20 ms·

How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

144 points by kamaal 13y ago

linux_devil 13y ago
I think its more about filling pockets by charging registration fees. One should try out for only IEEE conferences although it is not necessary but "International" in the title really does not make a conference "International"
- microarchitect 13y ago
  The IEEE label isn't an indicator of quality and similar papers have been published in IEEE sponsored conferences. See http://diehimmelistschoen.blogspot.com/ http://diehimmelistschoen.blogspot.com/ and http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/. One of my old professors used to joke that "for every paper, there is a conference that accepts it." Unfortunately this is somewhat literally true. This isn't unique to any one country as the SCIgen successes demonstrate and I don't really see a solution to it.
  - kken 13y ago
    Of course there are regional IEEE conferences. But in general, the international IEEE conferences and journals by the bigger societies are probably the best ones out there. I have published quite a bit in the physical sciences/engineering field and in my experience the IEEE journals have a far better peer review process than AIP, ACS, Elsevier and even NPG. The same goes for the conferences.
    - h0cked 13y ago
      I used to think if it's IEEE or ACM, they are ok (not good) to publish. Nowadays, I am not so sure after seeing a bunch of low quality "international" conferences in Asian especially in India. ACM seems a little better than IEEE... Now my rule is to only publish in conferences that I know or are well known in the field.... Aslo reject any requests to serve as a TPC or reviewer for conferences from this region..The papers are normally low quality and waste of my time to read...
      - microarchitect 13y ago
        You have way too much time on your hands if you are considering review requests from people you don't know.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        h0cked 13y ago
        I don't, but I do review papers for people that I don't know if they have a good reputation.
    - microarchitect 13y ago
      What makes a conference good isn't the IEEE label but rather the reputation of the conference itself and its corresponding ability to attract a high quality program committee. The important point here is that there isn't a shortcut to evaluating conference quality. You have to know your field, know who is worth listening to and who isn't, know what the top conferences are, what the mediocre conferences are and so forth. If a new conference springs up, you need to be able to judge whether to pay attention by looking at the PC. > Of course there are regional IEEE conferences. But in general, the international IEEE conferences and journals by the bigger societies are probably the best ones out there. You can't really make general statements like that. For example, CAV proceedings are published by Springer (http://www.springer.com/computer/theoretical+computer+science/book/978-3-642-39798-1 http://www.springer.com/computer/theoretical+computer+scienc...). JPDC is a well-regarded journal in the parallel computing community that is published by Elsevier. And a "regional" conference doesn't mean it's a bad conference. DATE (http://www.date-conference.com/ http://www.date-conference.com/) is probably the second best design automation conference behind DAC. ASPDAC, ATVA, APLAS, FSTTCS are some well-regarded regional conferences and there are plenty more like these. Not all of these are IEEE sponsored either. > I have published quite a bit in the physical sciences/engineering field and in my experience the IEEE journals have a far better peer review process than AIP, ACS, Elsevier and even NPG. The same goes for the conferences. I'm not trying to slight IEEE here. I looked through my publication list and it turns out all my papers are in IEEE conferences and journals! But on the other hand, a few of them could easily have ended up in a venue like CAV and this wouldn't magically make them worse papers. The key point here I want to make here is this: there is no substitute for knowing your field, if you're judging conference quality by the IEEE label, you're doing something wrong.
- midas007 13y ago
  Elsevier, McGraw-Hill, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and Pearson are just some of the extortionists of academia, education and training.
midas007 13y ago
Neither the first time nor the last. In fact, this should be a semi-official running gag (a-la Chaos Monkey) with all journals to keep them honest. Btw I had this wild English prof that claimed to have written crazy shit in undergrad papers that was never caught to prove that graded papers were just skimmed.
- AmVess 13y ago
  I had a crazy English prof that told me he never wrote a line of anything that wasn't complete malarkey, including his PhD thesis. He's currently enjoying being a highly respected prof at a top uni, and he still writes complete gibberish. He's one hell of a writing teacher, which is probably why they keep him around.
- saraid216 13y ago
  That's not going to keep them honest...
- Theodores 13y ago
  Maybe there should be merit given to people that self-select themselves to be the 'mystery shoppers' of the academic world. Perhaps you could get a job where the deciding factor to hire you rather than someone else was your ability to get x papers of utter nonsense in academic journals/conferences. If you think about it there are people doing this already...
kken 13y ago
>Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right? No, absolutely not. Looking at the web site immediately raises two red flags: 1) It's a multi-topic conference. Usually these fall into two categories: Undergrad conferences and money-making scams. Participating in neither of them is "a big achievement" 2) The submission deadline is 9 days before the conference starts and three days before the registrations deadline. This would give them 2-3 days for the peer review process? That's is close to impossible.
- albertyw 13y ago
  Another red flag - Is it just me, or is the header image on the conference website an image of Las Vegas?
  - thirsteh 13y ago
    Definitely LV. Caesar's Palace, the Rio--pretty distinguishable buildings. And you can see the light beam from the Luxor.
  - ngkabra 13y ago
    They did say it's an INTERNATIONAL conference...
    - chattoraj 13y ago
      Fergusson College recently hosted a "NATIONAL conference on Emerging Trends in Computer Science and Applications". Needless to say, every participant was from Pune...
- notthetup 13y ago
  True. Sadly many students don't know better. And the worst part being many employers also might not know the difference either. At some level this is also an issue with raising awareness/understanding among students of how academia and research works.
- 13y ago
obstacle1 13y ago
Reminds me of when Alan Sokal wrote a paper full of buzzwords and co-opted scientific language and name-dropping then submitted it to a prestigious cultural studies journal [1]. Thesis: quantum gravity is merely a social and linguistic construct. Accepted. The humanities are still trying to recover from that one. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- userbinator 13y ago
  The randomly generated talks here are just as hilarious: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks But the sad thing is, you could probably show stuff like this on a TV series as a "this is what research produces" and the majority of people wouldn't know any better.
  - thirsteh 13y ago
    Then again, the same thing can be said for any of us reading Ph.D. dissertations outside our fields.
    - CJefferson 13y ago
      Or I imagine getting an expert to describe their process for fixing large industrial machinery.
  - bhaumik 13y ago
    Reminds of Reggie Watt's "unpredictably brilliant" parody of a Ted Talk. [Skip to 0:54 for English] http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_most_entertaining_way.html http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_...
    - falcolas 13y ago
      I wouldn't recommend skipping anything, it's all very carefully rehearsed, and worth watching from end to end. The transition itself was pretty brilliant.
notastartup 13y ago
could it be possible that there are many scentific papers written by phd and masters which are simply garbage? All this time I thought, "but these guys are smart, they went and got phd and masters and their thesis sounds really intriguing", but reading through the paper, absolutely nothing is presented but just words for the sake of filling up space? Also papers that seems to skew their quantitative results, multiple papers claiming higher success rates than the previous while in small letters acknowledging crucial items that distort the results. Am I crazy for thinking I am making this up in my head? p.s. is there a way to get access to scientific papers without paying $24 each time or a subscription fee? google scholar is good but some of the papers really insist on you paying. I thought knowledge was supposed to be free!
- tlarkworthy 13y ago
  That's PhD level thinking! "Undergrads think they know everything. Grad students know they know nothing. PhD's know everybody else knows nothing." p.s. no, hope the open access movement takes off (I think it is), or find a a friend in a university you can tunnel into. Given knowledge is power, it's not surprising someone is making tons of money off it.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  There are probably many that are garbage. That doesn't mean that the majority of masters/PhD papers aren't scientific and intellectual achievements the likes of which aren't often found outside academia or the upper echelons of industry (nobody else can justify the risk profile of academic research). It also doesn't mean that the aggregate value of the results is small. Many/most papers present useless (to society) results that only appear meaningful when viewed in a very narrow light. Again, that's not really a problem: just like the startup world, science has a very low yield of very high value results. Scope-narrowing is actually a method which allows us to avoid unjustly punishing legitimate null results. A feature, not a bug. Also, what appears to be narrow scope to an outsider might be of incredible importance to someone who has a better sense of perspective. Many of today's most important innovations would be impossible without thousands of yesterday's "useless" results. You aren't crazy, but you are missing the big picture. To work around paywalls, try emailing authors, visiting /r/scholar, making friends at academic institutions, or getting a side-job that will permit you journal access.
dasmithii 13y ago
While writing supplements for the Common App, I can't help but consider automated essay writing in the context of college applications. The questions are, for the most part, generic and repetitive - one decent A.I. could probably disrupt the entire process.
tubelite 13y ago
You can see the whole thing unfold on Twitter TV, starting about Dec 11th: https://twitter.com/ngkabra https://twitter.com/ngkabra
DjangoReinhardt 13y ago
The second paper in the post should never have made it past any peer-reviewer had they bothered to read the first two paragraphs. It all stems from the (supposedly optional) requirement that a Masters' level student get a paper published. Sure, it is somewhat justified - seeing as how they are partially research students themselves - but the absence of a honest and thorough peer-review kinda puts paid to the justification. As a result, most students end up opting for these pay-to-publish scams (sometimes even knowingly) and they continue to thrive. The aim of the whole exercise was to expose these conferences for what they really are - money-making scams that prey upon the students' desperation. What hurts is the fact that the students (probably) knew about it but they were so desperate to get a publication, they couldn't care less. Such is the state of the education system in India. :(
- ngkabra 13y ago
  What depressed me the most was seeing the poor, sincere students who had come to the conference to present. Some of them were tweaking their PPTs. Others were going over notes for their talk. They were clearly (I think) under the impression that presenting at this conference was a major achievement. Of the 22 papers accepted by the conference (i.e. 22 people paid to get their papers published), only about 10 came to present, which leads me to suspect that the remaining 12 knew the true nature of this conference.
  - desipenguin 13y ago
    Or remaining 12 couldn't afford to pay for the conference ?? (Rs. 6000 is not a trivial amount for a student.)
    - ngkabra 13y ago
      Nope. If you can't afford to pay for the conference, your paper does not get published at all (of the two papers I got accepted, I paid for one and that appeared, while the one I did not pay for did not appear). And once you pay, then actually attending the conference is optional.
TempleOSV2 13y ago
India-nigger. God says... shudder parity devised proper Divers well-formed year Verity Rwanda bestow a_flag_on_that_play to tumult Send preachings observe trembled
daemonk 13y ago
These parasitic journal/conferences are becoming more prevalent in the biological sciences too. Here is an account of a guy who attended a conference hosted by the OMICS publishing group: http://cabbagesofdoom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/omics-group-conferences-sham-or-scam.html http://cabbagesofdoom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/omics-group-con... There was also a recent Science magazine's "sting operation" where they submitted tons of shitty papers to journals across the world and found many journals actually accepted the paper: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full The sting was pretty controversial though as they seemed to want to use this evidence to discredit open access publishing rather than to say this is a problem with academia in general. Open access is catching on in the biological sciences (http://biorxiv.org/ http://biorxiv.org/) and big journals like nature or science are afraid of losing money. You can argue that they are a natural response to the academic publishing culture where the sole metric of success is the number of papers you publish.
petercooper 13y ago
An entire article about a certain type of "academic" conference that's really just about making money: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/76.full http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/76.full
tensor 13y ago
These sorts of scam conferences are well known among academics and don't come close to reflecting the status quo at reputable universities. People could do more to warn and out them, however.
ragsagar 13y ago
The education system in India is unimaginably worse. 57 out 60 students who completed Btech IT(aka Software Engineering) in my batch didn't knew even to a write a program to check if a number is palindrome or not.
- kamaal 13y ago
  I've seen worse. I had opted for a micro controller elective in a semester. We were only 6 guys in the whole class who did that. I discovered I was pretty good in Assembly language programming(8085) so it made more sense to study and work on that further. The remain class opted for C++, on the day of the exam I was chatting with a girl as to well she had prepared. She tells she had prepared everything apart from classes(Note this is a C++ exam). I lost all appetite to continue the discussion further. On a tangential note my cousin is in his 3rd semester currently. He tells me he did bulk of the engineering drawing my merely copy pasting CAD projects from seniors. And tells that's how nearly every one in his class is doing it. I only imagine how this works at things like Medical courses. Do these kids really seriously study, or is our life all left to chance as to how much syllabus a person covered to score passing marks in the MBBS exams? Or how little they had to simply memorize to just claim qualifying marks to get a degree?
  - eitally 13y ago
    It really hurt the non-Indians in my American university's MEng program that all the Indians (about 80% of my department) worked collaboratively on all the homework, projects, and exams. Culturally, this had been acceptable for them as Indian undergrads, but it was completely unacceptable cheating in the US and ruined the curve for the rest of the students.
    - frozenport 13y ago
      I would like to confirm this. In undergrad I felt like foreign students come to US and ruin our education system. Which is a weird feeling when you weren''t born in the US. But I think this is a subject for another thread. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10132391/Riot-after-Chinese-teachers-try-to-stop-pupils-cheating.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1013239...
jebus989 13y ago
Predatory publishing does exist, but its damage is mitigated by the fact that papers are judged primarily on the reputation of the journal or publication they're in. That is, an academic in a given field will know all the highest-tier journal titles, and have a good knowledge of mid and lower tiers -- new or obscure titles will always draw scepticism. Previous blogs or reports with the same conclusions: [0] http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102 http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102 [1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151235-predatory-scholarly-publishing/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151235-predatory-schola... [2] http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/title/Predatory-Publishing/ http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/... And a(n incomplete) list of predatory publishers is maintained here: [3] http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/
ghoul2 13y ago
Also from India, a scammy journal: http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/index http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/index Someone had posted a link to a paper in the latest issue of this journal, here in HN a couple weeks back. It was titled "A Novel Scheme for Data Encryption Technique" ( http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/article/view/2391 http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/article/view/2391 ). I could not understand why such a journal would exist and why people would publish papers in this. I did not know that having conference papers/journal publications was now a requirement for B.Tech/M.Tech. degrees in India. It wasn't so when I got mine - or maybe just my Institute did not go in for such ridiculous requirements. Existence of such conferences and Journals is a direct and predictable outcome of such a requirement. Vast majority of Undergrad/Grad students in India earn a degree not because of interest or even ability in their chosen fields, but by knowing how to beat badly drafted exams. If you force these people to "publish", it is just another hurdle to pass, mostly by paying a few thousand Rs. The requirement for "industrial training" during summer has been bypassed the same way for ages. Sigh. Edit: To other fellow Indians here: Do you know if there is a regulatory body one can approach against such scammy conferences and journals? I understand that such bodies tend to not be at all willing to help, but I'd still like to pursue this matter. Failing this, maybe we should put together a list of such journals and conferences and have these sent out to colleges and universities as a way to blacklist them?
Yuioup 13y ago
I don't know how conferences work but isn't it the purpose of a conference to discuss a certain paper? Aren't sessions planned in which a paper is taken and dissected? I can very well imagine that papers like this would be quickly discovered and discredited. Sure, it may not happen before the conference starts but at some point either before or after everybody sits down to discuss the paper it should be glaringly obvious. IANAScientist ...
- ngkabra 13y ago
  Most conferences are supposed to have a selection process (in most cases a "peer review" process) in which all submissions are sent to multiple reviewers who are experts in that area, and only papers which are deemed "acceptable" by a majority of the reviewers are published. Usually this means that the paper should be relevant to the conference, should have results that are worth publishing, and should have something new - something that hasn't been done before. All of this is supposed to happen before the paper is accepted for publication. The proceedings of top conferences in most fields are, in my opinion, more important than the actual conference itself.
- gphilip 13y ago
  > isn't it the purpose of a conference to discuss a certain paper? No. The purpose of a conference [1] is to have researchers present their results. The timing guidelines for a typical conference talk would look like: 15 minutes for the talk, 5 minutes for questions and comments, and 5 minutes for setting up the next talk. As you can imagine, this doesn't give much time for discussions; dissecting a paper is not part of the agenda. The questions and comments raised in the 5-minute period after the talk usually are along the lines of "Do you think your approach will work for this other problem?", rather than "Can you explain how this step in the argument works?". If you have a question of the latter kind, then you are supposed to discuss it with the author offline, so that the conference schedule is not affected. The conference does not provide you with a forum to discuss papers at any depth. [1] All of this pertains to Theoretical Computer Science conferences; I suspect conferences in other fields are similar, but I don't know for sure.
  - 13y ago
mathattack 13y ago
Accepting almost half of undergrad papers seems like a very weak accomplishment.
- ngkabra 13y ago
  They claimed that they accepted almost half. My guess is that they accepted 100% of the submissions they received. Because if there was any process for rejection, both my papers should have been rejected.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Almost half is effectively the same as 100%. You're buying a credential. It's like paying $350 for a weekend project management certification that has no test, and then complaining that you didn't learn anything. Yes, technically they're lying. Yes, technically it should be a higher standard. But if it's an obvious scam, it's silly to get so angry that you can't see or write straight. Sure it's worth sharing to the world that there are scam artists out there, but to get so worked up about it?
    - ngkabra 13y ago
      Actually, I did not get worked up about the existence of such conferences. My main gripe is against the education system and the ridiculous requirement that makes it mandatory for all post-graduate students to have 2 published papers before they are granted their degree. Given the current state of research and higher education in India, the inevitable result of this requirement would be that students will be forced to pay to publish at such conferences.
      - mathattack 13y ago
        Entrepreneurs fill the void to capture rent from stupid regulations. Why not start a conference yourself?
LeicaLatte 13y ago
India, probably, has the worst system that labels people as educated. Personally, college has been a complete waste of time and I have seen many such incidents. At college, I learnt how to get alongwith people. Nothing else is on offer.
lyndonh 13y ago
This isn't news. There are plenty of poor quality conferences and publications willing to take your money and publish without checking. Even the good quality conferences send out batches of papers to be reviewed and then the reviewers forward them to their students and colleagues without properly checking the feedback before passing them back to the section chairs. Just be thankful that you didn't have a good quality paper rejected due to a bad review by a tired PhD student who didn't have enough experience in the field to be a reviewer. The OP blames the education system for putting pressure on students to publish. The problem is more like not teaching the students how to find a reputable path to publication and not weighing the quality of the venue. He/she should also be complaining to iraj.in for hosting the dodgy conference website and lending credibility to it.
- ngkabra 13y ago
  > The problem is more like not teaching the students how to find a reputable path to publication and not weighing the quality of the venue. Actually, in my opinion, most of the students couldn't care less about publications. They just want their degree, but the system refuses to let them have it without the publication. Hence they're forced to publish at conferences that publish without checking. The problem is indeed with the system that requires publications, and then accepts publications in dodgy conferences. What else can be expected of the students in this situation?
frozenport 13y ago
I mentor undergrads on research projects and this toxic environment hurts them. Every undergrad who comes to me wants to paper, and most believe they can do it in a few months while school is running. Often it ends in some kind of pleas to publish any paper no matter how poor quality the journal. Why is this bad? Poor research work damages for other reasons, but the mindset hurts the students. In research we often need to choose between doing an learning. If you start by doing you will never learn enough to make a meaningful contribution or come up with something original. These kids want to do work without learning anything.
analog31 13y ago
Any time you have a metric driven reward system, you will find an entire industry built upon gaming the metric.
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
As long as the participants were keen and serious, the conference still performed a function, as a useful practicum experience for them, and maybe even some learning and sharing got done. It can be seen as a betrayal of trust to inject nonsense into the proceedings. Like somebody sneaking into the locker room of a ball team in uniform, going on the field and fooling around. "See, the players are not really good! I'm a fool and I got out here!" Just representing the other side of the coin here. Just because its not prestigious, doesn't means its entirely worthless.

144 points by kamaal 13y ago

I think its more about filling pockets by charging registration fees. One should try out for only IEEE conferences although it is not necessary but "International" in the title really does not make a conference "International"

microarchitect 13y ago
The IEEE label isn't an indicator of quality and similar papers have been published in IEEE sponsored conferences. See http://diehimmelistschoen.blogspot.com/ http://diehimmelistschoen.blogspot.com/ and http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/. One of my old professors used to joke that "for every paper, there is a conference that accepts it." Unfortunately this is somewhat literally true. This isn't unique to any one country as the SCIgen successes demonstrate and I don't really see a solution to it.
- kken 13y ago
  Of course there are regional IEEE conferences. But in general, the international IEEE conferences and journals by the bigger societies are probably the best ones out there. I have published quite a bit in the physical sciences/engineering field and in my experience the IEEE journals have a far better peer review process than AIP, ACS, Elsevier and even NPG. The same goes for the conferences.
  - h0cked 13y ago
    I used to think if it's IEEE or ACM, they are ok (not good) to publish. Nowadays, I am not so sure after seeing a bunch of low quality "international" conferences in Asian especially in India. ACM seems a little better than IEEE... Now my rule is to only publish in conferences that I know or are well known in the field.... Aslo reject any requests to serve as a TPC or reviewer for conferences from this region..The papers are normally low quality and waste of my time to read...
    - microarchitect 13y ago
      You have way too much time on your hands if you are considering review requests from people you don't know.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - h0cked 13y ago
        I don't, but I do review papers for people that I don't know if they have a good reputation.
  - microarchitect 13y ago
    What makes a conference good isn't the IEEE label but rather the reputation of the conference itself and its corresponding ability to attract a high quality program committee. The important point here is that there isn't a shortcut to evaluating conference quality. You have to know your field, know who is worth listening to and who isn't, know what the top conferences are, what the mediocre conferences are and so forth. If a new conference springs up, you need to be able to judge whether to pay attention by looking at the PC. > Of course there are regional IEEE conferences. But in general, the international IEEE conferences and journals by the bigger societies are probably the best ones out there. You can't really make general statements like that. For example, CAV proceedings are published by Springer (http://www.springer.com/computer/theoretical+computer+science/book/978-3-642-39798-1 http://www.springer.com/computer/theoretical+computer+scienc...). JPDC is a well-regarded journal in the parallel computing community that is published by Elsevier. And a "regional" conference doesn't mean it's a bad conference. DATE (http://www.date-conference.com/ http://www.date-conference.com/) is probably the second best design automation conference behind DAC. ASPDAC, ATVA, APLAS, FSTTCS are some well-regarded regional conferences and there are plenty more like these. Not all of these are IEEE sponsored either. > I have published quite a bit in the physical sciences/engineering field and in my experience the IEEE journals have a far better peer review process than AIP, ACS, Elsevier and even NPG. The same goes for the conferences. I'm not trying to slight IEEE here. I looked through my publication list and it turns out all my papers are in IEEE conferences and journals! But on the other hand, a few of them could easily have ended up in a venue like CAV and this wouldn't magically make them worse papers. The key point here I want to make here is this: there is no substitute for knowing your field, if you're judging conference quality by the IEEE label, you're doing something wrong.
midas007 13y ago
Elsevier, McGraw-Hill, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and Pearson are just some of the extortionists of academia, education and training.

midas007 13y ago

Neither the first time nor the last. In fact, this should be a semi-official running gag (a-la Chaos Monkey) with all journals to keep them honest. Btw I had this wild English prof that claimed to have written crazy shit in undergrad papers that was never caught to prove that graded papers were just skimmed.

AmVess 13y ago
I had a crazy English prof that told me he never wrote a line of anything that wasn't complete malarkey, including his PhD thesis. He's currently enjoying being a highly respected prof at a top uni, and he still writes complete gibberish. He's one hell of a writing teacher, which is probably why they keep him around.
saraid216 13y ago
That's not going to keep them honest...
Theodores 13y ago
Maybe there should be merit given to people that self-select themselves to be the 'mystery shoppers' of the academic world. Perhaps you could get a job where the deciding factor to hire you rather than someone else was your ability to get x papers of utter nonsense in academic journals/conferences. If you think about it there are people doing this already...

kken 13y ago

>Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right? No, absolutely not. Looking at the web site immediately raises two red flags: 1) It's a multi-topic conference. Usually these fall into two categories: Undergrad conferences and money-making scams. Participating in neither of them is "a big achievement" 2) The submission deadline is 9 days before the conference starts and three days before the registrations deadline. This would give them 2-3 days for the peer review process? That's is close to impossible.

albertyw 13y ago
Another red flag - Is it just me, or is the header image on the conference website an image of Las Vegas?
- thirsteh 13y ago
  Definitely LV. Caesar's Palace, the Rio--pretty distinguishable buildings. And you can see the light beam from the Luxor.
- ngkabra 13y ago
  They did say it's an INTERNATIONAL conference...
  - chattoraj 13y ago
    Fergusson College recently hosted a "NATIONAL conference on Emerging Trends in Computer Science and Applications". Needless to say, every participant was from Pune...
notthetup 13y ago
True. Sadly many students don't know better. And the worst part being many employers also might not know the difference either. At some level this is also an issue with raising awareness/understanding among students of how academia and research works.
13y ago

obstacle1 13y ago

Reminds me of when Alan Sokal wrote a paper full of buzzwords and co-opted scientific language and name-dropping then submitted it to a prestigious cultural studies journal [1]. Thesis: quantum gravity is merely a social and linguistic construct. Accepted. The humanities are still trying to recover from that one. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

userbinator 13y ago
The randomly generated talks here are just as hilarious: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks But the sad thing is, you could probably show stuff like this on a TV series as a "this is what research produces" and the majority of people wouldn't know any better.
- thirsteh 13y ago
  Then again, the same thing can be said for any of us reading Ph.D. dissertations outside our fields.
  - CJefferson 13y ago
    Or I imagine getting an expert to describe their process for fixing large industrial machinery.
- bhaumik 13y ago
  Reminds of Reggie Watt's "unpredictably brilliant" parody of a Ted Talk. [Skip to 0:54 for English] http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_most_entertaining_way.html http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_...
  - falcolas 13y ago
    I wouldn't recommend skipping anything, it's all very carefully rehearsed, and worth watching from end to end. The transition itself was pretty brilliant.

notastartup 13y ago

could it be possible that there are many scentific papers written by phd and masters which are simply garbage? All this time I thought, "but these guys are smart, they went and got phd and masters and their thesis sounds really intriguing", but reading through the paper, absolutely nothing is presented but just words for the sake of filling up space? Also papers that seems to skew their quantitative results, multiple papers claiming higher success rates than the previous while in small letters acknowledging crucial items that distort the results. Am I crazy for thinking I am making this up in my head? p.s. is there a way to get access to scientific papers without paying $24 each time or a subscription fee? google scholar is good but some of the papers really insist on you paying. I thought knowledge was supposed to be free!

tlarkworthy 13y ago
That's PhD level thinking! "Undergrads think they know everything. Grad students know they know nothing. PhD's know everybody else knows nothing." p.s. no, hope the open access movement takes off (I think it is), or find a a friend in a university you can tunnel into. Given knowledge is power, it's not surprising someone is making tons of money off it.
jjoonathan 13y ago
There are probably many that are garbage. That doesn't mean that the majority of masters/PhD papers aren't scientific and intellectual achievements the likes of which aren't often found outside academia or the upper echelons of industry (nobody else can justify the risk profile of academic research). It also doesn't mean that the aggregate value of the results is small. Many/most papers present useless (to society) results that only appear meaningful when viewed in a very narrow light. Again, that's not really a problem: just like the startup world, science has a very low yield of very high value results. Scope-narrowing is actually a method which allows us to avoid unjustly punishing legitimate null results. A feature, not a bug. Also, what appears to be narrow scope to an outsider might be of incredible importance to someone who has a better sense of perspective. Many of today's most important innovations would be impossible without thousands of yesterday's "useless" results. You aren't crazy, but you are missing the big picture. To work around paywalls, try emailing authors, visiting /r/scholar, making friends at academic institutions, or getting a side-job that will permit you journal access.

dasmithii 13y ago

While writing supplements for the Common App, I can't help but consider automated essay writing in the context of college applications. The questions are, for the most part, generic and repetitive - one decent A.I. could probably disrupt the entire process.

tubelite 13y ago

You can see the whole thing unfold on Twitter TV, starting about Dec 11th: https://twitter.com/ngkabra https://twitter.com/ngkabra

DjangoReinhardt 13y ago

The second paper in the post should never have made it past any peer-reviewer had they bothered to read the first two paragraphs. It all stems from the (supposedly optional) requirement that a Masters' level student get a paper published. Sure, it is somewhat justified - seeing as how they are partially research students themselves - but the absence of a honest and thorough peer-review kinda puts paid to the justification. As a result, most students end up opting for these pay-to-publish scams (sometimes even knowingly) and they continue to thrive. The aim of the whole exercise was to expose these conferences for what they really are - money-making scams that prey upon the students' desperation. What hurts is the fact that the students (probably) knew about it but they were so desperate to get a publication, they couldn't care less. Such is the state of the education system in India. :(

ngkabra 13y ago
What depressed me the most was seeing the poor, sincere students who had come to the conference to present. Some of them were tweaking their PPTs. Others were going over notes for their talk. They were clearly (I think) under the impression that presenting at this conference was a major achievement. Of the 22 papers accepted by the conference (i.e. 22 people paid to get their papers published), only about 10 came to present, which leads me to suspect that the remaining 12 knew the true nature of this conference.
- desipenguin 13y ago
  Or remaining 12 couldn't afford to pay for the conference ?? (Rs. 6000 is not a trivial amount for a student.)
  - ngkabra 13y ago
    Nope. If you can't afford to pay for the conference, your paper does not get published at all (of the two papers I got accepted, I paid for one and that appeared, while the one I did not pay for did not appear). And once you pay, then actually attending the conference is optional.

TempleOSV2 13y ago

India-nigger. God says... shudder parity devised proper Divers well-formed year Verity Rwanda bestow a_flag_on_that_play to tumult Send preachings observe trembled

daemonk 13y ago

These parasitic journal/conferences are becoming more prevalent in the biological sciences too. Here is an account of a guy who attended a conference hosted by the OMICS publishing group: http://cabbagesofdoom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/omics-group-conferences-sham-or-scam.html http://cabbagesofdoom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/omics-group-con... There was also a recent Science magazine's "sting operation" where they submitted tons of shitty papers to journals across the world and found many journals actually accepted the paper: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full The sting was pretty controversial though as they seemed to want to use this evidence to discredit open access publishing rather than to say this is a problem with academia in general. Open access is catching on in the biological sciences (http://biorxiv.org/ http://biorxiv.org/) and big journals like nature or science are afraid of losing money. You can argue that they are a natural response to the academic publishing culture where the sole metric of success is the number of papers you publish.

petercooper 13y ago

An entire article about a certain type of "academic" conference that's really just about making money: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/76.full http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/76.full

tensor 13y ago

These sorts of scam conferences are well known among academics and don't come close to reflecting the status quo at reputable universities. People could do more to warn and out them, however.

ragsagar 13y ago

The education system in India is unimaginably worse. 57 out 60 students who completed Btech IT(aka Software Engineering) in my batch didn't knew even to a write a program to check if a number is palindrome or not.

kamaal 13y ago
I've seen worse. I had opted for a micro controller elective in a semester. We were only 6 guys in the whole class who did that. I discovered I was pretty good in Assembly language programming(8085) so it made more sense to study and work on that further. The remain class opted for C++, on the day of the exam I was chatting with a girl as to well she had prepared. She tells she had prepared everything apart from classes(Note this is a C++ exam). I lost all appetite to continue the discussion further. On a tangential note my cousin is in his 3rd semester currently. He tells me he did bulk of the engineering drawing my merely copy pasting CAD projects from seniors. And tells that's how nearly every one in his class is doing it. I only imagine how this works at things like Medical courses. Do these kids really seriously study, or is our life all left to chance as to how much syllabus a person covered to score passing marks in the MBBS exams? Or how little they had to simply memorize to just claim qualifying marks to get a degree?
- eitally 13y ago
  It really hurt the non-Indians in my American university's MEng program that all the Indians (about 80% of my department) worked collaboratively on all the homework, projects, and exams. Culturally, this had been acceptable for them as Indian undergrads, but it was completely unacceptable cheating in the US and ruined the curve for the rest of the students.
  - frozenport 13y ago
    I would like to confirm this. In undergrad I felt like foreign students come to US and ruin our education system. Which is a weird feeling when you weren''t born in the US. But I think this is a subject for another thread. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10132391/Riot-after-Chinese-teachers-try-to-stop-pupils-cheating.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1013239...

jebus989 13y ago

Predatory publishing does exist, but its damage is mitigated by the fact that papers are judged primarily on the reputation of the journal or publication they're in. That is, an academic in a given field will know all the highest-tier journal titles, and have a good knowledge of mid and lower tiers -- new or obscure titles will always draw scepticism. Previous blogs or reports with the same conclusions: [0] http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102 http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102 [1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151235-predatory-scholarly-publishing/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151235-predatory-schola... [2] http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/title/Predatory-Publishing/ http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/... And a(n incomplete) list of predatory publishers is maintained here: [3] http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

ghoul2 13y ago

Also from India, a scammy journal: http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/index http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/index Someone had posted a link to a paper in the latest issue of this journal, here in HN a couple weeks back. It was titled "A Novel Scheme for Data Encryption Technique" ( http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/article/view/2391 http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/article/view/2391 ). I could not understand why such a journal would exist and why people would publish papers in this. I did not know that having conference papers/journal publications was now a requirement for B.Tech/M.Tech. degrees in India. It wasn't so when I got mine - or maybe just my Institute did not go in for such ridiculous requirements. Existence of such conferences and Journals is a direct and predictable outcome of such a requirement. Vast majority of Undergrad/Grad students in India earn a degree not because of interest or even ability in their chosen fields, but by knowing how to beat badly drafted exams. If you force these people to "publish", it is just another hurdle to pass, mostly by paying a few thousand Rs. The requirement for "industrial training" during summer has been bypassed the same way for ages. Sigh. Edit: To other fellow Indians here: Do you know if there is a regulatory body one can approach against such scammy conferences and journals? I understand that such bodies tend to not be at all willing to help, but I'd still like to pursue this matter. Failing this, maybe we should put together a list of such journals and conferences and have these sent out to colleges and universities as a way to blacklist them?

Yuioup 13y ago

I don't know how conferences work but isn't it the purpose of a conference to discuss a certain paper? Aren't sessions planned in which a paper is taken and dissected? I can very well imagine that papers like this would be quickly discovered and discredited. Sure, it may not happen before the conference starts but at some point either before or after everybody sits down to discuss the paper it should be glaringly obvious. IANAScientist ...

ngkabra 13y ago
Most conferences are supposed to have a selection process (in most cases a "peer review" process) in which all submissions are sent to multiple reviewers who are experts in that area, and only papers which are deemed "acceptable" by a majority of the reviewers are published. Usually this means that the paper should be relevant to the conference, should have results that are worth publishing, and should have something new - something that hasn't been done before. All of this is supposed to happen before the paper is accepted for publication. The proceedings of top conferences in most fields are, in my opinion, more important than the actual conference itself.
gphilip 13y ago
> isn't it the purpose of a conference to discuss a certain paper? No. The purpose of a conference [1] is to have researchers present their results. The timing guidelines for a typical conference talk would look like: 15 minutes for the talk, 5 minutes for questions and comments, and 5 minutes for setting up the next talk. As you can imagine, this doesn't give much time for discussions; dissecting a paper is not part of the agenda. The questions and comments raised in the 5-minute period after the talk usually are along the lines of "Do you think your approach will work for this other problem?", rather than "Can you explain how this step in the argument works?". If you have a question of the latter kind, then you are supposed to discuss it with the author offline, so that the conference schedule is not affected. The conference does not provide you with a forum to discuss papers at any depth. [1] All of this pertains to Theoretical Computer Science conferences; I suspect conferences in other fields are similar, but I don't know for sure.
- 13y ago

mathattack 13y ago

Accepting almost half of undergrad papers seems like a very weak accomplishment.

ngkabra 13y ago
They claimed that they accepted almost half. My guess is that they accepted 100% of the submissions they received. Because if there was any process for rejection, both my papers should have been rejected.
- mathattack 13y ago
  Almost half is effectively the same as 100%. You're buying a credential. It's like paying $350 for a weekend project management certification that has no test, and then complaining that you didn't learn anything. Yes, technically they're lying. Yes, technically it should be a higher standard. But if it's an obvious scam, it's silly to get so angry that you can't see or write straight. Sure it's worth sharing to the world that there are scam artists out there, but to get so worked up about it?
  - ngkabra 13y ago
    Actually, I did not get worked up about the existence of such conferences. My main gripe is against the education system and the ridiculous requirement that makes it mandatory for all post-graduate students to have 2 published papers before they are granted their degree. Given the current state of research and higher education in India, the inevitable result of this requirement would be that students will be forced to pay to publish at such conferences.
    - mathattack 13y ago
      Entrepreneurs fill the void to capture rent from stupid regulations. Why not start a conference yourself?

LeicaLatte 13y ago

India, probably, has the worst system that labels people as educated. Personally, college has been a complete waste of time and I have seen many such incidents. At college, I learnt how to get alongwith people. Nothing else is on offer.

lyndonh 13y ago

This isn't news. There are plenty of poor quality conferences and publications willing to take your money and publish without checking. Even the good quality conferences send out batches of papers to be reviewed and then the reviewers forward them to their students and colleagues without properly checking the feedback before passing them back to the section chairs. Just be thankful that you didn't have a good quality paper rejected due to a bad review by a tired PhD student who didn't have enough experience in the field to be a reviewer. The OP blames the education system for putting pressure on students to publish. The problem is more like not teaching the students how to find a reputable path to publication and not weighing the quality of the venue. He/she should also be complaining to iraj.in for hosting the dodgy conference website and lending credibility to it.

ngkabra 13y ago
> The problem is more like not teaching the students how to find a reputable path to publication and not weighing the quality of the venue. Actually, in my opinion, most of the students couldn't care less about publications. They just want their degree, but the system refuses to let them have it without the publication. Hence they're forced to publish at conferences that publish without checking. The problem is indeed with the system that requires publications, and then accepts publications in dodgy conferences. What else can be expected of the students in this situation?

frozenport 13y ago

I mentor undergrads on research projects and this toxic environment hurts them. Every undergrad who comes to me wants to paper, and most believe they can do it in a few months while school is running. Often it ends in some kind of pleas to publish any paper no matter how poor quality the journal. Why is this bad? Poor research work damages for other reasons, but the mindset hurts the students. In research we often need to choose between doing an learning. If you start by doing you will never learn enough to make a meaningful contribution or come up with something original. These kids want to do work without learning anything.

analog31 13y ago

Any time you have a metric driven reward system, you will find an entire industry built upon gaming the metric.

JoeAltmaier 13y ago

As long as the participants were keen and serious, the conference still performed a function, as a useful practicum experience for them, and maybe even some learning and sharing got done. It can be seen as a betrayal of trust to inject nonsense into the proceedings. Like somebody sneaking into the locker room of a ball team in uniform, going on the field and fooling around. "See, the players are not really good! I'm a fool and I got out here!" Just representing the other side of the coin here. Just because its not prestigious, doesn't means its entirely worthless.