It's been happening for years, at scale. Nobody does anything. You're shielding the names of the authors, despite your absolute certainty that the paper is fraud.
Reveal them and try to get them fired from their jobs. It likely won't work but the reluctance of academics to swiftly and harshly punish each other for transgressions is exactly why it's overrun with fake papers.
I've been asked to review at least three such papers in the last two months, Mark. Not quite as blatantly plagiarised as this, but still complete nonsense. The one even had 'placeholder results'.
At least these papers don't take up more than a few minutes of my time. I feel mostly for editors. The only options I see are a) using an AI tool to check submission quality (to desk-reject the obvious chancers) and b) charging submission fees. Ideally both.
I recently reviewed a paper entirely written by AI. As a reviewer, I felt disheartened, and left a very brief review. After all, the central argument wasn't supported by their evidence and that was reason enough. But I wanted to cry from the rooftop, saying why waste my time! Of course the journal editor was notified of what I thought was an AI written article, with a suggestion that articles be AI tested before being sent to reviewers!
On a calmer note, I think what the use of AI in academic papers tells us is rather optimistic: for all the euphoria on AI and its capabilities, human writing and thinking may still be needed to propel knowledge forward. I have seen some academics use AI to write literary essays (as experiments) and feel jubilant about it. As a writer, I was initially offended, but now I laugh, because AI can perhaps get the technical language right (with hallucinations), it's yet to find a flair for literature. I do not trust the AI in any case, though for some (if they know how to control it), it can be a good assistant!
What a shame! It would help if universities took research misconduct more seriously, but I don't think administrators have enough incentive to care without some external pressure like bad press.
This bogus article has got to be a hoax. Maybe the author wanted to see if anyone would actually read it. Or maybe he wanted to see what kind of slop could get published in 2026.
A successful hoax would provoke a huge laugh and show that social science publishing is in a state of collapse.
Was his data also generated by AI? Besides, many AI‑written codes for analysis and data cleaning have serious flaws. After AI finishes data cleaning and regression, I have to spend much more time checking the code.
When you have very top academics like this around the whole enterprise is already incredibly discredited, a citation in the "academic publications" aka a very short blog post ...
Ahmed F. & Cremin H. (2019) Dialogic Education for Transformative Processes (Section introduction). In N. Mercer R. Wegerif & L. Major (Eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education Abingdon: Routledge 595-597
It's been happening for years, at scale. Nobody does anything. You're shielding the names of the authors, despite your absolute certainty that the paper is fraud.
Reveal them and try to get them fired from their jobs. It likely won't work but the reluctance of academics to swiftly and harshly punish each other for transgressions is exactly why it's overrun with fake papers.
Well, it’s not like they misgendered anybody
I've been asked to review at least three such papers in the last two months, Mark. Not quite as blatantly plagiarised as this, but still complete nonsense. The one even had 'placeholder results'.
At least these papers don't take up more than a few minutes of my time. I feel mostly for editors. The only options I see are a) using an AI tool to check submission quality (to desk-reject the obvious chancers) and b) charging submission fees. Ideally both.
Crazily, Explorations is not allowed a submission fee by Elsevier!
I recently reviewed a paper entirely written by AI. As a reviewer, I felt disheartened, and left a very brief review. After all, the central argument wasn't supported by their evidence and that was reason enough. But I wanted to cry from the rooftop, saying why waste my time! Of course the journal editor was notified of what I thought was an AI written article, with a suggestion that articles be AI tested before being sent to reviewers!
On a calmer note, I think what the use of AI in academic papers tells us is rather optimistic: for all the euphoria on AI and its capabilities, human writing and thinking may still be needed to propel knowledge forward. I have seen some academics use AI to write literary essays (as experiments) and feel jubilant about it. As a writer, I was initially offended, but now I laugh, because AI can perhaps get the technical language right (with hallucinations), it's yet to find a flair for literature. I do not trust the AI in any case, though for some (if they know how to control it), it can be a good assistant!
Why though? Why do this?
My guess, as Koyama suggest, is that you can submit a thousand papers like this, hope one will get accepted, and sell the citations.
What a shame! It would help if universities took research misconduct more seriously, but I don't think administrators have enough incentive to care without some external pressure like bad press.
Wow! This is jaw-dropping.
To think that someone could add a non-existent election to the TITLE, and think that they could get away with it!
As soon as I saw “ 1918 Ottoman Constitutional Elections”, my Spidey sense started tingling.
This bogus article has got to be a hoax. Maybe the author wanted to see if anyone would actually read it. Or maybe he wanted to see what kind of slop could get published in 2026.
A successful hoax would provoke a huge laugh and show that social science publishing is in a state of collapse.
Let me guess: the author was Alan Sokal, right?
And who was the supposed scholar who submitted this paper?
Note yet ready to reveal this publicly but I will do once I have checked in the authors of the fake paper and the author themselves.
Was his data also generated by AI? Besides, many AI‑written codes for analysis and data cleaning have serious flaws. After AI finishes data cleaning and regression, I have to spend much more time checking the code.
When you have very top academics like this around the whole enterprise is already incredibly discredited, a citation in the "academic publications" aka a very short blog post ...
Ahmed F. & Cremin H. (2019) Dialogic Education for Transformative Processes (Section introduction). In N. Mercer R. Wegerif & L. Major (Eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education Abingdon: Routledge 595-597
https://faculty.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/cremin