More than 120 fake science papers removed from databases

Nature : Springer and IEEE are working to remove some 120 scientific papers from their subscription databases after being informed that the papers were computer generated. The fakes were pointed out by Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France; he has been working for the past two years on a tool to detect bogus manuscripts generated by a computer program called SCIgen . The program was created by three MIT graduate students in 2005 to test weaknesses in publishers’ academic quality controls. They used SCIgen to randomly generate computer science research papers, complete with figures and citations, that they then submitted to conference proceedings. The software proved highly successful and has since been made freely available on the internet. Labbé says that although the fakes are easy to detect, there could be many more.