Peer Review Again

In a recent paper in Nature the author states:

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.

Now I have no knowledge of IEEE since I no longer kept up my membership after some 45 years because I saw a dramatically declining quality of papers. My concerns were:

1. Multi author papers: There was an explosion of papers, especially at conferences, where the number of authors approach a large class size. One would logically as; who wrote what? There was the "name" author, who I often wondered had even read the paper, and then a swarm of others, and amidst the mess was probably an author.

2. Repeat of Old Stuff: No one ever seemed to examine if what they did was just a rehash. In my opinion that was especially true of IEEE papers. One wondered if they just accepted anything that was generated in the "club" and ignored everything else.

3. Awards: There has become a proliferation of various awards and the sole purpose is to gather credits for academic status. It used to be that certain journals were controlled by Bell Labs and that they set the standard, namely support AT&T or else. Now it is not clear who they are but it is just a rebirth of the same old stuff.

The article continues:

“The papers are quite easy to spot,” says Labbé, who has built a website where users can test whether papers have been created using SCIgen. His detection technique, described in a study¹ published in Scientometrics in 2012, involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by SCIgen. Shortly before that paper was published, Labbé informed the IEEE of 85 fake papers he had found. Monika Stickel, director of corporate communications at IEEE, says that the publisher “took immediate action to remove the papers” and “refined our processes to prevent papers not meeting our standards from being published in the future”. In December 2013, Labbé informed the IEEE of another batch of apparent SCIgen articles he had found. Last week, those were also taken down, but the web pages for the removed articles give no explanation for their absence.

 Integrity is an essential element in science and engineering. Apparently there seems to be no check on it in certain publications. Perhaps a real house cleaning is in order. Yet, perhaps those in the house just want to shovel it under the rug and go on as the do. It is ironic that IEEE is now one of the few journals that has no open access. Perhaps that says something.