Computer Generated Papers Get Accepted For Conference

from the oops dept

In the last couple of months, I've started receiving requests addressed to Dr. Masnick asking me to submit papers to random and oddly named conferences. While there are a few Dr. Masnicks out there (some of whom are closely related), I've never made it that high up the academic food chain. I've been ignoring the emails assuming they were simply from confused individuals, but it seems like plenty of others have been receiving similar requests. One grad student at MIT got so fed up with the requests that he wrote a fake research paper generator and submitted some of the results -- which were accepted to these conferences. While the post linked from here suggests that the reviewers of the submissions aren't being very careful, you have to wonder if this is something of a scam -- like the various "Who's Who" books where they try to get people to buy these books that will just list anyone who pays.