Via Reuters: Scientific Conference Falls for Gibberish Prank

Jeremy Stribling said on Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with nonsensical text, charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

To their surprise, one of the papers — “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy” — was accepted for presentation.

To be honest, this surprised me not at all. I don’t know how the hard sciences work, but in the social sciences, a completed paper is not required when one makes a proposal to present at a conference. One is typically accepted based on one’s credentials and a paper title (and maybe an abstract).

The peer review takes places when you make your presentation to, well, your peers–who may not be too kind to you if you don’t make any sense.

I can’t imagine that in this case the WMSCI event planners actually read the things before putting them in the program. Certainly in this case, they didn’t:

Nagib Callaos, a conference organizer, said the paper was one of a small number accepted on a “non-reviewed” basis — meaning that reviewers had not yet given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.

“We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper that was not refused by any of its three selected reviewers,” Callaos wrote in an e-mail. “The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the content of their paper.”

One wonders if the reviewed papers are actually read beyond title and abstract, for that matter.

Now, the story about the journal in 1996 is pretty shocking, since those things are supposed to be thoroughly peer reviewed.

Update: Kevin Alyward ponders:

The unanswered question is whether they could they turn in the Rooter paper for a class and get something besides an F?

Methinks that the answer to that question is “no.”