Automated word generators have written around 120 recently published papers.
A study has discovered that around 120 papers published in recognized scientific journals the past few years are fraudulent, created by automated word generators. These machines are able to combine random, fancy-sounding words into plausible sentence structures, amazingly making the papers acceptable to the journals that originally published them.
The fake papers were in the fields of computer science and math and carried titles such as “Application and Research of Smalltalk Harnessing Based on Game-Theoretic Symmetries”; “An Evaluation of E-Business with Fin”; and “Simulating Flip-Flop Gates Using Peer-to-Peer Methodologies.”
This problem is not new. In a test back in 1996, a physics professor submitted a fake paper to a philosophy magazine. In the paper he claimed that gravity is “postmodern” because it is “free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth.” The paper was accepted and published.
How can nonsense like this end up happening? French computer scientist Cyril Labbé said, "High pressure on scientists leads directly to too prolific and less meaningful publications," but he couldn’t explain why journals would publish fake papers. "They all should have been evaluated by a peer-review process,” he added.
Publishers were also at a loss for an explanation. “We are in the process of investigating… [and] taking the papers down as quickly as possible. A placeholder notice will be put up once the papers have been removed. Since we publish over 2,200 journals and 8,400 books annually, this will take some time,” one publisher commented.
If these papers are as fraudulent and nonsensical as described, it would seem that nobody would be able to understand what the papers are talking about and therefore not use them as references. More worrisome are those papers discussing actual research but which nevertheless lead to unjustified and biased conclusions. As an example, consider some of the papers which describe new fossil discoveries. The fossils may be in pieces and incomplete, and yet conclusions are reached which don’t seem to be justified.
So, there is need to evaluate the quality of the papers we read and the claims they make, but a certain amount of trust is necessary. Creationist readers are likely to have a high amount of trust in papers published by the leading creationist journals and websites because fraud or carelessness would be very damaging to these Christian magazines and sites built on a reputation for honesty.
While the Bible is not a science textbook, the science which is in God’s Word is 100% trustworthy. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6) For the person who has repented of sin and is faithfully following Jesus like sheep follow their shepherd, the straight paths lead directly to our heavenly home.
Reference: Maxim Lott, “Over 100 published science journal articles just gibberish,” Fox News
(Photo from Wikipedia, by New York Zoological Society)
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QUESTION OF THE DAY
How dangerous are backyard trampolines?
According to the Indiana University School of Medicine, backyard trampoline accidents led to 1 million emergency room visits between 2002 and 2011. Three hundred thousand of those accidents resulted in broken bones.
Source: Discovery News (May 8, 2014)
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