Three types of Fake news in the academic world
How to tell if something is a fake publication Fake publications come in three forms: prank publications, predatory publications and just plain bad science . For more on predatory publications and how to identify them, please see our earlier post below. An example of an AI that generates prank mathematics publications is here . On the matter of prank publications, those are generally easier to detect since they make obviously ridiculous claims. However, the ability to detect whether the claims in the publication are indeed ridiculous depends on your academic backround. A particularly notorious case is the Sokal Hoax. In brief, a physicist called Alan Sokal sent a nonsense paper to a humanities journal: "In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text , an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies . The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor , and specifically to investigate whether "a ...