Computer-generated science
In fairness, the fraudulent science papers were no less rubbish than most of the stuff being published by human scientists these days:
Computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, spent two years examining published research papers, and found that computer-generated papers made it into more than 30 conferences, and over 120 have been published by academic publishing houses — over 100 by the the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and 16 by Springer.
The papers were generated by a piece of free software called SCIgen, developed in 2005 by scientists at MIT. SCIgen randomly generates nonsense papers, complete with graphs, diagrams and citations, and its purpose was to demonstrate how easily conferences accept meaningless submissions.Actually, in light of how they demonstrated that peer review is a completely ineffective filter and "published science" is no indication that it is even non-fiction, let alone reflective of actual science, one can reasonably argue that the computer gibberish was of considerably more scientific utility than the average science publication.
At this point, it's simply laughable that anyone even dares appeal to science anymore, let alone "scientific consensus". |
