Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

At the time, there was an arms race within the systems community to see who could flip a bigger bird to the organizers of the SCI spamference. David Mazieres and Eddie Kohler started it off when they submitted "Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List" [1] for publication. We wanted to one-up them and figured we could do so by submitting a random paper that might be accepted into the conference, allowing us to give an in-person talk. The plan worked up to a point, but when we asked the internet for $3k to send us to Orlando, the press and then the organizers of SCI caught wind and revoked the random paper they had previously accepted.

Everything since has been gravy. We're pumped that SCIgen is still a useful weapon against charlatans the world over (this now includes you, IEEE and Springer).

[1] http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf

Happily (?) high school and college essays (and probably potential scientific publications) will also be read chiefly by software in the near future, just as GRE essays are graded in part by software today. Whichever side has the best algorithm wins.

There are a couple of examples here: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#examples

I found them side-splittingly funny, at least for a page or so.

HCI and graphics are other examples: a SIGCHI proceedings paper carries way more weight than a paper in one the HCI journals. And a SIGGRAPH proceedings paper is better than than a paper in something like Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, although they've recently converted the SIGGRAPH proceedings into a special issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics (which is now more prestigious than other issues of that journal, because it's really a proceedings volume), mostly to avoid the confusion from other fields that don't consider conferences to be publications. Those two conferences actually have nearly exclusive prestige in their field, to the extent that they're the only top publication venue: if you're working in HCI or graphics you more or less need SIGCHI or SIGGRAPH publications to be considered a legit active researcher. They also tend to be more selective in peer-review than the journals are, with acceptance rates in the 10-15% range, while journals are usually more like 20-35%.

In AI I think it's a bit mixed, and maybe a US—European difference. Europeans tend to value journal publications in places like JAIR, JMLR, various IEEE Transactions, etc. more. Americans also value the best of those journals, but I get the impression that conference publications at places like NIPS, AAAI, and ICML are at least as good, and definitely better than a lower-tier journal.

My read on it is that the traditional approach in CS was:

1. Non-peer-reviewed "workshops" or "symposia". Place for position papers, work-in-progress, etc. Typically screened only for basic suitability for the event. In some cases authors may only submit an abstract of their topic, not a full paper.

2. Peer-reviewed but non-archival "conferences". Place to disseminate properly written up recent work in relatively short form [6-12 pages double-column], get feedback from other researchers, etc. Typically peer-reviewed by 2-4 reviewers, on the basis of a full paper (not abstracts like in some fields). The top 10-40% of submitted papers are accepted for inclusion (depending on the conference's selectivity), and then accepted authors typically have a month or so to revise their papers on the basis of reviewer comments, before submitting the final version for publication in the proceedings.

3. Peer-reviewed archival "journals". Place to wrap up a project or line of work with a publication that takes 3 to 5 conference publications, and integrates them into a full writeup of the project, tied into a nice bow for posterity suitable for archiving in The Literature. Peer-reviewed in the same way as other fields. Typically longer, 20+ pages.

But what seems to have happened is nobody really reads #3, since all the new work comes out in #2, the peer-review standards of #2 are already high enough for practical filtering, and #3 is years behind. And then people (especially Americans, especially in certain fields) just stopped writing #3 as often altogether. The view seems to be that tying several conference papers into a bow might be nice from the perspective of having a sorted-out archival literature, but at the present time, your peers have already moved on, and there are diminishing returns from tying those 3 already-published SIGGRAPH papers into a summary journal article, compared to working on new research for the next SIGGRAPH paper instead. It's even seen a little as "milking" your previous work: if you take your conference publications and turn them into a journal article, some people will assume you're doing it because you need the journal line on your CV for some kind of tenure/hiring committee, since otherwise why would you be spending all this time "upgrading" old conference papers into a journal, rather than writing new conference papers on new research?