The back story I heard is that the authors submitted to the top journals, were rejected, and kept going downward in perceived impact until the article was accep

The back story I heard is that the authors submitted to the top journals, were rejected, and kept going downward in perceived impact until the article was accepted. That is, that most of the articles (with perhaps one exception?) did not appear in the close-to-top journals. And they had many papers in the works at one time, and some of them did not get in at all despite the above "just-good-enough" optimization technique. Although I kind of enjoyed the original Sokal paper - I was a subscriber to Lingua Franca, where Sokal announced the hoax in the first place - I think the message of this iteration is more that: "if you work hard to game the system, you can indeed find a hole and game the system". This finding is not that interesting. --- Specifically (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Sokal-Squared-Is-Huge/244714 https://www.chronicle.com/article/Sokal-Squared-Is-Huge/2447...): "Three scholars [...] spent 10 months writing 20 hoax papers [...] and submitted them to "the best journals in the relevant fields." Of the 20, seven papers were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors [stopped].