Nonsense articles discovered in peer-reviewed science journals | Toronto Star

"Mayor Rob Ford has a busy life. Yesterday morning , he phoned into NBC’s Today Show and had a chat with host Matt Lauer. Yesterday afternoon, he co-authored a scientific article about computer science called 'Evaluating 8 Bit Architectures and the Ethernet with SecundYux.' 'Unified authenticated models have led to many structured advances, including interrupts and information retrieval systems. In fact, few leading analysts would disagree with the refinement of Smalltalk,' reads the abstract of the paper, which Ford co-authored with brother Doug Ford. 'Our focus in this work is not on whether 802.11b can be made concurrent, relational, and peer-to-peer, but rather on describing a heuristic for public-private key pairs (SecundYux).' Of course, this paper isn’t real, and Rob and Doug Ford didn’t actually write it. I created it by plugging their names into SCIgen , a website that allows anyone to input up to five "authors" and generate a random computer-science paper that reads vaguely like a real (if confusing) paper but is actually gibberish. SCIgen is supposed to be a lark: its creators claim at the top of the homepage that “Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.” But as Nature News and others reported, two major science publishers, Springer and IEEE, are in the process of removing more than 120 published studies from their databases after they were discovered to be SCIgen-generated nonsense.