Hundreds of gibberish papers still lurk in the scientific literature

The issue began in 2005, when three PhD students created paper-generating software called SCIgen for “maximum amusement”, and to show that some conferences would accept meaningless papers.

Springer also sponsored a PhD project to help spot SCIgen papers, which resulted in free software called SciDetect.

The publishers who posted the most SCIgen content were Trans Tech Publications, a Swiss publisher, which published 57 SCIgen papers, Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP), based in India, which had 54; and Atlantis Press, a French publisher that was acquired by Springer Nature this March, with 39.

SCIgen papers are extremely rare: Labbé and Cabanac estimate from their screen that they make up a mere 75 papers per million in the computer-science literature. They are a far smaller problem than are, for instance, suspected paper mills.

the existence of these papers is an indication of the harmful effects of a ‘publish or perish’ culture, and an example of how nonsensical work can still make it into conference proceedings or journals.