Fake Paper Update: My Paper has now been disqualified

Earlier today, I wrote about the fake paper I published.

Now, at 12:26pm, I received an email informing me that my paper has been disqualified. This disqualification happened many hours after the full story broke on Mid-Day, and almost a day after Mid-Day journalists had called up the organizers asking them how they let a fake paper get published by the conference. (According to the Mid-Day report, at that time the organizers responded that, “He (Kabra) might have sent it for another journal.”)

Here is the full text of the email

From: editor@iraj.in (21 mins. ago) (inbox)
Subject: Paper Disqalified
To: riaaseth@gmail.com, baldev.thakur@yahoo.com
Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2013 23:56:10 -0700

Dear Riaa Seth,

It is to inform you that after going through the fake paper submitted by you
in the conference. we have stopped the publication. and we have not
distributed the proceedings hard copy also on the conference day. The
acceptance is mistakenly sent to you by our coordinator. You are disqualified
to attend any of the upcoming IRAJ Conference.

Thank you.
With Honor and Regards
Managing Editor
INSTITUTE OF RESEARCH AND JOURNALS(IRAJ)
Official Website: www.iraj.in
Join us Facebook/IRAJ
Mob: 91-8598978459
Mail:editor@iraj.in/Iraj.editor@gmail.com

Yesterday, the paper had appeared in the online conference proceedings in the IRAJ website. The paper has now disappeared. We were expecting this, so we had archived the relevant webpage at the Wayback Machine. The online proceedings page is here. Compare this with the current version of the page. See the difference in paper number 20? Unfortunately, the PDF of the paper cannot be archived by the Wayback Machine. But here is a long list of people who downloaded the paper form the IRAJ website, on December 29 and morning of December 30 2013, and confirmed that the paper indeed contained nonsense.

I wonder if I should ask for a refund of my Rs. 3000 that I gave them to ensure that my paper is published…

Also, I am pretty sad that I am disqualified from attending upcoming IRAJ conferences. The next one in Pune, happening just one week from now, is International Conference Academics on Computer Science and Information Technology. But, this time, I hope the organizers read the accepted papers more carefully.

How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system

I am currently too upset to be able to do a good job of writing this article concisely and effectively, so please be patient and read the whole rambling thing. Note also: I’m not upset about the existence of one such conference – the real problem are the publish-or-perish rules in colleges/universities that are forcing the students to such conferences (of which there must be hundreds). Update: Mid-Day has done an article on this issue – you can check that out.

Consider this: http://iraj.in/Conference/2013/Pune/ICRIEST/

Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right?

Wrong.

We submitted to two fake papers to this conference – one was complete gibberish auto-generated by using the online fake paper generator at SCIGen, while the other was auto-generated gibberish interspersed with completely ridiculous statements, movie dialogues, and other random things. Both these papers where accepted by this conference. We paid the conference registration fee for one of the papers, and that was published in the conference proceedings, and we did not pay the registration fee for the other paper, so that paper was not published by them. The conference fee is Rs. 6000 for M.Tech. students (but we managed to get a 50% discount just by haggling with them in the same way we haggle with vegetable vendors).

Note: the paper that actually got published is such that anyone reading past paragraph #2 of the paper will realize it is complete nonsense. You be the judge of whether a paper like this should be acceptable to any conference which claims that papers are “peer reviewed and evaluated based on originality, technical and/or research content/depth, correctness, relevance to conference, contributions, and readability”

I would recommend you read the whole paper, but even if you don’t, note the following things:

  • Paragraph #2 of the introduction, on the first page itself, says: You should read any paragraph that starts with the first 4 words in bold and italics – those have been written by the author in painstaking detail. However, if a paragraph does not start with bold and italics, feel free to skip it because it is gibberish auto-generated by the good folks at SCIGen.
  • One section of the paper consists entirely of dialogues from the movie “My Cousin Vinny.”
  • And the conclusion section of the paper actually has this: And we’ve managed to reference Hilbert, HHGTTG, Sholay, My Cousin Vinny, Jeff Naughton, the Wisconsin Database Performance Paper, Xeno’s paradox, Meeta Kabra and the wogma.com website, and we even referenced the Sokal Affair in the heading of the paper (actually in the name of the institute that the authors are from, but you get what I mean, right?) proving once and for all that nobody has read this paper.

And this paper, was not just accepted, but also published in the conference proceedings. From early morning of 29th December (IST) to 11am of 30th December (IST), the paper was listed on the conference website and you could actually download from there. As expected, a few hours after this story broke on 30th December, the paper disappeared from the conference website without a trace. We were expecting this, so here is a long list of people who downloaded the paper form the IRAJ website, on December 29 and morning of December 30 2013, and confirmed that the paper indeed contained nonsense. (Note: we tried to get the Wayback Machine to archive the paper, but due to the way the Wayback Machine works, the updated page has gotten archived.)

Is it just a case of low standards?

One science reporter suggested on twitter that maybe this is a case of a conference so desperate for papers that rejection rates are low. Someone else suggested that this might simply be a case of a conference that has no review process, so anything is published.

Not quite. The organizers are clearly claiming that there was an expert review process for acceptance into the conference. For each of the two papers we submitted, they first sent one email saying that the paper had been sent for review. Later we received an ACCEPTANCE LETTER which appeared to indicate that the paper had been accepted based on 4 review scores. Note: we never received any actual review feedback from any reviewer – this point becomes relevant below.

Just to confirm that there was no misunderstanding of the process followed by the conference, I landed up at the conference with a journalist from Pune Mid-Day, and we interviewed the organizers about the conference.

The organizers made the following claims (which I managed to audio record on my phone):

  • The conference received 130 submissions out of which only 60 were selected.
  • All the papers were reviewed by panelists from a panel of international experts using a double-blind review methodology.
  • Only high quality papers were accepted
  • All accepted papers were sent reviews from at least 3 reviewers each and the authors were then asked to update the papers based on the review comments. (No such thing happened with the 2 papers we submitted to the conference.)

Who are affected by such conferences?

When I went to the conference, I found about a dozen delegates who all had papers to present, and most of them were M.E. or M.Tech. students from various parts of the country. There were 2 students who had come all the way from Odisha to Pune just for this conference. One of them had brought his mother along for the conference too. Two students had come from Solapur. There students from local Pune colleges too. All of them had paid the conference registration fees, and the travel costs from their own pocket. All of them were publishing because it was a requirement for their degree.

I had gone to the conference with the intention of making a ridiculous presentation along the lines of my ridiculous paper, and create a scene at the conference with the reporter and photographer from Mid-Day. However, after seeing the sincere faces of all the students there, I just couldn’t make myself do it. Instead of introducing myself as an author of a paper, I introduced myself as a reporter from PuneTech.com and joined the Mid-Day reporter in interviewing the organizers. I just stayed long enough to record the statements of the organizers and left.

How did I get involved in this?

Two years ago, I was an external advisor for a B.E. Project. My students told me that the University has a requirement that all B.E. Projects must be published in an international conference. This is such a patently ridiculous requirement that I tried to convince them that they must be mistaken. However, I couldn’t convince them.

So, I tried to prepare them for failure by pointing out that an average or even above-average B.E. Project report is not of the quality that can get published in a good conference. Imagine my surprise when the paper actually got accepted. And nothing I could do could prevent my students from paying Rs. 6500 as registration fees and going all the way to Kanyakumari using their own money to present at that conference.

This convinced me that misguided policies are forcing students into paying money to get papers published in conferences with low or non-existent quality standards. And I was sure that there must be many such conferences. And I needed to do something about this issue.

Ever since that happened, I’ve been waiting for one such conference to come to Pune so that I could prove, beyond any doubt, that these conferences accept anything as long as you are willing to pay the registration fees.

Update: as far as I know, it is not a university requirement that BE Projects must be published – that was just probably a case of a few colleges misguiding students. However it either is a mandatory requirement for ME/MTech, or lots of colleges are telling the students that it is a requirement.

Is this issue important?

Is this really an issue worth getting worked up over?

As far as we understand, all M.E. and M.Tech. students in the country are required to publish at least two papers, otherwise they cannot get their degree. This results in a country full of desperate students who have no choice but to pay for getting published at conferences like this one.

The conference organizers told us that:

  • The organization which held this conference has been in operation for 3-1/2 years
  • In that period they have held over 120+ such events
  • Each event has had an average of 30 to 50 presenters
  • They operate our of 4 major centers in India – Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and I forgot the 4th.

This is just one organization. I’m sure there must be many more such organizations all over the country.

In the past, we have heard of some colleges who told the students that it was mandatory for undergraduate (B.E.) students to also have published their B.E. project in an international conference. On a similar note, the organizers of this conference very passionately told us that they would like this to become a mandatory requirement across all the undergraduate engineering colleges in the country. Which of course would increase the size of the problem by an order of magnitude. I’m sure some bureaucrat sitting in some office is giving this some serious thought.

What to do?

My original intention of doing this was to spread awareness amongst students about the true nature of such conferences.

But now, after having gone through the experience, I am a bit depressed. I don’t know how awareness about this issue is going to help.

  • Even if students are aware of the issues, it is still very difficult to figure out whether any given conference indeed has high quality standards and a good peer/expert review process or not.
  • Even if there was an easy method of being able to distinguish between good conferences and bad ones, what are the students expected to do? They can’t graduate without publications.

The root of all evil is this stupid rule that mandates that all M.E./M.Tech. students must have two publications. Until that is changed, this sort of a thing will continue to thrive. (Note: I don’t really know for sure whether there is indeed such a rule, and whether it is applicable to all colleges in India – I’m just repeating what I heard from the students and the organizers of that conference.)

The more I dig into our education system, the more depressed I become.

Vaclav Smil on why we need manufacturing, vegetarianism, and less innovation

When Bill Gates says:

I’ve talked before about my favorite author Vaclav Smil. He doesn’t pull any punches in this @WIRED interview

I know it will be an interview worth reading. So I head over and find an excellent interview with Vaclav Smil

Here are some excerpts:

Let’s talk about manufacturing. You say a country that stops doing mass manufacturing falls apart. Why?

In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.

and

Restoring manufacturing would mean training Americans again to build things?

Only two countries have done this well: Germany and Switzerland. They’ve both maintained strong manufacturing sectors and they share a key thing: Kids go into apprentice programs at age 14 or 15. You spend a few years, depending on the skill, and you can make BMWs. And because you started young and learned from the older people, your products can’t be matched in quality. This is where it all starts.

On food:

Your other big subject is food. You’re a pretty grim thinker, but this is your most optimistic area. You actually think we can feed a planet of 10 billion people—if we eat less meat and waste less food.

We pour all this energy into growing corn and soybeans, and then we put all that into rearing animals while feeding them antibiotics. And then we throw away 40 percent of the food we produce.

Meat eaters don’t like me because I call for moderation, and vegetarians don’t like me because I say there’s nothing wrong with eating meat. It’s part of our evolutionary heritage! Meat has helped to make us what we are. Meat helps to make our big brains. The problem is with eating 200 pounds of meat per capita per year. Eating hamburgers every day. And steak.

You know, you take some chicken breast, cut it up into little cubes, and make a Chinese stew—three people can eat one chicken breast. When you cut meat into little pieces, as they do in India, China, and Malaysia, all you need to eat is maybe like 40 pounds a year.

On “innovation” as the solution to all our problems:

“Let’s not reform the education system, the tax system. Let’s not improve our dysfunctional government. Just wait for this innovation manna from a little group of people in Silicon Valley, preferably of Indian origin.”

Read the full article