SCIgen – An Automatic Research Paper Generator

June 5, 2005

In 2005, graduate students at MIT’s PDOS research group attended the 9th World Multi-Conference of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics.  Although their research paper Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy was accepted, the submission wasn’t as important as its lack of content; for the paper was nothing more than a randomly generated set of incomprehensible words organized to sound like something coherent and meaningful. The students’ intent was to challenge organizations that they suspect have low submission standards for academic content.

SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations.  It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers.  Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards.  A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website).  There’s  also a list of  known bogus conferences.  Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end.  In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005!  See Examples for more details.

We went to WMSCI 2005.  Check out the talks and video.  You can find more details in our blog.

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Generate your own paper HERE.