# Randomly Generated ‘Peer Reviewed’ Papers - as in fake



## Robert Zwilling (Oct 4, 2021)

436 Randomly Generated ‘Peer Reviewed’ Papers Published by Springer Nature

Remember those mysterious emails that first started popping up in the 90s that had paragraphs of words in them that almost made sense but didn't?

That industry has come along way in those 30 years. 

"The paper can’t decide if it’s about organic pollutants or the beauty of Latin dancing, and switches instantly from one to the other half way through the abstract. The publisher claims this went through about two months of review, during which time the editors proved their value by assigning it helpful keywords..."

It's all about boosting someone's or something's exposure on the web. Perhaps it could be called artificial publicity. And everyone involved always says they were hacked, which is all too true most of the time. Some of it could be practice for making better fictional stories with reasonable plot twists solely created by AI. With all the research being done to improve the table manners of Siri, Alexa, GoogleSpeaks, and Cortana, the world of made up words will only become more perfect as the trickle down economies of web procedures spread throughout the world's internet users. Watson is probably in a class by itself, being able to play a good game of chess, read medical papers and tests, and direct remote medical procedures. Wonder what kind of yarns Watson can spin.


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## Toby Frost (Oct 5, 2021)

I do remember those chunks of random prose, which I always assumed were created to hide the "please click this dodgy porn link" phrase below.

This reminds me of the Sokal hoax. There used to be a random generator on the internet that would produce scholarly-sounding gibberish, and would auto-write articles with titles like "Towards a holistic reinterpretation of brie: structural relativity and problematic theism in the songs of Madonna".


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## Dave (Oct 5, 2021)

We used to get those regularly on SFFChronicles as spam posts but they seem to have stopped recently. They must have been generated by a machine. But I'm thinking that there is nothing really new in all this. The Lorem Ipsum*** dummy text used in the printing and typesetting industry has been around since 1500's, and there have been Lorem Ipsum generators since word processors were invented. Even before that, there were Letraset sheets with Lorem Ipsum passages in the 1960's.

The big difference being that Lorum Ipsum wasn't created as fake text for a nefarious reason i.e. boosting backward citations

***If anyone doesn't know what Lorum Ipsum is then it is this stuff -
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."


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