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Something similar happened with IEEE[1] - It had accepted approx 120 papers generated by SCIgen[2]. [1] - http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120... [2] - http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

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IEEE may be more prone to precision errors (letting bad papers in) while NIPS may be prone to recall errors (throwing good papers out). With the way reviewing is done (no one can take a week off to read and fully comprehend the four papers they are given) you cannot achieve perfect separation - even if that were possible.

Calling the process of "accepting a SciGen-generated paper into a allegedly peer-reviewed journal" a "precision error" is a bit on the optimistic side. It implies that someone was making a decision after reading the content of the paper, as opposed to, well, just accepting everything in sight.

It doesn't take a "week off" to notice that a paper is gibberish, at the very least.

Unless the reviewer doesn't actually know anything at all about what he/she claims to.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if most of the general public would be unable to distinguish a SciGen-generated paper from a real one.

What is such a person doing reviewing for the IEEE.

How is this similar to what the NIPS organizers did? It doesn't seem related at all.

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