Fake Research Papers

Anyone who's ever had a research paper rejected must have had the same funny feeling I did upon learning that a computer program named SCIgen has been published many times, as recounted in Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers published in Nature.There is no proof that SCIgen created the fake papers, but the fakes were detected by French researcher Cyril Labb's program that detects papers created by SCIgen, so the suspicion is strong that SCIgen and similar programs were involved. The journals involved concede the papers are nonsense and are in the process of withdrawing them. I'm embarrassed to find that IEEE, my own trade organization, was one of the organizations snookered, especially since they've never hesitated to reject my own papers.I'm for peer review and against open journals, which to me are equivalent to self-publishing. To me, any research paper that hasn't been vetted by at least 2 other sincere and motivated researchers in the same field is suspect. Absent peer review a journal is just a technical form of Twitter.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

So essentially SCIgen generates word salad?

Wow! Kinda sickening. Did you find links to any of the fake papers? Doesn't open access mean that publication is funded by the author rather than subscriptions? It doesn't necessarily mean "not peer reviewed," although it would seem that many are not. I appreciate open access journals since subscription based journals cost $35 to $50 to view a single article. Way too expensive for the average person to access. However, if open access journals can't be trusted to provide reliable research papers, they become essentially worthless.I wonder if providing reviewer comments to open access articles would help keep genuine peer-reviewed open access journals honest. Which of course would increase costs and so reduce profits, which is really the important thing right? HBD

Yes, but we're talking about 'Nature' here. Does 'Nature' published non-peer reviewed articles. I had not thought so. I suppose I should have looked that up before hitting 'submit' and that not doing so is setting a bad example.... I found myself unable to hit submit, likely because I want to reserve the right to badger someone else. Nature does publish some non-peer reviewed articles, and has in the past been called on the carpet for publishing both fraudulent papers and nonsense papers.

Not open access, just open from an author perspective, like http://www.arxiv.org. Maybe "non-peer reviewed" would have been a better term.You describe something like a crowdsourced approach to peer review. If it works I'm in favor of it. I think many people use the quality of the journal as a measure of how much a paper can be trusted. Anything that provides that assurance is good. Examples of a high quality journals are Nature, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine. I can trust what I read there.When researching anything outside my specialty I need that assurance so I don't waste my time. If I'm just posting here and I use an unreliable paper as a source, then I could post incorrect information. If I'm looking up an algorithm for use at work, it would be a big waste of time if I used a paper authored by SCIgen or someone having a bit of fun.--Percy

??? Nature was where the article about nonsense papers appeared, not one of the offending journals. I'm not expecting perfection, I don't think it's possible, and I don't see how a journal can do much to protect against fraud, but it does surprise me to learn that Nature does publish some papers without peer review, and even more that they've published nonsense papers.So looking this up, Wikipedia states that "Watson and Crick's 1953 paper on the structure of DNA" was not peer reviewed. Interestingly, peer review operates in the reverse direction too, rejecting legitimate papers as happened when "Enrico Fermi submitted his breakthrough paper on the weak interaction theory of beta decay" and "Nature turned down the paper because it was considered too remote from reality."I couldn't find information about nonsense papers published by Nature.--Percy

Yeah, Looks like I goofed. How about the stuff described in the 'Controversies' section of the wikipedia article on 'Nature'.Nature - Wikipedia(journal)