Comes another reminder that some scholarly journals, like some people, are less careful than others. [Another way to put this: if the ONLY thing you know about a report is that it was published in “a scholarly journal”, then you know almost nothing about it.] Richard van Noorden reports, in Nature:
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.
Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers….
There is a long history of journalists and researchers getting spoof papers accepted in conferences or by journals to reveal weaknesses in academic quality controls — from a fake paper published by physicist Alan Sokal of New York University in the journal Social Text in 1996, to a sting operation by US reporter John Bohannon published in Science in 2013, in which he got more than 150 open-access journals to accept a deliberately flawed study for publication.…
The Sokal hoax resulted, among other things, in the awarding of the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature to the editors of the journal Social Text, for eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist. [REFERENCE: The paper was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Alan Sokal, “Social Text,” Spring/Summer 1996, pp. 217-252.]