http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and...sense.html

It’s a scandal that’s been quietly rocking zoos all around the world. For nearly a decade now, an increasing number of zookeepers at smaller zoos and animal parks have been taken in by an embarrassing scam. Several years after they acquire one or more lions and put them on display, a sharp-eyed zoo-goer points out that the so-called lions are nothing more than carefully coiffed dogs. But now, mortified zookeepers can breathe a sigh of relief, because a solution to the fake-lion problem is at hand. After intensive collaboration with the Université Joseph Fourier in France, a coalition of veterinarians and zookeepers has developed a genetic test, dubbed LionDetect, that quickly and efficiently determines whether or not a newly acquired lion is the genuine article or a mastiff with a mane. The test isn’t perfect; it can’t yet sound the alarm when someone tries to sell a rubber snake, a fake panda, or a bogus snow leopard to an animal park. Nevertheless, zoo personnel everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief now that they’re a lot less likely to be mortified by the acquisition of a phony lion.


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Yet just last week, a scientist at the Université Joseph Fourier did almost the exact same test—not for the business of animal parks, but for the business of scientific publishing. In collaboration with the Springer publishing house, he released SciDetect, a computer program that spots a particular category of phony papers that has been plaguing computer science publications. (Just last year Springer had to pull 18 fake papers, while another publisher, IEEE, had to pull more than 100.) “SciDetect indicates whether an entire document or its parts are genuine or not,” the press release brags. “The software reports suspicious activity by relying on sensitivity thresholds that can be easily adjusted.” Great news, right? Not so much. For the fake papers it aims to detect—which are generated by an algorithm known as SCIgen—are the shaved mastiffs of the computer science world. They are so obviously fake that nobody who has any business being within 10 feet of a computer science journal would fail to spot them with even the most careless examination. A technological solution is completely unnecessary. So why did Springer spend so much time and effort (and presumably money) to build SciDetect?

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Yet just last week, a scientist at the Université Joseph Fourier did almost the exact same test—not for the business of animal parks, but for the business of scientific publishing. In collaboration with the Springer publishing house, he released SciDetect, a computer program that spots a particular category of phony papers that has been plaguing computer science publications. (Just last year Springer had to pull 18 fake papers, while another publisher, IEEE, had to pull more than 100.) “SciDetect indicates whether an entire document or its parts are genuine or not,” the press release brags. “The software reports suspicious activity by relying on sensitivity thresholds that can be easily adjusted.” Great news, right? Not so much. For the fake papers it aims to detect—which are generated by an algorithm known as SCIgen—are the shaved mastiffs of the computer science world. They are so obviously fake that nobody who has any business being within 10 feet of a computer science journal would fail to spot them with even the most careless examination. A technological solution is completely unnecessary. So why did Springer spend so much time and effort (and presumably money) to build SciDetect?