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It’s the kind of stunt I might have pulled myself if
only I had the technical smarts: Three Massachusetts Institute of
Technology graduate students were formally invited to present a
research paper generated by a software program they designed. The
program, called “SCIgen,” strings together pseudo-scientific jargon
and random buzzwords to produces authentic-looking papers complete
with charts, graphs, footnotes, and everything one could want in a
research paper except research.
The invitation came from
organizers of the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics
and Informatics (WMSCI), to be held in Florida in July, after the
students submitted “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical
Unification of Access Points and Redundancy.” It is pure gibberish,
complete with “context-free grammar” like “Building a sufficient
software environment took time, but was well worth it in the end.
We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67,
augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions,” and “Our
experiments soon proved that automating our parallel 5.25 floppy
drives was more effective than auto-generating them, as previous
work suggested.”
It sounds like much of the
scientific research I’ve read but I always assumed real scientists
understood that stuff. Instead, WMSCI spokesman Nagib Callaos told
Reuters the alleged reviewers simply didn’t finish their comments by
the deadline, though I’m not sure how long it takes to write
“rubbish.” “We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper
that was not refused by any of its three selected reviewers,”
Callaos continued.
Or maybe he doesn’t know
context-free grammar when he sees it. The conference’s website is
riddled with it, including gems like “Through WMSCI conferences, we
are trying to relate the analytic
thinking required in focused
conference sessions, to the synthetic
thinking, required for analogies generation, which calls for
multi-focus domain and divergent
thinking.”
Perhaps Callaos is too fluent
in gobbledygook for “Rooter” to have raised a red flag. To prove my
point I considered listing quotes from both the counterfeit paper
and the conference website to dare readers to guess which was which
but I felt myself slipping into a coma after about the third quote.
The feeling was not unlike that I get when I read bona fide
research, usually for the purpose of translating it into English for
a column.
I’ve always wondered how much
torturing of the English language by scientists, attorneys, and
others is done for the purpose of making themselves look smart. If
smarts fills more seats at a conference – and brings in more cash –
it helps to look intelligent, or at least be able to fake it.
The pranksters say the
phoniness of many scientific conferences is exactly what led them to
develop SCIgen. According to their website, “One useful
purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to ‘fake’
conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which
exist only to make money.” Even as invited speakers, the MIT
students were asked to pay registration fees for the conference and
cover their own travel costs. They raised the cash by taking
donations through their website in less than 72 hours.
For its part, WMSCI is making
the “everyone does it” defense, claiming on their website “Several
conferences that announce the possibility of reviewed and
non-reviewed papers simultaneously can be found on the Web … indeed,
there are prestigious conferences that accept papers with an
abstract of no more than 50 words, so there is no full paper
reviewing before accepting the paper.”
They’ve also withdrawn their
invitation to the MIT students, which is too bad since they probably
made the greatest discovery of the conference: unintelligible mumbo
jumbo does not equal good science.
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