
How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system - kamaal
http://smritiweb.com/navin/education-2/how-i-published-a-fake-paper-and-why-it-is-the-fault-of-our-education-system
======
kken
>Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this
conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right?

No, absolutely not. Looking at the web site immediately raises two red flags:

1) It's a multi-topic conference. Usually these fall into two categories:
Undergrad conferences and money-making scams. Participating in neither of them
is "a big achievement"

2) The submission deadline is 9 days before the conference starts and three
days before the registrations deadline. This would give them 2-3 days for the
peer review process? That's is close to impossible.

~~~
ngkabra
Original author here. The two things you pointed out were exactly the two
things that first caused me to get suspicious of this conference.

However, as notthetup points out, there are lots of people in the Indian
education system who don't know this. And the statement I made: _Seems like an
impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should
be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right?_ is actually something
many students and faculty in our engineering colleges actually think.

(Edit: formatting)

~~~
astrowizicist
No, it's not.

As an academic myself, we get _spam_ emails advertising conferences just like
this. It is _not_ an achievement (of any sort), and what you're doing poorly
represents both the academic system, and yourself.

~~~
ngkabra
I am not sure I understand what you're saying.

I know that getting a paper in a conference like this is not an achievement.
However, I know lots of students who do not know this. I know faculty in
Engineering colleges who do not know this. I know many people who actually pay
money to get published in such conferences because they really believe it's an
achievement.

Hence, this expose to improve awareness.

I am not sure how I have poorly represented the academic system and myself by
doing that, so could you elaborate?

~~~
crocowhile
What astrowizicist is trying to say is that any student - let alone faculty -
who is falling for a spamference is clearly too stupid to work in academia.

~~~
nilkn
I think the real point of this article is that it's not realistic to expect
every one of these students to have two high-quality published papers as a
graduation requirement. This leads to and fuels the bogus conferences.

------
obstacle1
Reminds me of when Alan Sokal wrote a paper full of buzzwords and co-opted
scientific language and name-dropping then submitted it to a prestigious
cultural studies journal [1]. Thesis: quantum gravity is merely a social and
linguistic construct.

Accepted.

The humanities are still trying to recover from that one.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)

~~~
userbinator
The randomly generated talks here are just as hilarious:

[http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks)

But the sad thing is, you could probably show stuff like this on a TV series
as a "this is what research produces" and the majority of people wouldn't know
any better.

~~~
bhaumik
Reminds of Reggie Watt's "unpredictably brilliant" parody of a Ted Talk.

[Skip to 0:54 for English]
[http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_most_entertaining_way.html)

~~~
falcolas
I wouldn't recommend skipping anything, it's all very carefully rehearsed, and
worth watching from end to end.

The transition itself was pretty brilliant.

------
daemonk
These parasitic journal/conferences are becoming more prevalent in the
biological sciences too.

Here is an account of a guy who attended a conference hosted by the OMICS
publishing group: [http://cabbagesofdoom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/omics-group-
con...](http://cabbagesofdoom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/omics-group-conferences-
sham-or-scam.html)

There was also a recent Science magazine's "sting operation" where they
submitted tons of shitty papers to journals across the world and found many
journals actually accepted the paper:
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full)

The sting was pretty controversial though as they seemed to want to use this
evidence to discredit open access publishing rather than to say this is a
problem with academia in general. Open access is catching on in the biological
sciences ([http://biorxiv.org/](http://biorxiv.org/)) and big journals like
nature or science are afraid of losing money.

You can argue that they are a natural response to the academic publishing
culture where the sole metric of success is the number of papers you publish.

------
ghoul2
Also from India, a scammy journal:
[http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/index](http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/index)

Someone had posted a link to a paper in the latest issue of this journal, here
in HN a couple weeks back. It was titled "A Novel Scheme for Data Encryption
Technique" (
[http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/article/view/2391](http://www.ijma.info/index.php/ijma/article/view/2391)
).

I could not understand why such a journal would exist and why people would
publish papers in this. I did not know that having conference papers/journal
publications was now a requirement for B.Tech/M.Tech. degrees in India. It
wasn't so when I got mine - or maybe just my Institute did not go in for such
ridiculous requirements.

Existence of such conferences and Journals is a direct and predictable outcome
of such a requirement. Vast majority of Undergrad/Grad students in India earn
a degree not because of interest or even ability in their chosen fields, but
by knowing how to beat badly drafted exams. If you force these people to
"publish", it is just another hurdle to pass, mostly by paying a few thousand
Rs. The requirement for "industrial training" during summer has been bypassed
the same way for ages.

Sigh.

Edit: To other fellow Indians here: Do you know if there is a regulatory body
one can approach against such scammy conferences and journals? I understand
that such bodies tend to not be at all willing to help, but I'd still like to
pursue this matter. Failing this, maybe we should put together a list of such
journals and conferences and have these sent out to colleges and universities
as a way to blacklist them?

------
midas007
Neither the first time nor the last.

In fact, this should be a semi-official running gag (a-la Chaos Monkey) with
all journals to keep them honest.

Btw I had this wild English prof that claimed to have written crazy shit in
undergrad papers that was never caught to prove that graded papers were just
skimmed.

~~~
AmVess
I had a crazy English prof that told me he never wrote a line of anything that
wasn't complete malarkey, including his PhD thesis.

He's currently enjoying being a highly respected prof at a top uni, and he
still writes complete gibberish. He's one hell of a writing teacher, which is
probably why they keep him around.

------
linux_devil
I think its more about filling pockets by charging registration fees. One
should try out for only IEEE conferences although it is not necessary but
"International" in the title really does not make a conference "International"

~~~
microarchitect
The IEEE label isn't an indicator of quality and similar papers have been
published in IEEE sponsored conferences. See
[http://diehimmelistschoen.blogspot.com/](http://diehimmelistschoen.blogspot.com/)
and [http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/).

One of my old professors used to joke that "for every paper, there is a
conference that accepts it." Unfortunately this is somewhat literally true.
This isn't unique to any one country as the SCIgen successes demonstrate and I
don't really see a solution to it.

~~~
kken
Of course there are regional IEEE conferences. But in general, the
international IEEE conferences and journals by the bigger societies are
probably the best ones out there.

I have published quite a bit in the physical sciences/engineering field and in
my experience the IEEE journals have a far better peer review process than
AIP, ACS, Elsevier and even NPG. The same goes for the conferences.

~~~
h0cked
I used to think if it's IEEE or ACM, they are ok (not good) to publish.
Nowadays, I am not so sure after seeing a bunch of low quality "international"
conferences in Asian especially in India. ACM seems a little better than
IEEE...

Now my rule is to only publish in conferences that I know or are well known in
the field....

Aslo reject any requests to serve as a TPC or reviewer for conferences from
this region..The papers are normally low quality and waste of my time to
read...

~~~
microarchitect
You have way too much time on your hands if you are considering review
requests from people you don't know.

~~~
h0cked
I don't, but I do review papers for people that I don't know if they have a
good reputation.

------
frozenport
I mentor undergrads on research projects and this toxic environment hurts
them. Every undergrad who comes to me wants to paper, and most believe they
can do it in a few months while school is running. Often it ends in some kind
of pleas to publish any paper no matter how poor quality the journal.

Why is this bad? Poor research work damages for other reasons, but the mindset
hurts the students. In research we often need to choose between doing an
learning. If you start by doing you will never learn enough to make a
meaningful contribution or come up with something original. These kids want to
do work without learning anything.

------
tensor
These sorts of scam conferences are well known among academics and don't come
close to reflecting the status quo at reputable universities. People could do
more to warn and out them, however.

------
LeicaLatte
India, probably, has the worst system that labels people as educated.
Personally, college has been a complete waste of time and I have seen many
such incidents. At college, I learnt how to get alongwith people. Nothing else
is on offer.

------
lyndonh
This isn't news. There are plenty of poor quality conferences and publications
willing to take your money and publish without checking.

Even the good quality conferences send out batches of papers to be reviewed
and then the reviewers forward them to their students and colleagues without
properly checking the feedback before passing them back to the section chairs.
Just be thankful that you didn't have a good quality paper rejected due to a
bad review by a tired PhD student who didn't have enough experience in the
field to be a reviewer.

The OP blames the education system for putting pressure on students to
publish. The problem is more like not teaching the students how to find a
reputable path to publication and not weighing the quality of the venue.

He/she should also be complaining to iraj.in for hosting the dodgy conference
website and lending credibility to it.

~~~
ngkabra
> The problem is more like not teaching the students how to find a reputable
> path to publication and not weighing the quality of the venue.

Actually, in my opinion, most of the students couldn't care less about
publications. They just want their degree, but the system refuses to let them
have it without the publication. Hence they're forced to publish at
conferences that publish without checking.

The problem is indeed with the system that requires publications, and then
accepts publications in dodgy conferences. What else can be expected of the
students in this situation?

------
tubelite
You can see the whole thing unfold on Twitter TV, starting about Dec 11th:
[https://twitter.com/ngkabra](https://twitter.com/ngkabra)

------
jebus989
Predatory publishing does exist, but its damage is mitigated by the fact that
papers are judged primarily on the reputation of the journal or publication
they're in. That is, an academic in a given field will know all the highest-
tier journal titles, and have a good knowledge of mid and lower tiers -- new
or obscure titles will always draw scepticism.

Previous blogs or reports with the same conclusions:

[0]
[http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102](http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102)

[1] [http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151235-predatory-
schola...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151235-predatory-scholarly-
publishing/fulltext)

[2] [http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/...](http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/title/Predatory-Publishing/)

And a(n incomplete) list of predatory publishers is maintained here:

[3] [http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/](http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/)

------
DjangoReinhardt
The second paper in the post should never have made it past any peer-reviewer
had they bothered to read the first two paragraphs.

It all stems from the (supposedly optional) requirement that a Masters' level
student get a paper published. Sure, it is somewhat justified - seeing as how
they are partially research students themselves - but the absence of a honest
and thorough peer-review kinda puts paid to the justification. As a result,
most students end up opting for these pay-to-publish scams (sometimes even
knowingly) and they continue to thrive.

The aim of the whole exercise was to expose these conferences for what they
really are - money-making scams that prey upon the students' desperation. What
hurts is the fact that the students (probably) knew about it but they were so
desperate to get a publication, they couldn't care less. Such is the state of
the education system in India. :(

~~~
ngkabra
What depressed me the most was seeing the poor, sincere students who had come
to the conference to present. Some of them were tweaking their PPTs. Others
were going over notes for their talk. They were clearly (I think) under the
impression that presenting at this conference was a major achievement. Of the
22 papers accepted by the conference (i.e. 22 people paid to get their papers
published), only about 10 came to present, which leads me to suspect that the
remaining 12 knew the true nature of this conference.

~~~
desipenguin
Or remaining 12 couldn't afford to pay for the conference ?? (Rs. 6000 is not
a trivial amount for a student.)

~~~
ngkabra
Nope. If you can't afford to pay for the conference, your paper does not get
published at all (of the two papers I got accepted, I paid for one and that
appeared, while the one I did not pay for did not appear). And once you pay,
then actually attending the conference is optional.

------
ragsagar
The education system in India is unimaginably worse. 57 out 60 students who
completed Btech IT(aka Software Engineering) in my batch didn't knew even to a
write a program to check if a number is palindrome or not.

~~~
kamaal
I've seen worse.

I had opted for a micro controller elective in a semester. We were only 6 guys
in the whole class who did that. I discovered I was pretty good in Assembly
language programming(8085) so it made more sense to study and work on that
further.

The remain class opted for C++, on the day of the exam I was chatting with a
girl as to well she had prepared. She tells she had prepared everything apart
from _classes_ (Note this is a _C++_ exam). I lost all appetite to continue
the discussion further.

On a tangential note my cousin is in his 3rd semester currently. He tells me
he did bulk of the engineering drawing my merely copy pasting CAD projects
from seniors. And tells that's how nearly every one in his class is doing it.

I only imagine how this works at things like Medical courses. Do these kids
really seriously study, or is our life all left to chance as to how much
syllabus a person covered to score passing marks in the MBBS exams? Or how
little they had to simply memorize to just claim qualifying marks to get a
degree?

~~~
eitally
It really hurt the non-Indians in my American university's MEng program that
all the Indians (about 80% of my department) worked collaboratively on all the
homework, projects, and exams. Culturally, this had been acceptable for them
as Indian undergrads, but it was completely unacceptable cheating in the US
and ruined the curve for the rest of the students.

~~~
frozenport
I would like to confirm this. In undergrad I felt like foreign students come
to US and ruin our education system. Which is a weird feeling when you
weren''t born in the US. But I think this is a subject for another thread.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1013239...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10132391/Riot-
after-Chinese-teachers-try-to-stop-pupils-cheating.html)

------
JoeAltmaier
As long as the participants were keen and serious, the conference still
performed a function, as a useful practicum experience for them, and maybe
even some learning and sharing got done.

It can be seen as a betrayal of trust to inject nonsense into the proceedings.
Like somebody sneaking into the locker room of a ball team in uniform, going
on the field and fooling around. "See, the players are not really good! I'm a
fool and I got out here!"

Just representing the other side of the coin here. Just because its not
prestigious, doesn't means its entirely worthless.

------
Yuioup
I don't know how conferences work but isn't it the purpose of a conference to
discuss a certain paper? Aren't sessions planned in which a paper is taken and
dissected? I can very well imagine that papers like this would be quickly
discovered and discredited. Sure, it may not happen before the conference
starts but at some point either before or after everybody sits down to discuss
the paper it should be glaringly obvious.

IANAScientist ...

~~~
gphilip
> isn't it the purpose of a conference to discuss a certain paper?

No. The purpose of a conference [1] is to have researchers _present_ their
results. The timing guidelines for a typical conference talk would look like:
15 minutes for the talk, 5 minutes for questions and comments, and 5 minutes
for setting up the next talk. As you can imagine, this doesn't give much time
for discussions; dissecting a paper is not part of the agenda. The questions
and comments raised in the 5-minute period after the talk usually are along
the lines of "Do you think your approach will work for this other problem?",
rather than "Can you explain how this step in the argument works?". If you
have a question of the latter kind, then you are supposed to discuss it with
the author offline, so that the conference schedule is not affected. The
conference does not provide you with a forum to discuss papers at any depth.

[1] All of this pertains to Theoretical Computer Science conferences; I
suspect conferences in other fields are similar, but I don't know for sure.

~~~
Yuioup
Thanks for clearing it up.

So basically there is a lack of pre-conference peer review.

~~~
ngkabra
Right. In fact, in my opinion, the most important thing a conference provides
is the quality of the peer-review and the selection process. So a conference
that claims peer-review, but does not provide it, is really taking your money
and not providing value for it.

------
petercooper
An entire article about a certain type of "academic" conference that's really
just about making money:
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/76.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/76.full)

------
dasmithii
While writing supplements for the Common App, I can't help but consider
automated essay writing in the context of college applications. The questions
are, for the most part, generic and repetitive - one decent A.I. could
probably disrupt the entire process.

------
analog31
Any time you have a metric driven reward system, you will find an entire
industry built upon gaming the metric.

------
mathattack
Accepting almost half of undergrad papers seems like a very weak
accomplishment.

~~~
ngkabra
They claimed that they accepted almost half. My guess is that they accepted
100% of the submissions they received. Because if there was _any_ process for
rejection, both my papers should have been rejected.

~~~
mathattack
Almost half is effectively the same as 100%. You're buying a credential. It's
like paying $350 for a weekend project management certification that has no
test, and then complaining that you didn't learn anything.

Yes, technically they're lying. Yes, technically it should be a higher
standard.

But if it's an obvious scam, it's silly to get so angry that you can't see or
write straight. Sure it's worth sharing to the world that there are scam
artists out there, but to get so worked up about it?

~~~
ngkabra
Actually, I did not get worked up about the existence of such conferences. My
main gripe is against the education system and the ridiculous requirement that
makes it mandatory for all post-graduate students to have 2 published papers
before they are granted their degree. Given the current state of research and
higher education in India, the inevitable result of this requirement would be
that students will be forced to pay to publish at such conferences.

~~~
mathattack
Entrepreneurs fill the void to capture rent from stupid regulations. Why not
start a conference yourself?

------
notastartup
could it be possible that there are many scentific papers written by phd and
masters which are simply garbage?

All this time I thought, "but these guys are smart, they went and got phd and
masters and their thesis sounds really intriguing", but reading through the
paper, absolutely nothing is presented but just words for the sake of filling
up space?

Also papers that seems to skew their quantitative results, multiple papers
claiming higher success rates than the previous while in small letters
acknowledging crucial items that distort the results.

Am I crazy for thinking I am making this up in my head?

p.s. is there a way to get access to scientific papers without paying $24 each
time or a subscription fee? google scholar is good but some of the papers
really insist on you paying. I thought knowledge was supposed to be free!

~~~
jjoonathan
There are probably many that are garbage.

That doesn't mean that the majority of masters/PhD papers aren't scientific
and intellectual achievements the likes of which aren't often found outside
academia or the upper echelons of industry (nobody else can justify the risk
profile of academic research). It also doesn't mean that the aggregate value
of the results is small.

Many/most papers present useless (to society) results that only appear
meaningful when viewed in a very narrow light. Again, that's not really a
problem: just like the startup world, science has a very low yield of very
high value results. Scope-narrowing is actually a method which allows us to
avoid unjustly punishing legitimate null results. A feature, not a bug. Also,
what appears to be narrow scope to an outsider might be of incredible
importance to someone who has a better sense of perspective. Many of today's
most important innovations would be impossible without thousands of
yesterday's "useless" results.

You aren't crazy, but you are missing the big picture.

To work around paywalls, try emailing authors, visiting /r/scholar, making
friends at academic institutions, or getting a side-job that will permit you
journal access.

~~~
tensor
In my experience the ratio is no where near that of successful startups to
unsuccessful ones. The majority of papers from good universities are valuable.
But to put all of this in perspective, the number of startups or companies
that try to advance our collective knowledge is close to nonexistent.

Hacker news appears to love to criticize science and cheer industry. Yet
almost no one here even attempts to perform the most basic of experiments, let
alone write something close to an actual science experiment. On that note, I'd
like to address the vocal subgroup of HN that feels science is best left to
industry.

There has been absolutely nothing stopping companies from doing science since
the scientific revolution hundreds of years ago. Yet the majority advances
still come from publicly funded efforts. There is nothing _to do_ to create
industry science. Our current state already reflects what happens when you
leave science to those who are primarily profit focused. There is almost no
science from them.

In the past there were a few great industry research labs, we all know their
names, but all of that is long gone. A few of the largest firms still do some
basic science, but it's a shadow of the public effort and little to none of it
is free, or even for sale at $30 a paper. A single patent will cost you much
much more that that and is not even equivalent to a proper paper in utility.

This is because science is not near term profitable, or even profitable in a
century necessarily. It's hugely valuable on longer time scales though,
possibly more so than any other human endeavour. This is much too long of a
time scale for companies to care about, and it's also impractical to allow law
to bury research for centuries to allow individuals to massively profit from
it. Industry has already proven it is unwilling to perform good basic science
on a large scale.

