Saturday, July 17, 2010

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?]

2 comments:

  1. How is the Cern-paper related to fake conferences? The above gives the impression that there might be something wrong about this paper which is completely unjustified (I am not one of the authors but still feel comfortable to say this). The (very) long author list is due to the fact that the paper deals with one of the (or probably THE) largest experiments that physicists have ever undertaken, therefore basically everybody working in that particular field is involved. The authors are all part of the Atlas-consortium, which has directed the experiments (and each of these persons has contributed a piece to the experiments, e.g. by programming software, detector development, simulations etc.)

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  2. Sorry, that is misleading. I find it hard to believe, though, that 3469 people collaborated on writing a paper. And of course, all will be submitting this to their institutions for the publication lists. I have no problem with each describing their part of the experiments, but having all these names on a paper instead of a web site seems problematic. I suppose I have the expectation that a paper reflects work that each has knowingly contributed to the effort. An alternative form of publication should be found for such a large experiment, in my opinion.

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