Der Schlangemann - False Scientific Work

False Scientific Work

The name of a fictional man named "Herbert Schlangemann" was used to publish false scientific articles in international conferences that are suspected to be, at least partially, frauds.

  • In 2008, after receiving a series of Call-for-Paper e-mails, a couple of students used the SCIgen computer program to generate a false scientific paper titled Towards the Simulation of E-Commerce, using "Herbert Schlangemann" as the author. The article was accepted at the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE 2008), co-sponsored by the IEEE, to be held in Wuhan, China, and the author was invited to be a session chair on grounds of his fictional Curriculum Vitae. The paper was available for a short time in the IEEE Xplore Database but was then removed. The entire story is described in the official "Herbert Schlangemann" blog, and it also received attention in Slashdot and the German-language technology-news site Heise Online.
  • In 2009, the same incident happened and Herbert Schlangemann's latest fake paper PlusPug: A Methodology for the Improvement of Local-Area Networks was accepted for oral presentation at the 2009 International Conference on e-Business and Information System Security (EBISS 2009), also co-sponsored by IEEE, to be held again in Wuhan, China.

In all cases, the published papers were withdrawn from the conferences' proceedings, and the conference organizing committee as well as the names of the keynote speakers were removed from their websites.

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