Publishing Scandal breaks as a hoax paper authored by two Simpsons characters and “Kim Jong Fun” proves that some journals will literally accept anything

A fictional paper authored by Simpsons characters Edna Krabappel and Maggie Simpson, as well as someone called Kim Jong Fun (who we can only imagine is a slightly more approachable relative of North Korea’s leader) has just been accepted into two scientific journals.

Titled “Fuzzy Homogeneous Configurations”, the article makes absolutely no sense and is made up entirely of a random string of words, but both the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems, and the Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology have agreed to publish it.

Don’t worry, you didn’t miss the episode where Ms Krabappel and Maggie got their PhDs - the paper was created as a hoax set out to expose predatory journals, as Joseph Stromberg reports for Vox. And it clearly worked.

These predatory journals spam thousands of scientists and - for a fee - will publish literally anything. They usually claim that the papers they accept are peer reviewed, but, as this example clearly demonstrates, that’s not the case.

Still, many young researchers desperate to build up their profile are unfortunately duped by them.

In an attempt to raise awareness about these scam journals, US engineer Alex Smolyanitsky recently created this completely incoherent “scientific” paper using a random text generator