| 查看: 1316 | 回复: 4 | |||
[交流]
灌水竟然有软件？已有2人参与
|
|
Nature | News Sharing Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers Conference proceedings removed from subscription databases after scientist reveals that they were computer-generated. Richard Van Noorden 24 February 2014 Updated: 25 February 2014 The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers. Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply*; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper). *Update: One of the named authors replied to Nature News on 25 February. He said that he first learned of the article when conference organizers notified his university in December 2013; and that he does not know why he was a listed co-author on the paper. "The matter is being looked into by the related investigators," he said. How to create a nonsense paper Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement” (see ‘Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper’). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv. SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen’s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick. Labbé does not know why the papers were submitted — or even if the authors were aware of them. Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations. Labbé has emailed editors and authors named in many of the papers and related conferences but received scant replies; one editor said that he did not work as a program chair at a particular conference, even though he was named as doing so, and another author claimed his paper was submitted on purpose to test out a conference, but did not respond on follow-up. Nature has not heard anything from a few enquiries. “I wasn’t aware of the scale of the problem, but I knew it definitely happens. We do get occasional e-mails from good citizens letting us know where SCIgen papers show up,” says Jeremy Stribling, who co-wrote SCIgen when he was at MIT and now works at VMware, a software company in Palo Alto, California. “The papers are quite easy to spot,” says Labbé, who has built a website where users can test whether papers have been created using SCIgen. His detection technique, described in a study1 published in Scientometrics in 2012, involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by SCIgen. Shortly before that paper was published, Labbé informed the IEEE of 85 fake papers he had found. Monika Stickel, director of corporate communications at IEEE, says that the publisher “took immediate action to remove the papers” and “refined our processes to prevent papers not meeting our standards from being published in the future”. In December 2013, Labbé informed the IEEE of another batch of apparent SCIgen articles he had found. Last week, those were also taken down, but the web pages for the removed articles give no explanation for their absence. Ruth Francis, UK head of communications at Springer, says that the company has contacted editors, and is trying to contact authors, about the issues surrounding the articles that are coming down. The relevant conference proceedings were peer reviewed, she confirms — making it more mystifying that the papers were accepted. The IEEE would not say, however, whether it had contacted the authors or editors of the suspected SCIgen papers, or whether submissions for the relevant conferences were supposed to be peer reviewed. “We continue to follow strict governance guidelines for evaluating IEEE conferences and publications,” Stickel said. A long history of fakes Labbé is no stranger to fake studies. In April 2010, he used SCIgen to generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antkare [see pdf]. Labbé showed how easy it was to add these fake papers to the Google Scholar database, boosting Ike Antkare’s h-index, a measure of published output, to 94 — at the time, making Antkare the world's 21st most highly cited scientist. Last year, researchers at the University of Granada, Spain, added to Labbé’s work, boosting their own citation scores in Google Scholar by uploading six fake papers with long lists to their own previous work2. Labbé says that the latest discovery is merely one symptom of a “spamming war started at the heart of science” in which researchers feel pressured to rush out papers to publish as much as possible. There is a long history of journalists and researchers getting spoof papers accepted in conferences or by journals to reveal weaknesses in academic quality controls — from a fake paper published by physicist Alan Sokal of New York University in the journal Social Text in 1996, to a sting operation by US reporter John Bohannon published in Science in 2013, in which he got more than 150 open-access journals to accept a deliberately flawed study for publication. Labbé emphasizes that the nonsense computer science papers all appeared in subscription offerings. In his view, there is little evidence that open-access publishers — which charge fees to publish manuscripts — necessarily have less stringent peer review than subscription publishers. Labbé adds that the nonsense papers were easy to detect using his tools, much like the plagiarism checkers that many publishers already employ. But because he could not automatically download all papers from the subscription databases, he cannot be sure that he has spotted every SCIgen-generated paper. Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2014.14763 http://www.nature.com/news/publi ... rish-papers-1.14763 |
回复此楼» 猜你喜欢
找一个允许我去清华联合培养的研究生导师
已经有5人回复
-
基金和生小孩
已经有35人回复
-
美国教授开除中国研究生：我就不该录取你！
已经有7人回复
-
厦门大学，课题组新增一个博士名额，085803核能工程
已经有7人回复
-
杭州国企和浙江高校如何选择？
已经有21人回复
-
最近遇到这样一个问题
已经有7人回复
-
某系主任被同校教授举报包养情妇、长期嫖娼
已经有16人回复
-
傅克酰基化，产率大于百分之一百，求解，很急
已经有11人回复
-
小孩7岁，上一年级，不自信，学习较差
已经有32人回复
-
24/25读博求博导
已经有3人回复
» 本主题相关价值贴推荐，对您同样有帮助:
- 电子书《期刊审稿专家心得体会》分享及审稿专家奖励发放专贴
已经有312人回复
CKX
木虫 (著名写手)
- 应助: 45 (小学生)
- 金币: 2261.1
- 散金: 133
- 红花: 8
- 帖子: 1413
- 在线: 186.5小时
- 虫号: 602271
- 注册: 2008-09-14
- 专业: 理论和计算化学
2楼2014-03-01 15:47:54
3楼2014-03-01 17:19:02
huangchao234
新虫 (初入文坛)
- 应助: 1 (幼儿园)
- 金币: 42.7
- 散金: 5
- 帖子: 29
- 在线: 14.5小时
- 虫号: 3008576
- 注册: 2014-03-02
- 专业: 免疫学研究新技术与新方法
★
小木虫: 金币+0.5, 给个红包，谢谢回帖
小木虫: 金币+0.5, 给个红包，谢谢回帖
|
Thank you very much for submitting your manuscript "The Pathogenesis of ***" (NMED-A70032). After careful consideration, we decided that your manuscript is not appropriate for publication in Nature Medicine. We are only able to publish a small fraction of the manuscripts submitted to Nature Medicine. We therefore aim to return most of them as quickly as possible, avoiding a time-consuming peer-review process. Papers may be turned down on a number of editorial grounds. For example, they may be judged unlikely to appeal to a broad sample of the biomedical community, or to represent a relatively small advance over work previously published or in press at Nature Medicine or elsewhere. In this case, we feel the work is better suited for a more specialized journal. In making this decision we do not intend a criticism of the work -- we are indeed sure that others in this field will find it interesting. We merely question its appropriateness for Nature Medicine. Nevertheless, thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to consider your work. I am sorry that we cannot be more positive on this occasion and hope you are soon able to interest an alternative journal in your manuscript. Sincerely, Alison Farrell, Ph.D. Senior Editor Nature Medicine ______________________________________________________________________________ ** As a service to authors, Nature Publishing Group provides authors with the ability to transfer a manuscript that one journal cannot offer to publish to another journal, without the author having to upload the manuscript data again. To transfer your manuscript to another NPG journal using this service, please click on http://mts-nmed.nature.com/cgi-bin/main.plex?el=A2H4iVr3A5CaRv4X6A9U9faKMzT |
4楼2014-03-02 00:59:00
huangchao234
新虫 (初入文坛)
- 应助: 1 (幼儿园)
- 金币: 42.7
- 散金: 5
- 帖子: 29
- 在线: 14.5小时
- 虫号: 3008576
- 注册: 2014-03-02
- 专业: 免疫学研究新技术与新方法
5楼2014-03-02 01:00:31
4