Maybe it is the economy or the advent of the abuse of technology. Maybe people are too lazy to write their own academic papers and dissertations. But according to an article in the Guardian, Computer Generated Fake Papers are Flooding Academia. Worst yet these papers, filled with gobbly-gook are being accepted at face value.
So now for employers you not only have to conduct education verification for your job candidates to see if they are claiming a degree from a diploma mill or unaccredited college, or if they are claiming a degree while having attended for a mere couple of years or not at all, you now should be aware that the academic papers they filed are maybe not as credible as you hoped. It would be a sad day to hire someone from the science world or world of research and have him represent your company, only to discover by and large, he has no real expertise and may not even know what he is talking about.
According to the article…”But this is the hoax that keeps on giving. The creators of the automatic nonsense generator, Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, have made the SCIgen program free to download. And scientists have been using it in their droves. This week, Nature reported, French researcher Cyril Labbé revealed that 16 gobbledegook papers created by SCIgen had been used by German academic publisher Springer. More than 100 more fake SCIgen papers were published by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Both organisations have now taken steps to remove the papers.
Hoaxes in academia are nothing new. In 1996, mathematician Alan Sokal riled postmodernists by publishing a nonsense paper in the leading US journal, Social Text. It was laden with meaningless phrases but, as Sokal said, it sounded good to them. Other fields have not been immune. In 1964, critics of modern art were wowed by the work of Pierre Brassau, who turned out to be a four-year-old chimpanzee. In a more convoluted case, Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s best-known philosophers, was left to ponder his own expertise after quoting the lectures of Jean-Baptiste Botul as evidence that Kant was a fake, only to find out that Botul was the fake, an invention of a French reporter.
Just as the students wrote a quick and dirty program to churn out nonsense papers, so Labbé has written one to spot the papers. He has made it freely available, so publishers and conference organizers have no excuse for accepting nonsense work in future.”
