Gibberish-Free Zone

More than 100 scientific articles, published by major journals, have turned out to be pure gibberish.

Have you ever been browsing the periodicals at the library or clicking around online, and stumbled across a scientific journal or a highbrow academic magazine -- you know, the kind of thing that really smart people get published in, where they write about really confusing subject matter? If so, then you know that to the average Joe such articles and magazines can often sound like technical nonsense. Sure, it's written in English, but that doesn't mean it isn't flying directly over your head.

But here's the funny thing: Sometimes those articles actually are pure, nonsensical gibberish. Some 120 papers published in highly credible scientific journals have turned out to be total frauds, the product of automated word generators. The computer programs that craft the phony articles simply throw fancy words together in quasi-coherent sentences, producing full-length articles with titles like, "Simulating Flip-Flop Gates Using Peer-to-Peer Methodologies."

No one is clear, just yet, as to why...