List of scholarly publishing stings

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This is a list of scholarly publishing "sting operations" such as the Sokal affair. These are nonsense papers that were accepted by an academic journal or academic conference; the list does not include cases of scientific misconduct. The intent of such publications is typically to expose shortcomings in a journal's peer review process or to criticize the standards of pay-to-publish journals. The ethics of academic stings are disputed, with some arguing that it is morally equivalent to other forms of fraud.[1]

Notable examples

The hoax was revealed and halted after one of the papers in the England-based feminist geography journal Gender, Place and Culture was criticized on social media, and then on Campus Reform, which led a Wall Street Journal editorial writer to investigate and report on it.[12] The paper, which was in the process of being retracted when the Wall Street Journal story broke, referred to dog parks as "petri dishes for canine rape culture". The report also described a paper published in Affilia which contained a reworded excerpt from Mein Kampf.[13]

Financial stings

The definition of a 'sting' can also include a researcher failing to pay publication fees.[citation needed]

Discipline Year Description
Chemistry 2013 "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?": In 2013 John Bohannon wrote in Science about a "sting operation" he conducted in which he submitted "a credible but mundane scientific paper, one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable", to 304 open-access publishers.[2] 157 journals accepted the paper. There have been some objections to the sting's methodology and about what conclusions can be drawn from it.[3][4]
Computer science 2005 A paper randomly generated by the SCIgen program was accepted without peer-review for presentation at the United States-based World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI). None of the three assigned peer-reviewers submitted an opinion about its fidelity, veracity, or accuracy to its subject. The three MIT graduate students who wrote the hoax article said they were unaware of the Sokal affair until after submitting their article. Numerous other papers generated by SCIgen have been published in scientific journals or accepted for presentation at scientific conferences.
Computer science 2013 In December 2013, a Pune-based software professional submitted a bogus paper titled "use of cloud-computing and social media to determine box office performance", which was accepted by the Bhubaneswar-based Research Forum for their ICRIEST-AICEEMCS International Conference. The paper's introductory section cautioned that it contained "gibberish" that was auto-generated by software. One section of the paper also includes 19 lines about the 1970s Bollywood film Sholay, and 19 lines from My Cousin Vinny, a 1992 Hollywood film. The incident highlighted a practice where "poor quality papers are accepted from students who are then asked to pay a few thousand rupees to participate in the conferences". The management of the event retracted the paper and apologized publicly. The Secretary in an interview described the acceptance as a human error of the coordinators.[5]
Computer science 2014 In 2014, Australian computer scientist Peter Vamplew submitted a paper to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (IJACT) after being angered that the journal would not take his email off its mailing list. The article, in fact written a decade earlier by David Mazières and Eddie Kohler, was titled "Get me off your fucking mailing list" and consisted of the phrase "Get me off your fucking mailing list" being repeated for the entirety of the article body. The journal requested the researcher to "add some more recent references and do a bit of reformatting" saying that the article's "suitability for the journal was excellent". He was never taken off the mailing list.[6]
Medicine 1974 Elaine Murphy hoaxed the British Medical Journal in 1974 with a case report on the fictional medical condition cello scrotum, purportedly an affliction of the scrotum affecting male players of the cello.[7]
Medicine 2014 In December 2014, Mark Shrime, then a graduate student at Harvard University and now the chair of global surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, used a random text generator to create a gibberish paper entitled "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs? The Surgical and Neoplastic Role of Cacao Extract in Breakfast Cereals". He submitted this paper, whose authors were listed as "Pinkerton LeBrain" and Orson Welles, to 37 medical journals. It was accepted into 17 of them.[8]
Medicine 2020 In August 2020, graduate student Mathieu Rebeaud, general practitioner Michaël Rochoy, nuclear medicine intern Valentin Ruggeri and professor of philosophy Florian Cova hoaxed the predatory Asian Journal of Medicine and Health with an article titled "SARS-CoV-2 was Unexpectedly Deadlier than Push-scooters: Could Hydroxychloroquine be the Unique Solution?"[9][10] The authors list include the then French president's dog, Nemo.[11]
Discipline Year Description
Medicine 2014 In February 2014, Hatixhe Latifi-Pupovci, a professor from the University of Prishtina, submitted a flawed paper to Medical Archives, a journal published in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On 14 April 2014, she received a reminder to pay the publication fee of 250 EUR, which she never did. The paper was already published in the journal four days earlier.[14][15] In July 2014, the editor of the journal, Izet Masic, published an editorial titled "A New Example of Unethical Behaviour in the Academic Journal Medical Archives," calling out Latifi-Pupovci's actions and declaring that the paper would be retracted.

See also

References

  1. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named unethical
  2. Bohannon, John (4 October 2013). "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?". Science. 342 (6154): 60–65. Bibcode:2013Sci...342...60B. doi:10.1126/science.342.6154.60. PMID 24092725.
  3. Taylor, Mike; Matt Wedell; Darren Naish (7 October 2013). "Anti-tutorial: how to design and execute a really bad study". Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. Archived from the original on 15 October 2013. Retrieved 14 October 2013.
  4. Smith, Kevin (10 October 2013). "The big picture about peer-review". Scholarly Communications @ Duke. Duke University Libraries. Archived from the original on 16 October 2013. Retrieved 14 October 2013.
  5. Mudur, G.S. (2014-01-02). "Throw in F-word and become paper tiger". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 2 June 2014. Retrieved 15 September 2014.
  6. Safi, Michael (2014-11-25). "Journal accepts bogus paper requesting removal from mailing list". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 2017-05-27. Retrieved 2017-06-23.
  7. "Peer reveals 'cello scrotum' hoax". 2009-01-28. Retrieved 2019-11-14.
  8. Segran, Elizabeth (2015-01-27). "Why A Fake Article Titled "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?" Was Accepted By 17 Medical Journals". Fast Company. Retrieved 2021-10-04.
  9. Journal accepts fake story about scooters and hydroxychloroquine
  10. Hydroxychloroquine, push-scooters, and COVID-19: A journal gets stung, and swiftly retracts
  11. Willard Oodendijk; Michaël Rochoy; Valentin Ruggeri; Florian Cova; Didier Lembrouille; Sylvano Trottinetta; Otter F. Hantome; Nemo Macron; Manis Javanica (15 August 2020). "SARS-CoV-2 was Unexpectedly Deadlier than Push-scooters: Could Hydroxychloroquine be the Unique Solution?". Asian Journal of Medicine and Health. 18 (9): 14–21.
  12. Schuessler, Jennifer (October 4, 2018). "Hoaxers Slip Breastaurants and Dog-Park Sex Into Journals". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 10, 2018. Retrieved October 5, 2018.
  13. Jillian Kay Melchior (2018-10-02). "Fake news comes to academia". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 2018-10-05. Retrieved 2018-10-05.
  14. Palus, Shannon (2016-08-31). "Sting operation forces predatory publisher to pull paper". Retraction Watch. Retrieved 2021-06-13.
  15. Plan, The Publication (2016-09-13). ""Sting" operation exposes predatory publisher". The Publication Plan for everyone interested in medical writing, the development of medical publications, and publication planning. Retrieved 2021-06-13.