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Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

nature.com

11–20 of 54 posts

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#11
post #9

It may not be long before passable high school and college essays can be undetectably generated by software. I wonder what we'll do then. At some point, I guess we'll have writer software that pretty much generates nicely articulated narrative for whatever it is we wish to say. "Write up something about global warming. Make it borderline skeptical, quote the Concerned Scientists and so forth. You know what to say."

That would mean that a computer had passed the Turing test which would be...quite an achievement.

Not at all - you aren't engaged in conversation with a paper you are reading.

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would mean that a computer had passed the Turing test which would be...quite an achievement.

Not at all - you aren't engaged in conversation with a paper you are reading.

Hrmmm. Yes, that's true. I stand corrected!

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#13

It may not be long before passable high school and college essays can be undetectably generated by software. I wonder what we'll do then. At some point, I guess we'll have writer software that pretty much generates nicely articulated narrative for whatever it is we wish to say. "Write up something about global warming. Make it borderline skeptical, quote the Concerned Scientists and so forth. You know what to say."

It may not be long before passable high school and college essays can be undetectably generated by software. I wonder what we'll do then.

If we fed such a program good-quality reference books, we could massively improve the quality of most Wikipedia articles.

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#14
Conference proceedings (not to be confused with a handful of actual journals that just contain "proceedings" in their name) can be thought of like the paper programs you might be handed at a play. They're usually meant to be an accompaniment to the event rather than a stand-alone publication. Their intent is to collect contributions from conference participants into a handy reference that attendees can use if they want more information, missed a talk they were interested in, etc.. Extremely high quality proceedings are peer-reviewed and might eventually evolve into a text-book. This level of quality is relatively rare though.

Most conference proceedings are not peer-reviewed and many aren't even read once by the conference organizers/"editors". This usually isn't thought to be a big deal because it is assumed that, were a submission truly fraudulent, the submitter would inevitably be outed when they give their talk. However, some conferences make submitting an original paper for their proceedings mandatory for acceptance. Getting funding to attend a conference is usually a lot easier if you're presenting, so researchers are motivated to speak even if they merely wish to attend. Speaking looks better on your CV to boot. Since conference proceedings are typically ignored, researchers generally won't put their best effort into these papers. When dead trees ruled, conference proceedings would be rapidly forgotten simply because you'd have a deuce of a time finding them if you somehow heard about a paper in it that you wanted to read! They simply weren't distributed to anyone besides conference attendees and maybe a library or two. Today, electronic copies have brought poor quality conference proceedings to a far vaster audience than they were ever intended for!

I'm disappointed, but not the least bit surprised that some people would submit something created by a paper generator to a conference. The blame for this falls squarely on conference organizers for requiring paper submissions but being too lazy to even read them once. If you don't want to read a stack of badly written papers, require abstracts only and, if you're still gung-ho to make some proceedings, welcome voluntary paper submissions.

This incident should not shake confidence in peer-reviewed journals one iota. It might, however, discourage conference organizers from requiring papers from speakers if they're not committed to reading them all.

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#16
post #14

Conference proceedings (not to be confused with a handful of actual journals that just contain "proceedings" in their name) can be thought of like the paper programs you might be handed at a play. They're usually meant to be an accompaniment to the event rather than a stand-alone publication. Their intent is to collect contributions from conference participants into a handy reference that attendees can use if they wa…

>Since conference proceedings are typically ignored researchers generally won't put their best effort into these papers.

It's interesting, because this is completely the opposite in many CS fields (e.g. security). The top conferences carry much more weight than any journal. It's probably related to how fast the field changes.

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#19
post #16
post #14

Conference proceedings (not to be confused with a handful of actual journals that just contain "proceedings" in their name) can be thought of like the paper programs you might be handed at a play. They're usually meant to be an accompaniment to the event rather than a stand-alone publication. Their intent is to collect contributions from conference participants into a handy reference that attendees can use if they wa…

>Since conference proceedings are typically ignored researchers generally won't put their best effort into these papers. It's interesting, because this is completely the opposite in many CS fields (e.g. security). The top conferences carry much more weight than any journal. It's probably related to how fast the field changes.

I'm not in CS, but I've heard of this. It's definitely aberrant. Some other fields change just as rapidly so I'd just chalk this up as a cultural difference.

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#20
Previously, I have understood this was a concern mostly with the so-called "open-access" journals.

In 2013, the Science Magazine went to some extreme lengths to discredit these journals, that more often than not seem to lack any form of scientific peer review. A fake paper, published by a made-up person working for a non-existent university, purporting to describe a cancer drug extracted from lichen, had experimental flaws that should be blatantly obvious to even an undergraduate of the field.

Of the 304 papers submitted, 157 were accepted and only 98 were rejected, with the rest not eliciting a timely reply. Only 36 papers received reviewer comments about the scientific shortcomings, and in 16 of those cases the paper was accepted anyway. Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

It seems pretty shocking that even well-known publishers like IEEE and Springer are not alien to such obvious lack of peer review. Does it actually serve anyone's interest, that we have so many parallel "scientific" journals that publishers can't even find competent reviewers for a large number of the papers published? Does anyone follow the publications? Or are they all just a way to rip off institutional subscribers like universities, who must subscribe to all possible journals and pay outrageous sums to the publishers?

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