committee members of a top-10 US university told me how they deal with this problem.

That they keep track of good universities in India, and what GPA is considered good in India. Occasionally, they take a chance with a student with an interesting resume from an unknown University, and continue selecting from there if that student does well. Repeat this process, and over time they end up with a good list of sources of good students from India; and they ignore applications from all other Indians.

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

#77

Post by fat0wl »

astrowizicist wrote: post #41
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…

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.

Well I mean.... calm down, this was done as an experiment by the author to see what kind of corrupt shakedown his students were being run through.

These things need to be tested in order to improve the academic system. Otherwise the misinformation continues (in the form of some actually believing the claims of peer review etc.) and people may be duped by a paper that is seemingly innocuous but where the research is faked.

(Here is a recent article that is indicative of how dangerous the academic review process is getting. IMHO it should be valued above novel research at this point -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6968676)

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

#78

Post by fat0wl »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #74
ct1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may elaborate, in the hope it is useful. You should never submit any work to a conference or journal you do not know and follow beforehand. To be more explicit: a good rule of thumb is that if you are not familiar with the publications of at least some of the committee or, if you were asked to suggest reviewers for you research out of the scientific committee members, you'd be hard pressed to name a few, you should…

Why shouldn't you submit to such a conference? Because you don't know if it's legit or not? I don't think the students care if it's legit or not. They care about getting papers published so they can graduate. And apparently their schools don't care if the conferences are legit or not either. So everyone is happy, we all win!

the only actual beneficiary i can think of is the people charging students to publish without even having to deal with the overhead of hiring someone to read the damn thing

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

#79

Post by frozenport »

eitally wrote: post #66
kamaal wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clas…

It really hurt the non-Indians in my American university's MEng program that all the Indians (about 80% of my department) worked collaboratively on all the homework, projects, and exams. Culturally, this had been acceptable for them as Indian undergrads, but it was completely unacceptable cheating in the US and ruined the curve for the rest of the students.

I would like to confirm this. In undergrad I felt like foreign students come to US and ruin our education system. Which is a weird feeling when you weren''t born in the US. But I think this is a subject for another thread.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1013239...

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

#80

Post by frozenport »

I mentor undergrads on research projects and this toxic environment hurts them. Every undergrad who comes to me wants to paper, and most believe they can do it in a few months while school is running. Often it ends in some kind of pleas to publish any paper no matter how poor quality the journal.

Why is this bad? Poor research work damages for other reasons, but the mindset hurts the students. In research we often need to choose between doing an learning. If you start by doing you will never learn enough to make a meaningful contribution or come up with something original. These kids want to do work without learning anything.

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