Academic papers can be dense and confounding, but this one was even more so than usual. Entitled "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy," the inscrutable paper was accepted to July's Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, and its authors - three MIT grad students - were offered the chance to present it there in person.
But the students' paper was more than just inscrutable. In fact, it wasn't an actual academic paper at all: it was a prank paper full of computer-generated nonsense. Its first sentence? "Many scholars would agree that, had it not been for active networks, the simulation of Lamport clocks might never have occurred."
"We certainly exposed this conference as being willing to publish any paper regardless of whether it's been peer-reviewed, which is kind of a dangerous precedent to set," Justin Stribling, one of the three students who created the program and submitted the paper, told CNN.
According to Lecturer Marcy Brink-Danan, who teaches an Ex College course on language and ideology, the MIT students' prank is not the first of its kind.
"A physicist at another university [Duke] sent a jargon-esque paper in to a very well-known humanities journal called Social Text," said Brink-Danan, who did language-related research as a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Fellow. "He was making basically a nonsense case, and it was accepted!"
That physicist, Alan Sokal, successfully submitted his paper, called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," in 1996.
Brink-Danan said that pranks like the MIT students' and Sokal's are more scandalous within some segments of the academic community than others.
"For people in the scientific community, there are certain standards for papers: you have a hypothesis, you prove it, you give results," she said. "So if you give a false paper, you're giving falsified information."
"From a humanities and social sciences perspective, it's less scandalous," she added. "Such papers are less about the effort to prove a theory - if a paper or conference talk is able to make us think of something in a new way, then it's a success."
That the MIT students' paper was accepted by the conference, Brink-Danan said, "means the conference was badly administrated."
"It just goes to show the arbitrary nature of the selection process," junior Julia Verplank agreed.
In the wake of the prank's success, debate has arisen over whether academic conferences are too profit-driven. The Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics charges individuals who are presenting their papers a $390 fee.
The prank has also stirred debate about the nature of the language common to academic papers - jargon.
"A lot of times, people use jargon because they need new words for new concepts," Brink-Danan said. "But sometimes, people throw jargon around. If you're writing things just to be opaque, it's a waste of time to read."
According to junior Negar Razavi, students as well as academics can sometimes fall prey to the jargon temptation.
"I think that oftentimes, students think that they can just piece together big words that they probably looked up, using them in an incorrect context, and are sometimes rewarded for it by their professors," Razavi said.
But sometimes, Brink-Danan said, jargon is a necessity: "Some things are very complicated and require academic terminology," she said.
That terminology can be frustrating for students who are required to read academic papers for their classes.
"My biggest complaint with all the psych research they're doing right now [is that] it's very hard the deeper research gets and the more detailed it gets," junior Alex Frere said.
In Frere's experience, another problem with academic papers is their lack of originality.
"A lot of these papers seem to take something from 20 other papers and expand on it a little - most of the research come from reading other people's research, not from actual work you've done on your own," Frere said. "Before 1960, there were only 10,000 articles published on psych, and after 1960, something like 70,000. It bothers me."
As for whether the high volume of scholarly papers available contributes to or merely clutters academia, the jury's still out.
"There's a big debate between people looking for an objectivist point of view in education - where there's just one truth, and things are arrived at and proven - and another approach, the subjectivist approach, which is looking at the world more as a dialogue between people," Brink-Danan said.
"The prank doesn't fall into either of these categories - it's a prank!" she said.
Conference organizers eventually realized this as well and rescinded the MIT students' invitation. But even if the hoax had gone unnoticed until the time of the conference, Brink-Danan is confident that, once there, their paper would have been exposed.
"Getting a paper accepted to a conference is an administrative issue - the real test is when you present it to people," she said. "And if it's a nonsense paper, people are just going to laugh at you."
