A conference proceedings for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted a 2021 paper which appears to have been produced in part by the fake article generator SCIGen — an allegation the corresponding author denies.
“Estimate The Efficiency Of Multiprocessor’s Cash Memory Work Algorithms” appeared earlier this year in the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Smart Information Systems and Technologies, where it came to the attention of Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé.
As readers of this blog might recall, Cabanac, Labbé and their colleague Alexander Magazinov recently wrote a preprint about how mangled translations into English — “tortured phrases,” in their words — can indicate that an article has been churned out by a paper mill.
Posting on PubPeer, Cabanac and Labbé noted that not only does the IEEE article contain sections of absolute gibberish — suggesting it was generated by SCIGen — it also has extensive self-citation, suggesting that the bibliography was very much intentional. Cabanac and Labbé have worked to identify SCIGen-generated papers for some time, and Springer Nature at one point funded a graduate student in Labbé’s lab for part of the project.
One of the authors, Abdelrahman Abdallah, of Satbayev University in Kazakhstan, followed the critique of his paper with what we might call vigorous interest. In a series of comments on PubPeer, someone claiming to be Abdallah first questioned how the article appeared on the site, then lashed out at critics:
I don’t know who gave you the rights to comments on the papers. anyway I don’t care about all comments. it is not legal to put my paper without any permission from the conference and from me. and I think I didn’t ask to review the paper as I remember
That response was followed by a post from “Tarphius Epinae,” who wrote:
Dear Mr. Abdallah,
The risk of publishing a paper is that someone actually reads it and has an opinion or a laugh on it. I guess one could see it as an unasked-for review when the opinion is published.
Out of interest: did you really write this piece and can you make sense of it? The abstract is public, so I probably do not offend you quoting a few lines from it:
“The refinement of extreme programming is an unfortunate challenge. Few experts disagree with the synthesis of access points. This article demonstrates that Internet QoS and 16-bit architectures are always incompatible, but it’s the same situation for write-back caches.”
Every single line is non-sensical, though ‘extreme programming’ definitely brings back the cool in IT!
When another commenter noted that the article was retracted, Abdallah responded:
we don’t care if it removes or not remove and I don’t care about your comment I don’t know why this website keeping sends me emails. this is an achievement for people like you. we have more articles to focus on them, not like these shit comments
The retraction notice is mum on the reason for the removal:
Document Removed From IEEE Xplore®: After careful and considered review of its content this document has been found to be in violation of IEEE’s Publication Principles and should not be used for further research or citation purposes. We regret any inconvenience.
Clearly, more careful and considered review went into the retraction than in the reading of the article in the first place.
We emailed Abdallah to confirm that he indeed made those posts and he did not deny doing so. He also lashed out again at his accusers, and us for asking if he and his co-author had used SCIGen to create their article:
why they access my article without my permission and who these people to give comments to my article and why they do that
it is not right and I don’t have time to their comment or explain to them
and why you ask me question like that
Adballah also denied having used SCIGen:
no, it is a thesis paper that belongs to the IT university in Kazakhstan
this first time we hear about [the generator]
Meanwhile, IEEE is no stranger to the delights of SCIGen. In 2014, the publisher and Springer retracted more than 120 articles combined (most from IEEE journals) after learning from Labbé that they’d been produced by the generator.
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As I read this post, I kept wondering: Could this be the work of the great Borat Sagdiyev, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borat_Sagdiyev?
>>it also has extensive self-citation, suggesting that
>>the bibliography was very much intentional.
It seems “academic search engine spam” is becoming reality, as we predicted 10 years ago already https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0013.305
The best defense is a good offense? This apparent lack of understanding of the purpose of the scientific discourse is truly mind boggling.
“Cash” memory?!
“Extreme programming” was a software development methodology in vogue in the agile Cambrian explosion of the early-mid 00s — not nonsense in itself, but certainly nonsense in context.
I like very much this argument: “The risk of publishing a paper is that someone actually reads it and has an opinion or a laugh on it.” Indeed, even in the case of a rejected paper, at least one or two persons in the world will have read the manuscript (the referees and, sometimes, the editor). That might in itself be enough to gain a poor reputation in specialized fields.
“we have more articles to focus on them, not like these shit comments” – why pubpeer did not moderate this comment? is this word “s..t” allowed in science now-a-days?