Nature is reporting on he long term results of a scientific hoax tool:
Nonsensical research papers generated by a computer program are still popping up in the scientific literature many years after the problem was first seen, a study has revealed1. Some publishers have told Nature they will take down the papers, which could result in more than 200 retractions.
The issue began in 2005, when three PhD students created paper-generating software called SCIgen for “maximum amusement”, and to show that some conferences would accept meaningless papers. The program cobbles together words to generate research articles with random titles, text and charts, easily spotted as gibberish by a human reader. It is free to download, and anyone can use it.
By 2012, computer scientist Cyril Labbé had found 85 fake SCIgen papers in conferences published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE); he went on to find more than 120 fake SCIgen papers published by the IEEE and by Springer2. It was unclear who had generated the papers or why. The articles were subsequently retracted — or sometimes deleted — and Labbé released a website allowing anyone to upload a manuscript and check whether it seems to be a SCIgen invention. Springer also sponsored a PhD project to help spot SCIgen papers, which resulted in free software called SciDetect. (Springer is now part of Springer Nature; Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.)
Sometimes it seems like the world is collapsing into chaos, doesn’t it? And why does it have to center on my field?
… the researchers identified 243 nonsense articles created entirely or partly by SCIgen, they report in a study published on 26 May1. These articles, published between 2008 and 2020, appeared in various journals, conference proceedings and preprint sites, and were mostly in the computer-science field. Some appeared in open-access journals; others were paywalled. Forty-six of them had already been retracted or deleted from the websites where they were first published.
Maybe humans shouldn’t be allowed to do anything that requires being responsibility.
