Another Look at Computer-Generated Scientific Papers

By Roland Piquepaille

Like many of you, I had a good laugh a month ago when I read that some students at the MIT submitted a computer-generated 'scientific' paper to a computer conference which accepted it, at least in a first step. (See 'Prank research paper makes the grade' for example.) But now, I'm not laughing anymore. Imagine that 100,000 people around the world use this Automatic CS Paper Generator to generate a fake paper and keep it online. In our world of 'permanent' information, what will happen in five years when someone uses a search engine looking for keywords contained in the title of these fake papers? One of these papers may appear high in the list of results and this person may use this computer-generated paper as a basis for one of his projects. Scary, isn't? Read more...

Let's first go back to the original story in case you missed it.

On April 15, 2005, the MIT News office wrote that some MIT computer science students were so tired to see their papers rejected by scientific conference people that they started to have some doubts about their standards to accept or refuse a paper. (see link above for more details.)

So they decided to have some fun and to write software that generates meaningless research papers and submit them to different organizations.

One of their computer-generated papers, "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" (PDF format, 4 pages, 92 KB) was initially accepted by World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 2005 (WMSCI 2005) as a non-reviewed paper, and later rejected.

Now, let's have some fun and build a meaningless computer science paper. It's very easy. On the site mentioned above, you just fill the names of one to five authors and submit your request. That's all for you to do!

As an example, here are two fake papers that I 'co-authored' with some well-known people in the computer industry.

It's pretty easy to imagine a group of people, with fun or evil intentions, to link to such a computer-generated document in order to see it ranked high by search engines. If enough people are putting a link to the first document mentioned above, a Google search for 'boolean' and 'harmful' will soon return this fake document as its #1 result.

Of course, I don't see why people would do that. And the probability that a real paper was co-authored by Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds is very low, so I don't think anyone will think it's a genuine document.

But lots of 'phishing' attacks these days show that people are more gullible than we might think.

So, is the possibility of hundred of thousands of fake computer science papers sitting online represents a danger or not? Time will tell, but please let me know what you think.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, with various websites

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