Maggie Simpson and Kim Jong Fun Get Published
January 6, 2015
Ah, the world of professional publishing. Is there anything like it? In an effort to lure shady journals into exposing their nonexistent peer-review processes, one engineer succeeded in catching two publications in his ridiculously obvious ploy. Vox reports, “A Paper by Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel Was Accepted by Two Scientific Journals.” The article relates:
“A scientific study by Maggie Simpson, Edna Krabappel, and Kim Jong Fun has been accepted by two journals. Of course, none of these fictional characters actually wrote the paper, titled ‘Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.’ Rather, it’s a nonsensical text, submitted by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky in an effort to expose a pair of scientific journals — the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the comic sans-loving Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology.
“These outlets both belong to a world of predatory journals that spam thousands of scientists, offering to publish their work — whatever it is — for a fee, without actually conducting peer review. When Smolyanitsky was contacted by them, he submitted the paper, which has a totally incoherent, science-esque text written by SCIgen, a random text generator. (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.’)
“Then, he thought up the authors, along with a nonexistent affiliation (‘Belford University’) for them. ‘I wanted first and foremost to come up with something that gives out the fake immediately,’ he says. ‘My only regret is that the second author isn’t Ralph Wiggum.’”
Why would any journal do such a thing? It’s all about the publishing fees, of course. Simpson et al continue to receive an invoice for $459 from just one of the journals. The article points out this is not the first time such “predatory publishing” has been exposed, and it is unlikely to be the last. See the article for more examples, as well as a brief history of the practice. (It seems to have begun in earnest in the early aughts.) Apparently, new shoddy publishers keep popping up. Researchers and readers should keep the phenomenon in mind when considering whether to submit to, or trust the information in, any given journal.
Cynthia Murrell, January 06, 2014
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