SCIENCE: Publishers remove gibberish computer-generated research papers.

Computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, spent two years examining published research papers, and found that computer-generated papers made it into more than 30 conferences, and over 120 have been published by academic publishing houses — over 100 by the the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and 16 by Springer.

The papers were generated by a piece of free software called SCIgen, developed in 2005 by scientists at MIT. SCIgen randomly generates nonsense papers, complete with graphs, diagrams and citations, and its purpose was to demonstrate how easily conferences accept meaningless submissions. . . .

Both publishing houses have pulled the papers in question, although some issues remain. Ruth Springer, UK head of communications for Springer, is running into issues trying to contact the authors, and noted that the conferences in question were, in fact, peer reviewed, which casts a bad light on the current processes. IEEE, however, declined to comment.