ENGR 231: Introduction to Technical Writing: Fake Scholarly Articles

Hoax Papers Sent to Predatory Publishers

With the rise of predatory publishing in the sciences, scholars have been fighting back against unscrupulous journals in many ways, including submitting hoax papers to academic journals. These academic sting operations help to identify which journals follow best publication practices and which journals only in existence to make a profit. As funny as these hoax papers are, they highlight the importance of vetting scholarly sources before using them in personal research.

Famous Hoax Papers

Mitochondria: Structure, Function and Clinical Relevance
For his blog in Discover Magazine, an neuroscience by the pen name of Neuroskeptic, sent this paper to predatory journals. In the paper, Neuroskeptic plagiarizes Wikipedia articles on mitochondria, replacing the word mitochondria with Star Wars' midi-chlorians, and inserting the Tragedy of Darth Plaguis the Wise monologue from Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith directly into the paper. Note the names of the paper's authors: Lucas McGeorge and Annette Kin. Four journals accepted this article, and three published it.
Rapid Genetic and Developmental Morphological Change Following Extreme Celerity
Inspired by the Star Wars hoax paper, another biologist wrote this paper. The text of it is the plot summary of an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, in which a character rapidly evolves into an amphibian life-form after traveling through space at an extreme speed. The paper was published by the American Research Journal of Biosciences for a fee of $50. The journal promptly took down the article once the hoax was revealed, which is why the link to the article is a cached version of the page from earlier this year. It is still possible to find the article on Google Scholar, however.
Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy
This 2005 conference paper is the result of SciGen, a computer science paper generator created by three MIT graduate students. This paper was submitted to World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI) and accepted as a non-reviewed paper to the conference. Once the hoax was discovered, WMSCI conference papers were pulled from IEEE sponsorship. In 2013 IEEE and Springer Publishing removed all WMSCI papers from their collections.