http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-w ... rs-1.14763
Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
Conference proceedings removed from subscription databases after scientist reveals that they were computer-generated.
Richard Van Noorden
24 February 2014 Updated: 25 February 2014
Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York.
Here comes the kicker ---Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement” (see ‘Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper’). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv. SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes.
*********Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations.
或许这是一个自古就有的现象，或许这是一个现在越来越严重的现象。我也没研究过，不知道答案。不过我觉得真逗真讽刺，这种事儿的发生，原因是每个人都只顾呱啦呱啦讲个不停，把自己的每一句话每一闪念每一口饭吃喝拉撒都喷满网络世界，可是谁也没兴趣听别人一句，看别人一眼。活人没时间看一眼发进来的投稿是什么玩意儿，过目的只有电脑，反正发出去也没人看。
I'll just wait for Charlie Kaufman to make a movie about it.