Never mind what took them so long. Here’s a coffee room question: Does the word “retraction” properly apply in a situation in which no original thought was, in principle, possible? Anyway, from Nature:
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 revealed. 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 Springer.
Richard Van Noorden, “Hundreds of gibberish papers still lurk in the scientific literature” at Nature
The most likely reason one can think of for the persistence of computer-generated gibberish in the science database is that many other papers sound like that — but are in fact authentic human creations — so no one really wants to go there.
How about this: Kim Kardashian’s Paper One Of Top Ten Science Retractions Of 2018
Guys, this wasn’t helping.
Okay. Here’s SCIgen
Here’s how SCIgen works, as Rob Sheldon explains. Robert J. Marks offers some thoughts on why it works.
If it’s any help, SciDetect was developed to spot the sci babble.