What do you think of this?

Recent advances in cooperative technology and classical communication are based entirely on the assumption that the Internet and active networks are not in conflict with object-oriented languages. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with the visualization of DHTs that made refining and possibly simulating 8 bit architectures a reality, which embodies the compelling principles of electrical engineering. In this work we better understand how digital-to-analog converters can be applied to the development of e-commerce.

Grammar check: OK, computing terminology: check, meaning: wait… it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. It reads like a bunch of random sentences, which in isolation are all right, but when taken together just lose all meaning.

The quote is the abstract of a computer-generated paper called “Towards the Simulation of E-Commerce”, which got accepted into the IEEE 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE2008), to be held in Wuhan, China.

The fake author, one Dr. Herbert Schlangemann from Umeå University in Sweden, even got accepted into the session chair of Oral Session 5, “Distributed and Parallel Computing & Embedded Programming”!

I would like to know what is the benefit of traditional science publishing, conferences and traditional “peer-reviewed research” if the peers could just be replaced with a simple regular expression? What are the researchers, universities, foundations, companies and taxpayers really paying for?

Of course, the conference could be simply one of the bogus ones, which accept any paper whatsoever with the intention of leeching money off the researchers who want to present their papers. However, it seems not to be the case here – CSSE2008 looks legit.

So what is wrong? If it’s not a false conference, it means the reviewers let it slip. Don’t those people who review, actually, you know, review? If even I can spot that something is wrong in about 20 seconds while reading the abstract, shouldn’t the group of peer reviewers spot it too?

This was not the first time an SCIgen-generated paper got accepted as a real research publication. To me it seems that there just might be too much money involved in the scientific publishing/conference industry.

The very fact that it is an established industry contributes to these kind of episodes. Why? Because it means that science and progress – which should be number one goals! – take the second place, while money and profit-making take the first place. When in conflict, the second place loses to the first place, always. While good for business, this is not good for scientific progress as a whole.