I was chatting with my buddy Alex the other day, and he said, “Dude… check this out.” He sent me a paper that we had apparently co-authored together. “That’s funny,” I thought, “I don’t remember co-authoring a paper with Alex.” But then I read the title, “Decoupling the Transistor from Simulated Annealing in IPv6.” Ah ha! While I wouldn’t put it past myself to sleep through coauthoring a paper with someone, something must be awry if behaviorists are putting out complex comp sci papers.

Welcome to SCIgen, an automatic CS paper generator created by a few folks over at the CS / AI Lab at MIT. It pulls in elements from a bunch of currently existing CS papers to create a new one. Works cited included! Hilarity is sure to ensue… if you have any idea what the concepts are addressing in the first place. Even a CS degree from UNO is leaving me scratching my head at times…

But might this tool have more purposes than just crazy hijinks for CS students? According to the SCIgen website, it can also be fun to submit said random papers to conferences and see if they get accepted. Apparently, one did. You can read all about it (including the letters back and forth) on their site.

Now, while I can appreciate the motivation behind trying to debunk some of the lame conferences out there, I have a few problems with how this is being pursued. First of all, it says something about your discipline (and I’m not sure it’s positive) if the experts in the field can’t distinguish between a random, nonsense paper and an actual publication. Secondly, I think the ethics are a little shady. Check out the Works Cited in “my publication.” You’ll notice that Alex and I are cited repeatedly; sometimes with other authors, sometimes individually. While that’s a clever consideration on the joke angle, once you submit that paper, you are citing non-existant sources or, even worse, citing actual sources incorrectly. I feel both are inappropriate in academia, and inadequately citing a course could be considered plagiarism.

I’m fine with this site as a joke, and I’m happy to have “co-authored” a paper with Alex. But when you submit a paper, I think there’s a reasonable expectation that the paper is legitimate. Therefore, it should be held to the same level of scrutiny and code of ethics as any other submitted paper, especially when it comes to citation of other sources.