Intentionally-Bogus Paper by Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel Accepted by Two “Scientific” Journals

It seems Maggie Simpson and the late Mrs. Edna Krabappel aren’t just characters on The Simpsons, but actual scientists, according to two so-called scientific journals that recently published their work.

Unfortunately, “Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations,” wasn’t really written by the famous cartoons, but instead by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky attempting to expose the sham publications, the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology.

These outlets are referred to as predatory journals due to the fact that they spam countless scientists with offers to publish their work – regardless of the quality – to make a quick and dishonest buck.

Smolyanitsky was one of the scientists contacted, and he proceeded to submit a nonsensical science-jargon-filled piece of crappola using a random text generator called SCIgen. (An example sentence: “we removed a 8-petabyte tape drive from our peer-to-peer cluster to prove provably “fuzzy” symmetries’s influence on the work of Japanese mad scientist Karthik Lakshminarayanan.”)

As an obvious & humorous cherry on top, Smolyanitsky finished his submission by adding the Simpson characters’ names and an affiliation with the non-existent Belford University. “I wanted first and foremost to come up with something that gives out the fake immediately,” he said. “My only regret is that the second author isn’t Ralph Wiggum.” Maybe to get his point across better he should have made the school “Bovine University” instead.

One of the two journals accepted the paper immediately, and the other took about a month. I’m sure this time was spend fastidiously peer reviewing the content. The bill he received: $459.

Not to delve too far into the deeper issues of these predatory publications, but needless to say they pose a problem – by reducing trust in science, allowing any Dr. Tom/Dick/Harry to pad their resumes with bullshit work, and making research for legit scientists more tedious since they must now search even harder to find useful papers as shoddy work sometimes trickles into the mainstream outlets via the phony ones.

And Smolyanitsky’s paper isn’t the first to expose these journals. Last year, two computer scientists had a paper accepted entitled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List.” Around the same time, Tom Spears, a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, wrote a completely mental paper on soils, cancer treatment, and Mars that was accepted by 8 of 18 online, for-profit journals. Reporter John Bohannon and the (legit) journal, Science, successfully submitted another to 60% of 340 of these publications. Another piece specifically mentioned the fact that these groups publish without proofreading or editing, and still managed to get published.

And the number of these sham rags is only growing more plentiful. University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall keeps an updated list to help researchers avoid being bamboozled, and it currently tops out at 550 publishers and journals.

Hopefully something can be done to remedy this situation and these phonies can be shut down or punished. In the meantime, I’ll be publishing a study called, “Can Hamsters Fly Planes?” It’s co-authored by the third (and only non-Simpsons) author on the “Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations” article, Mr. Kim Jong Fun. That one is totally real, right?

[via Vox]