Hoax papers that fooled journals, from Sokal to SCIgen

Hoax papers that fooled journals are fabrications their authors confessed. A physicist wrote nonsense about quantum gravity for a cultural studies journal in 1996; three MIT students let a grammar program write a conference paper in 2005; a Science reporter sent a broken drug study to 304 journals in 2013; three writers had papers on dog parks and a rewritten chapter of Mein Kampf accepted in 2018. Each was accepted somewhere, and each author then told the world.

EdCitation publishes this account, from the hoaxers' own write-ups, the journals' replies and the reporting of the time, read on 27 September 2026. Where we could only find a story second-hand, we say so.

The lesson for anyone citing a paper is short: a source is sound when its record says so, not when it reads well. We ran the hoaxes themselves through EdCitation's free Verify references, which checks each entry against the publisher's record and marks any retraction.

Which hoax papers fooled journals?

Six cases are documented well enough to tell from their sources. Two were not hoaxes at all: nobody confessed, and outside checkers found them.

What was the Sokal hoax?

The Sokal hoax was a deliberately absurd essay that Social Text published in 1996, which its author, the New York University physicist Alan Sokal, then exposed as a parody.

The parody and the reveal

"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" appeared in Social Text 46/47, a spring/summer 1996 special issue on the "Science Wars", at pages 217 to 252 (Sokal, 1996b). In Lingua Franca for May/June 1996, Sokal explained the experiment: would a leading cultural studies journal publish nonsense if it "sounded good" and flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions (Sokal, 1996a)?

He listed the planted errors, from a New Age idea offered as a theory of quantum gravity to the axiom of equality in set theory likened to feminist politics. Any physics undergraduate, he wrote, should have seen through it. He also stressed that every work he cited was real and every quotation accurate.

What the Social Text editors said

The editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, replied in the next issue of Lingua Franca. Social Text was a non-refereed journal run by an editorial collective, they wrote; they had found the piece "a little hokey", asked Sokal to cut its philosophical speculation and most of its footnotes, and placed it in the special issue when he refused (Robbins & Ross, 1996). They apologised to readers, called the deception a breach of ethics, and rejected the idea that one accepted article proved cultural studies bankrupt.

Both sides had a point: Sokal showed editors publishing physics they never sent to a physicist, and his critics were right that he fooled a magazine without referees. Sokal's own index of the affair adds a coda: Social Text declined his afterword, which appeared in Dissent that autumn.

How did SCIgen papers get into journals and conferences?

SCIgen papers got in because the venues did not read them. SCIgen is a program written by three MIT graduate students, Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, that builds a computer science paper, graphs and citations included, from a hand-written grammar; its stated aim is to maximise amusement rather than coherence (Stribling et al., n.d.).

Rooter at WMSCI 2005

In April 2005 the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics accepted "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" as a "non-reviewed" paper. A second SCIgen submission was rejected. Once the story broke, the conference withdrew the students' invitation to attend (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015), and their project page records that the registration fee was refunded. Funded by 165 donors, they held their own session of generated talks in the conference hotel.

Springer and IEEE withdraw more than 120 papers (2014)

On 24 February 2014 Nature reported that Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist at Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, had catalogued SCIgen papers in more than 30 published conference proceedings from 2008 to 2013: sixteen from Springer and more than 100 from IEEE (Van Noorden, 2014). Both publishers said they were removing them. Springer confirmed the proceedings had been peer reviewed. IEEE's pages for the removed papers gave no reason for their absence. Nobody had confessed to these papers, and Labbé did not know why they were submitted; one named author told Nature he did not know why he was listed.

Labbé had shown the risk to citation counts in 2010, when 102 SCIgen papers by an invented author, Ike Antkare, raised that author's h-index in Google Scholar to 94 (Van Noorden, 2014). The first citation index tells how counting citations began.

Still there in 2021

In 2021 Guillaume Cabanac and Labbé built a detector and found 243 SCIgen papers from 19 publishers. Only 19% had been dealt with: 12 formally retracted and 34 silently removed, leaving 197 still served, some still sold, without any warning. Some had edited bibliographies, which the authors read as citation manipulation (Cabanac & Labbé, 2021).

What did "Who's afraid of peer review?" find?

It found that more than half the open-access journals approached accepted a paper any competent reviewer should have rejected. John Bohannon wrote one flawed study, that a molecule from a lichen slowed cancer cells, and generated 304 versions under invented authors at invented African institutions. Between January and August 2013 he sent them to journals of 304 publishers drawn from the Directory of Open Access Journals and Jeffrey Beall's list of "predatory" publishers (Bohannon, 2013).

By press time 157 journals had accepted it and 98 rejected it. Of the 106 that showed any sign of review, 70% accepted; only 36 submissions drew comments spotting the science's problems, and 16 of those were accepted anyway. PLOS ONE rejected it and was the only journal to raise its ethical gaps. Accepting journals included titles hosted by Sage and Elsevier.

The critics had a point. The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association replied the same week that no subscription journals had been tested for comparison and that the targets were not chosen at random, so nothing could be said about open access against subscription publishing (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, 2013). Labbé later noted that the SCIgen papers of 2014 had all appeared in subscription products (Van Noorden, 2014). One accepting editor told Bohannon the sting damaged the trust research depends on. How to choose a journal and avoid predatory ones covers the checks an author can make.

What was the grievance studies affair?

The grievance studies affair was a year-long hoax by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, who wrote 20 papers for journals in gender, race and identity studies and announced the results in Areo on 2 October 2018. By then four had been published online, three more accepted, seven were still under review and six had been retired (Pluckrose et al., 2018).

The dog park paper and its retraction

The best known, under the invented name Helen Wilson of an invented Portland Ungendering Research Initiative, claimed to have recorded dog behaviour in Portland parks as evidence of rape culture. Gender, Place & Culture chose it as one of twelve lead pieces for its 25th anniversary. Doubts on social media led the journal to ask for proof of the author's identity; Crossref's record, which draws on the Retraction Watch database, shows an expression of concern on 6 August 2018 and a retraction on 3 October 2018 (Gender, Place & Culture, 2018). The hoaxers said this pressure, and a Wall Street Journal inquiry, forced them to go public early.

Elsewhere, Affilia accepted a paper built on part of a chapter of Mein Kampf with feminist terms swapped in, and Hypatia reviewers asked for revisions to a paper on classroom privilege. The authors admitted the study was not particularly controlled.

What critics said

In an anonymous letter, about a dozen Portland State professors called the papers "simply lies peddled to journals" (Flaherty, 2019a). The classicist Joel Christensen said Boghossian wanted it both ways: a rigorous study when publicising it, not a study when asked about ethics approval. Portland State's review board ruled the editors and reviewers were human subjects whose use needed approval, and in July 2019 the university found Boghossian had broken its human-subjects policy, though not its rules on fabrication or plagiarism (Flaherty, 2019b). Sokal and Steven Pinker were among those who defended him.

What are tortured phrases?

Tortured phrases are odd substitutes for standard terms, such as "counterfeit consciousness" for "artificial intelligence", which the researchers linked to free text-rewriting websites. Cabanac, Labbé and Alexander Magazinov described them in a July 2021 preprint, found them concentrated in one reputable journal, and flagged citations of literature that does not exist (Cabanac et al., 2021). Nature reported that the researchers first noticed the phrases in April 2021, along with "colossal information" for "big data" (Else, 2021).

Like the 2014 SCIgen papers, these were never confessed; like the cases in how fabrication scandals were caught, someone checking found them.

A story told only second-hand

David Mazières and Eddie Kohler's 2005 joke paper repeats one rude request to be taken off a mailing list. Vox reported in November 2014 that a journal accepted it for a $150 fee, but Vox relied on a blog and we could not read the journal's letter: treat it as unconfirmed. The same Vox piece put Bohannon's sting at 340 journals: his own article says 304.

What do the hoaxes show, and what do they not?

They show that a check can be skipped while a venue still calls itself reviewed. They do not show that a whole field, or all of open access, is worthless. Five lessons hold up:

1. Look at who checked. Social Text had no referees and WMSCI took "non-reviewed" papers. Peer-reviewed journals: how to tell shows how to find out.
2. Real references can prop up a fake. Sokal and the grievance hoaxers both said every source they cited was real. Verify references confirms a source exists; only reading it tells you what it supports.
3. Removal is not retraction. IEEE removed papers without notices, and 197 SCIgen papers were still online in 2021, so check for retraction and read what you cite.
4. A sting without a control proves less than it seems. OASPA's point about Bohannon applies to every case here.
5. Hoaxes cost trust. Editors and reviewers gave unpaid time, and the ethics ruling on the grievance hoax is part of the record.

The same checks work on invented references from chatbots: what studies say about AI-fabricated references gives the rates, and how to spot fabricated references in student work is the marker's version.

How do I check a paper before I cite it?

Look it up in the publisher's record, check for a retraction notice, then read it. EdCitation's Verify references is the best tool for the first two, and the hoaxes show why: every one of them passed someone who took the paper on trust. It searches the publisher's record for every entry, at no cost and without signing up. The verdict for each is verified, "check this" or not found, with any retraction flagged; an entry it was unable to check is marked "could not check", never "not found".

What Verify references returned

On 27 September 2026 we pasted four entries: Sokal's Social Text article, the dog park paper as first published under its pseudonym, the IEEE SCIgen paper Nature named in 2014, and Bohannon's article, each with its DOI. The summary counted three verified and one retracted.

Sokal's article and Bohannon's both came back: "The DOI resolves to this record and the title matches." Neither has a retraction notice, which is correct: Social Text never retracted the parody. The dog park paper came back:

The DOI resolves to this record and the title matches. This paper has since been retracted.

A real paper, and one you must not rely on. The IEEE paper came back verified with no retraction flag: IEEE removed it in 2014 without a notice (Van Noorden, 2014), so its record holds no retraction for any checker to find.

Citing Sokal's article in APA 7

Cite a source, given the DOI 10.2307/466856, returned this APA 7 entry and found no retraction:

Sokal, A. D. (1996). Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Social Text, (46/47), 217. https://doi.org/10.2307/466856

Crossref's record holds only the first page, so add the range, 217–252, from the article. In a list that also cites his Lingua Franca piece, the two take 1996a and 1996b, as ours below do.

When a source fails, Find sources searches for the claim it was meant to support. For a finished paper uploaded as a file, References from a file in the Pro plan ($8 a month, see pricing) runs the same check on each reference and ties every in-text citation to its entry. Every word of the paper stays yours: EdCitation looks sources up and formats them, and writes none of it.

What could not be confirmed?

Nature's 2014 report is paywalled; we read the full text in its authorised Scientific American reprint. Taylor & Francis blocked our reader, so the dog park dates come from Crossref's record, not the notice itself. We could not read the New York Times report of May 1996 or the Wall Street Journal's 2018 story.

Quick questions

What was the Sokal hoax?

In 1996 the physicist Alan Sokal published a deliberately nonsensical essay on quantum gravity in Social Text, then revealed it as a parody in Lingua Franca. The editors replied that the journal was not refereed and called his deception unethical.

What is SCIgen?

A program written at MIT in 2005 that generates nonsense computer science papers. One was accepted by the WMSCI 2005 conference, and in 2014 Springer and IEEE withdrew more than 120 SCIgen papers.

What was the grievance studies affair?

Three writers submitted 20 hoax papers to identity studies journals in 2017 and 2018; seven were accepted, and Gender, Place & Culture retracted its dog park paper in October 2018.

Was Sokal's paper retracted?

No. Its record carries no retraction notice, and EdCitation's Verify references confirmed it as published and unretracted on 27 September 2026.

How can I tell if a paper I want to cite is fake or retracted?

Check it against the publisher's record and look for a retraction notice, then read it. EdCitation's free Verify references does the first two for a whole list; our guide to retracted papers in your reference list covers what to do next.

References

• Bohannon, J. (2013). Who's afraid of peer review? Science, 342(6154), 60–65. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.342.6154.60
• Cabanac, G., & Labbé, C. (2021). Prevalence of nonsensical algorithmically generated papers in the scientific literature. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 72(12), 1461–1476. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24495
• Cabanac, G., Labbé, C., & Magazinov, A. (2021). Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals [Preprint]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2107.06751
• Else, H. (2021). 'Tortured phrases' give away fabricated research papers. Nature, 596(7872), 328–329. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02134-0
• Flaherty, C. (2019a, January 8). Author of recent academic hoax faces disciplinary action by Portland State. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/08/author-recent-academic-hoax-faces-disciplinary-action-portland-state
• Flaherty, C. (2019b, July 26). Consequences for Sokal-squared scholar. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/07/26/consequences-sokal-squared-scholar
• Gender, Place & Culture. (2018). Retraction: Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. Gender, Place & Culture, 27(2), 306. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1513216
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (2015, April 14). How three MIT students fooled the world of scientific journals. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2015-04-mit-students-world-scientific-journals.html
• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. (2013, October 4). OASPA's response to the recent article in Science entitled "Who's afraid of peer review?" https://www.oaspa.org/news/oaspas-response-to-the-recent-article-in-science-entitled-whos-afraid-of-peer-review/
• Pluckrose, H., Lindsay, J. A., & Boghossian, P. (2018, October 2). Academic grievance studies and the corruption of scholarship. Areo. Archived October 3, 2018, at https://web.archive.org/web/20181003051912/https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/
• Robbins, B., & Ross, A. (1996, July/August). [Response by the editors of Social Text to Alan Sokal]. Lingua Franca. https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf
• Sokal, A. D. (1996a, May/June). A physicist experiments with cultural studies. Lingua Franca, 62–64. https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html
• Sokal, A. D. (1996b). Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Social Text, (46/47), 217–252. https://doi.org/10.2307/466856
• Stribling, J., Krohn, M., & Aguayo, D. (n.d.). SCIgen: An automatic CS paper generator. MIT PDOS. https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
• Van Noorden, R. (2014, February 24). Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2014.14763