Academic Paper Spam

There seems to be an epidemic of computer-generated nonsense academic papers.

Labbé does not know why the papers were submitted -- or even if the authors were aware of them. Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations. Labbé has emailed editors and authors named in many of the papers and related conferences but received scant replies; one editor said that he did not work as a program chair at a particular conference, even though he was named as doing so, and another author claimed his paper was submitted on purpose to test out a conference, but did not respond on follow-up. Nature has not heard anything from a few enquiries.

In this arms race between fake-paper-generator and fake-paper-detector, the advantage goes to the detector.