Peer-Review
- 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.
- Jun 2026 The Hoaxers Who Accidentally Made Art Ern Malley. Sokal. Grievance Studies. Three hoaxes designed to prove that something was fake. In each case, the hoaxers accidentally produced something real. What does it mean when the troll can't help being good?
- 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.
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