Academic-Hoax

2005 Jun 2026 SCIgen and the Machines In 2005, three MIT students built a program that generates fake computer science papers — grammatically correct, technically jargon-filled, entirely meaningless. They submitted one to an academic conference. It was accepted. By 2013, over 120 SCIgen papers had been found in IEEE and Springer publications. Then someone submitted a paper consisting entirely of the sentence 'Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List' repeated hundreds of times, with graphs. It was accepted with a score of 'excellent.'
2018 Jun 2026 The Grievance Studies Affair In 2018, three academics revealed they had spent a year submitting twenty hoax papers to peer-reviewed journals. Seven were accepted. One was a feminist rewrite of Mein Kampf. The dog park paper won an award.
1996 Jun 2026 The Sokal Hoax In 1996, a physicist submitted a paper arguing that quantum gravity was a social construct to Social Text, a leading cultural studies journal. It was published. The same day, Sokal revealed it was a deliberate hoax.