Friday, October 12, 2012

A French Puzzle

An anonymous correspondent dropped this link into my box this morning: Imposture à l'Université ?

Google Translate lets me know that this is a bit of a French puzzle. Professor Imad Saleh of the University of Paris 8, lists as an important paper in a CV:
Meziani Rachid et Saleh Imad (2011), « Towards a collaborative business
process management methodolgy [sic] », ICMCS ’09, IEEE, 6-8 April 2011
Maroc, 8 pages (article indexé).
That is, a paper from the 2009 conference ICMCS sponsored by IEEE in 2011. Okay, that might be a typographical error. The ICMCS'11 did take place in Morocco, but from 7-9 Apr 2011. Okay, off-by-one is normal for computer scientists.

The article posts a link to that paper. And it posts a link to a paper written by Rachid Meziani and Rodrigo Magalhães from the Center for Organizational Design and Engineering in Lisbon, Portugal in 2009: Proposals for an Agile Business Process Management Methodology.

Shall we compare the abstracts with the VroniPlag Wiki SIM_TEXT comparison tool?

(You can click on the picture for a larger view)

Needless to say, the article continues pretty much word for word, table by table, picture by picture.

Saleh is professor and the director of PARAGRAPHE, an interdisciplinary research laboratory attached to the doctoral School (N°224) Cognition, Langage and Interaction (CLI) of the University of Paris 8. There is no Meziani listed there or at the web site of the University of Paris 8. There is a Rodrigo Magalhães to be found in Kuwait, and he does BPO, but there is not a complete bibliography listed there.

So the French Puzzle is: why are these two papers identical? What happened to Meziani and Magalhães? There has been a case submitted to the French Council on Universities. It is interesting to note that Saleh is a member of that council

And if I may add a question myself - why do we continue to prize conference publications in computer science? We can't tell the mock conferences from the substantial ones, and plagiarism seems to be rampant because the peer-review systems is dead for conferences.

2 comments:

  1. "why do we continue to prize conference publications in computer science? We can't tell the mock conferences from the substantial ones, and plagiarism seems to be rampant because the peer-review systems is dead for conferences."

    This statement is not correct.
    1.) Mock ("Fake") conferences are quite easy to distinguish from real conferences, especially if you are from the field. Otherwise there are several indicators for high-quality conference:
    - The conference is listed on DBLP
    - ARCs conference rating list
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_science_conferences
    - The conference is known even amongst researchers not in their respective field, see i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_science_conferences
    2.) Good conferences are quite often linked to high quality journals
    3.) Good conferences publish their rejection rate, which is often around 70% or higher.

    In fact, for reputable conferences, the peer-review system is quite the opposite from dead.

    ReplyDelete
  2. PS: Sorry, wrong link for the ARC List:
    www.arc.gov.au/xls/era2010_conference_list.xls

    ReplyDelete

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