University of Bergen Plagiarism Video

The University of Bergen in Norway has put out an amusing video on plagiarism:


It is in Norwegian, with English subtitles. Enjoy!

Interesting links on fake conferences

While researching that last posting on fake conferences I found a number of interesting sites I want to link to here:

• Diploma Mill News, a blog dedicated to "[e]xposing scammers of every ilk: diploma mills, fake diplomas, fabricated transcripts, bogus accreditation, plagiarism, cheating, essay mills, identity theft, impersonation of licensed professionals, and more."
• The State of Oregon has a long list of unaccredited schools
• Academic Spam, a blog that collects the solicitations ("If you are a pseudoscientist, then a new bogus conference is calling you to send fake papers")
• A scientific paper:  Zhuang, Z., Elmacioglu, E., Lee, D., and Giles, C. L. 2007. Measuring conference quality by mining program committee characteristics.  In Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 18 - 23, 2007). JCDL '07. ACM, New York, NY, 225-234. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1255175.1255220
• Some Japanese guy has plagiarized my first article on fake conferences...
• A blacklist of conferences and journals
• A 10-page paper from CERN that has 3469 authors (!) [Did they all get money from their institutions for this publication?]

More Fake Conferences?

I had a discussion with the GI Ethics group yesterday on the topic of fake conferences. How exactly do we decide if a conference is a fake - only there to provide researchers with publications to pad their CVs and a trip to a nice place? One of our group had submitted a paper to a conference that sounded legit, but when he arrived he was shocked that most of the week was dedicated to local tours and the few papers that he heard given were either very thin, very wacko, or given in such bad English as to be incomprehensible.