This is a list of scholarly publishing "sting operations" such as theSokal affair. These are nonsense papers that were accepted by anacademic journal oracademic conference; the list does not include cases ofscientific misconduct. The intent of such publications is typically to expose shortcomings in a journal'speer review process or to criticize the standards ofpay-to-publish journals. The ethics of academic stings are disputed, with some arguing that it is morally equivalent to other forms of fraud.[1]
| Discipline | Year | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Chemistry | 2013 | "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?": In 2013John Bohannon wrote inScience 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 theSCIgen program was accepted without peer-review for presentation at theUnited States-basedWorld 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 threeMIT graduate students who wrote the hoax article said they were unaware of theSokal 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, Navin Kabra, aPune-based software professional submitted a bogus paper titled "use of cloud-computing and social media to determine box office performance", which was accepted by theBhubaneswar-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 filmSholay, and 19 lines fromMy 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 ahuman error of the coordinators.[5] |
| Computer science | 2014 | In 2014, Australian computer scientist Peter Vamplew submitted a paper to theInternational 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 andEddie 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 theBritish Medical Journal in 1974 with a case report on the fictional medical conditioncello scrotum, purportedly an affliction of thescrotum affecting male players of thecello.[7] |
| Medicine | 2014 | In December 2014,Mark Shrime, then a graduate student atHarvard University and now the chair of global surgery at theRoyal 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" andOrson 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 predatoryAsian 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 includeEmmanuel Macron's dogNemo.[11] |
| Philosophy | 2015 | In April 2015, philosophers Philippe Huneman and Anouk Barberousse published a hoax article entitled "Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non-)Being-Queer" in the journalBadiou Studies.[12][13] The paper was submitted under thepen name Benedetta Tripodi and was subsequently retracted. The parody was designed to undermine the foundation ofAlain Badiou's thought.[13] The hoax was exposed in the French newspaperLibération with the support ofAlan Sokal, among others. Answering critics who denounced Huneman and Barberousse's strategy as one of avoidance rather than criticism, the authors of theLibération article pointed toJonathan Swift'sA Modest Proposal to show that publishing satire is sometimes a good way to voice criticism.[12] |
| Physics | 2016 | Christoph Bartneck, anassociate professor inInformation Technology at New Zealand'sUniversity of Canterbury, was invited to submit a paper to the 2016 International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics organised byConferenceSeries. With little knowledge of nuclear physics, he usediOS's auto-complete function to write the paper, choosing randomly from its suggestions after starting each sentence,[14] and submitted it under the name Iris Pear (a reference toSiri andApple).[15] A sample sentence: "The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place for a great time to enjoy the day you are a wonderful person to your great time to take the fun and take a great time and enjoy the great day you will be a wonderful time for your parents and kids".[14] The work was accepted within three hours of submission and a conference registration fee of US$1,099 requested.[14][15] ConferenceSeries is associated with theOMICS Publishing Group,[16] which producesopen access journals widely regarded aspredatory, and has been accused of moving into "predatory meetings".[17] Bartneck said he was "reasonably certain that this is a money-making conference with little to no commitment to science," given the poor quality of the review process and the high cost of attendance.[14] |
| Political science | 2017 | In 2017, geographer Reuben Rose-Redwood sent a pitch to 13 editors of academic journals who supported the publication ofBruce Gilley's paper "The Case forColonialism". Rose-Redwood proposed a special issue on "The Costs and Benefits ofGenocide: Towards a Balanced Debate". Only one editor raised ethical concerns about the proposal.[18][1][19] |
| Psychology | 2007 | In 2007,Tomasz Witkowski published a fake article in the psychology journalCharaktery, which described apsychotherapeutic method based on apseudoscientific theory ofRupert Sheldrake. According to Witkowski, the editorial board assisted in adding plagiarized content about Sheldrake to the submission.[20][21][22] |
| Social studies | 1996 | TheSokal affair:Alan Sokal, aphysics professor atNew York University andUniversity College London, wrote a paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a TransformativeHermeneutics of Quantum Gravity",[23] which proposed thatquantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The paper was published in the United States-basedSocial Text spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. At that time, the journal did not practiceacademic peer review, and it did not submit the article for outside review by a physicist.[23][24] On the day of its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed inLingua Franca that the article was a hoax.[25] |
| Social studies | 2017 | The"grievance studies" affair (also referred to as the "Sokal Squared" Hoax by the news media): During 2017–2018Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian wrote 20 hoax articles; at the time the hoax stopped, four papers had been published, three had been accepted but not yet published, seven were under review, and six had been rejected. The papers all focused on what the authors called "grievance studies" related to race, gender, sexuality and other forms of identity. The hoax was revealed and halted after one of the papers in the England-basedfeminist geography journalGender, Place and Culture was criticized on social media, and then onCampus Reform, which led aWall Street Journal editorial writer to investigate and report on it.[26] The paper, which was in the process of being retracted when theWall Street Journal story broke, referred to dog parks as "petri dishes for caninerape culture". The report also described a paper published inAffilia which contained a reworded excerpt fromMein Kampf.[27] |
| Social studies | 2015 | TheSociétés hoax: Using a false identity, Manuel Quinon andArnaud Saint-Martin submitted an intentionally inept and absurd article on theAutolib', a small rentable car inParis, toMichel Maffesoli'sSociétés journal. The article was deliberately incoherent and plastered with liberal quotes and references to Maffesoli and other postmodern thinkers. The article was duly "reviewed" by two people, before being accepted and published inSociétés without any substantial editing.[28] |
| Theology | 2012 | Maarten Boudry, aphilosopher, in 2012, persuaded twotheology conferences to accept abstracts composed of meaninglessword salads as a paper.[29] |
The definition of a 'sting' can also include a researcher failing to pay publication fees.[citation needed]
| Discipline | Year | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Medicine | 2014 | In February 2014, Hatixhe Latifi-Pupovci, a professor from theUniversity of Pristina, submitted a flawed paper toMedical Archives, a journal published inBosnia and Herzegovina. On 14 April 2014, she received a reminder to pay the publication fee of 250EUR, which she never did. The paper was already published in the journal four days earlier.[30][31] In July 2014, the editor of the journal, Izet Masic, published an editorial titled "A New Example of Unethical Behaviour in the Academic JournalMedical Archives," calling out Latifi-Pupovci's actions and declaring that the paper would be retracted. |