Dragan Djuric and Boris Delibasic, two professors of FON (Faculty of Organizational Sciences), along with advisor Stevica Radisic deliberately published a nonsensical, fictional article in the Romanian magazine “Metalurgia International” in order to draw attention on the massive production of quasi-scientific works by Serbian professors which are published in dubious magazines.

The work

Their “scientific” work was titled “Evaluation of transformative hermeneutic heuristics for processing of random data”, and even though it looks like a badly written fairy tale, it was published without correction in the magazine, which is otherwise full of Serbian papers. Here’s a small fragment of the paper’s extraordinary text:

Our work has been inspired and directly founded on various astonishing research by intellectual giants in various interesting fields of social science and practically conducted and supported by the advances in multiple technical disciplines, thus giving this work a veritable multidisciplinary aura.

To add a little more humour, they also attached pictures, which feature an obviously fake moustache and even a wig.

The quotations

But the quotations – ah the quotations! This bold scientific journal accepted references from 2012 from the long-gone Bernoulli and Laplace who haven’t published a paper in hundreds of years, as well as Michael Jackson and porn actor Ron Jeremy, who has been moonlighting as an author in the journal Transactions of the Chinese Mathematical Society, (a journal that, according to a simple Google search, doesn’t exist) . But that’s not the half of it! The paper also quotes B. Sagdiyev (otherwise known as Borat), results published by Disney character Goofy in the scientific magazine “Mikijev Zabavnik” (comic for children), and noted researcher A.S. Hole.

Needless to say, the move was hailed by the scientific community, who is still struggling to fight the faux scientific mumbo jumbo which doesn’t really say anything, as well as pseudoscience.

“Phenomenal move! We do not want to put up anymore with false scientific works of quasi-scientists being published in suspicious magazines while their colleagues in times as hard as these manage to do great researches and publish them in prestigious world magazines,” said professor dr. Pero Sipka, director of the EB of Centre for Evaluation in Education.

Read the full “Paper” here.

Enjoyed this article? Join 40,000+ subscribers to the ZME Science newsletter. Subscribe now!