“All these papers were deliberately bad. They were created with the purpose of exposing exploitative publishing practices. That is, the works collected here were sting operations on predatory journals.” So says the introduction to the book Stinging the Predators: A collection of papers that should never have been published, assembled by Zen Faulkes. Falkes is a professor of biology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. You can download the book, free.
That book includes the following papers, and follows them with some Faulkesian analysis of the situation that led people to write the papers, and led publishers to publish them:
The Sokal hoax (1996)
The blog that called predator (June 2009)
Abstract theology (August 2011)
Random math (September 2012)
The Bohannon Science sting (October 2013)
“Get me off your fucking mailing list” (November 2014)
Cuckoo for cocoa puffs (January 2015)
Fake news (May 2015)
Been there, done that (August 2016)
“Siri, write me a conference abstract” (October 2016)
The first Spears (November 2016)
The second Spears (December 2016)
Doctor Fraud (March 2017)
A paper about nothing (April 2017)
The conceptual penis (May 2017)
The garbage’ll do (July 2017)
Spam inspires surreal sting (July 2017)
NOTE: Publication of the Sokal hoax paper led to 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.