Fake Conferences

It's that time of year again. Suddenly, your inbox is filled with letters requesting that you submit a paper to the "The 13th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2009" or "The 6th International Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies: CCCT 2008" or "The International Multi-Conference on Engineering and Technological Innovation: IMETI 2008", all interestingly co-located in Orlando, Florida, and all organized by one Professor Nagib Callaos of the "International Institute of Informatics and Systemics".

Never heard of any of this because you are a philosopher getting the emails, too? Don't worry, serious computer scientists don't usually go to the conferences, although people do easily get impressed by all the names and submit a paper.

Strangely enough, all papers are accepted, as long as you have paid your registration fee. You don't actually have to come and give the paper, although the family will surely love following you to Orlando. The "Acceptance Policy" is spelled out in pseudo-scientific detail on the conference site. I paraphrase: We accept everything, because there might happen to be a good paper in there, and because a reviewer might plagiarize a paper they reject.

This conference accepted a paper back in 2005 that had been generated by a computer programmed by some MIT students, SCIgen. A nice blog discussion of that and the conference is found here. There was quite a row about this back in 2005, as one must question how scientific a conference is that accepts random (albeit well-worded) garbage and is willing to publish it. It is said that more than 1500 papers are accepted (at $ a pop that isn't chicken feed), and the "majority" are actually presented. That is not what a real conference is about, where you meet and discuss with peers working in similar areas.

How many of these thousands of papers ever get cited? That is perhaps an indication of how good the papers really are. I just searched the ACM Digital Library. There are 19 (nineteen) citations of the WMSCI conference. There have been 12 such conferences taken place.

That's not too many, so I went through the references for all 19 papers. Eleven of these papers were written by at least one of the authors of a WMSCI-published paper, so over half are self-citations. One paper is Peter G. Neumann's note of the acceptance of the fake paper in his "Risks to the Public" column in Software Engineering Notes.

As an aside, there's a fascinating paper on bibliometrics for discovering low-quality conferences published in 2007: Measuring conference quality by mining program committee characteristics.

Glancing down the lineup of invited speakers can cause quite some hilarity: Karl H. Müller, is given at CCCT2008 as being with the "University of Ljubljana (Austria)". I don't think that Austria has acutally annexed Slovenia, and a search of their web site turns up Mr. Müller as having given a talk there a few years back, but he is not listed as a teacher. He lists himself in his CV on the pages of his institute as teaching at any number of Austrian schools, but strangely, they don't list him.

Dr. Subhas C Misra is listed for this conference as being a visiting Scientist at Harvard, for another conference as being a visiting scientist at State University of New York. At another conference he is listed as the "NSERCPDF Scientist, Harvard University", but I find no mention of this program outside of his CV. Harvard includes CVs of its visiting scientists on its home page, there is no mention of Misra.

Who are these guys?

It seems that anyone can make up a fancy institute name and make themselves director, declare themselves teachers at University X (and may actually have taught there a semester or so before being put out on their ear), make up papers and fancy conferences and rush around finding themselves soooo important - but this has nothing to do with science! They can even pretend to be from some institution. Most are so large, no one can be sure that they are not actually from that place.

What can be done to stop this pseudo-science? Or do we just ignore them, but watch young people and unsuspecting colleagues pour departmental travel money into attending these conferences to present their papers? We do get a publication point out of it.....

Note (2016-11-10):  This blog entry was the begin of a long discussion. In 2012 I started speaking of "mock conferences" instead of "fake" ones. I keep getting lawyer's letters demanding that I remove this or that article because it is somehow defamatory. Please understand that science is a process, a long discussion, in which arguments are exchanged. Everyone is welcome to post comments, except those that attack a named person, and if you wish to argue your point of view I will be glad to publish guest commentary so that we can discuss it. In my opinion, having a lawyer enter a scientific conversation is akin to "Goodwin's Law": You automatically lose the argument.

When Professors Plagiarize

Henriette Haas, Ph.D., has put up an English-language page with advice for researchers who suspect that their professors may be systematically plagiarizing from them.

Warning: Top-Ranked Plagiarism Detection System found to contain Trojan Backdoor!

A reader from Norway, Lothar Fritsch from the Norwegian Computing Center, reports that the installer for Plagiarism-Detector, a system that came in second in our 2008 test of plagiarism detection software, is infected with a Trojan backdoor. The reader has updated his virus-detection software and downloaded the installer from plagiarism-detector.com again - the Trojan is still there. Das ist nicht die Test-Version, er hat eine Lizenz gekauft.


Until further notice we cannot recommend the use of this system! The company was notified on December 5, 2008 of this grave problem. The company promises "answers with minutes". Today is December 9, the Norwegians are still waiting for even an answer that someone has read about their problem.

Iranian Minister of the Interior caught without titles

Spiegel Online is reporting that the Minister of the Interior of Iran, Ali Kordan, doesn't have either am Iranian Bachelor's or a Master's degree, as he had claimed, and that the honorary doctorate that he supposedly was granted from Oxford University is a fake. The mistakes in spelling on the document are apparently a dead give-away, and Oxford has no record of having given him a degree. A spokesman for Oxford noted that honorary doctorates are awarded to scientists and scholars, not politicians.

The Iranian parliament was not amused, and has fired Kordan. The prime minister, Mahmud Ahmadinedschad, said he didn't care about any pieces of paper, he was only interested in results. Of course, he now has a problem. Since he himself fired nine ministers over the course of the past three years because of differences of opinion, and Kordan is now the tenth minister to leave his position, the constitution of Iran insists that Ahmadinedschad now ask parliament for a vote of confidence.

A new test of plagiarism detection systems

The research group at the FHTW has again tested plagiarism detection systems. We have extended our collection of test cases and now also have a selection of collusions - slightly changed papers that strongly resemble other papers - so that we can check how well software can find collusions. We also included a paper stored in a closed database (Springerlink) and one which we copied by typing up a page we found on Google books. An additional nasty test case replaced the letter "e" in a paragraph with the letter "ε". It still looks okay at first glance, but many systems were not able to find the plagiarism.

The results are, as always, not exciting. Software just cannot find translation plagiarisms or plagiarisms that are taken from books. Teacher, however, are often very good at spotting "fishy" texts like this and can even find sources using search machines. Even removing all the test cases with this kind of plagiarism from our evaluation, we still had no software that was given the grade of "very good". The systems have gotten slightly better, however.

We also evaluated the usability of the systems - many have lots of problems in this area. A particular problem is the numbers reported - it is often not clear, what the numbers or percent values given mean. And the reports are sometimes not very useful or the system is difficult to use in a university setting. Having to submit papers one at a time and having to wait a longish period between each test is not acceptable.

One system - one of the worst - has forbidden us from giving their name. We just refer to them as XXXX. The ranking is:

Good Systems (Grade "B")

• 1: Copyscape Premium
• 2: Plagiarism-Detector
• 3: Copyscape Free
• 4: Urkund
• 5: Docoloc - PlagAware (new version)
• 7: Ephorus

Satisfactory Systems (Grade "C")

• 8: SafeAssign
• 9: Strikeplagiarism
• 10: PlagiatCheck
• 11: AntiPlag
• 12: PlagAware (old version)

Acceptable Systems (Grade "D")

• 13: Turnitin
• 14: XXXX

Not acceptable Systems (Grade "F")

• 15: Plagiarism-Finder
• 16: Turnitin Global

Collusion Detection Systems

Good Systems

• JPlag
• Turnitin
• WCopyFind

Satisfactory Systems

• YAPLAF

The complete test is available (in German) at http://plagiat.fhtw-berlin.de/software/2008/ as well as an E-Learning unit on plagiarism.

Cambridge students admit to cheating

Joanna Sogden reports in the Times Online on a poll done at the University of Cambridge:

The results of an anonymous online poll of more than 1,000 students conducted by the student newspaper Varsity found that 49 per cent of undergraduates pass other people’s work off as their own at some point during their university career.

Only 5% report getting caught.

Paper by former vice-president of Iran retracted

Nature reports that a "review paper by Massoumeh Ebtekar, the former vice-president of Iran and an immunologist at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran, is to be retracted from an Iranian journal following allegations that it was almost entirely stitched together from other scientists' papers."

NatureNews: Butler, Declan. Iranian paper sparks sense of deja vu - Allegations of plagiarism prompt journal to retract report. Published online 22 October 2008 | Nature 455, 1019 (2008) | doi:10.1038/4551019a (http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081022/full/4551019a.html)

The plagiarism is one of more than 70,000 entries in the Deja Vu database. Powered by a tool called eTBLAST, it collects similar articles from the various scientific journals indexed by Medline. It takes an abstract, searches for similar ones, and then compares them, determining which one was published first. This blog noted a previous case in January 2008.

There are a shocking number of papers that are exact duplicates (but published in different journals), or have the same abstract but are published in different languages, or are identical but have different authors. Deja Vu is run by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and is funded by the Hudson Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

This is a great service to the community!