Scientific Journals Publish Bogus Paper About Midi-chlorians from Star Wars | Gizmodo UK

"The science community has long known that certain 'predatory journals' will publish almost any paper for a fee without proper peer review. Some watchdogs have submitted fake papers by fake researchers to these journals to highlight how bogus journals harm the integrity of the Open Access publishing movement, by taking advantage of a loophole. This newest sting from the anonymous science blogger Neuroskeptic is truly astounding for just how silly the fake paper is.

'The goal was to see whether journals would publish a manuscript that, while seemingly scientific, was actually a joke,' Neuroskeptic told Gizmodo in an email. 'I didn’t want to just submit nonsense (like a computer-generated text), or a bad paper, but rather something that was verifiably based on fiction (i.e. Star Wars).'

Most of the paper’s text comes from copying the Wikipedia page about mitochondria, replacing any instance of 'mitochondr-' with 'midichlor-,' and then rearranging the words so the paper didn’t look like straight plagiarism. Neuroskeptic even included the text of the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the wise, word-for-word."