Publisher of science journals Springer said Thursday it would scrap 16 papers from its archives after they were revealed to be computer-generated gibberish.
The fake papers had been submitted to conferences on computer science and engineering whose proceedings were published in specialised, subscription-only publications, Springer said.
"We are in the process of taking down the papers as quickly as possible," the German-based publisher said in a statement.
"This means that they will be removed, not retracted, since they are all nonsense."
The embarrassing lapse was exposed by French computer scientist Cyril Labbe of the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble.
He also spotted more than 100 other "nonsense" papers unwittingly published by the New York-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the journal Nature reported.
Labbe, 41, has been exploring how to detect fake papers written with a program called SCIgen.
The program cranks out impressive-looking "studies" stuffed with randomly-selected computer and engineering terms.
Labbe spotted the frauds by searching for telltale SCIgen vocabulary.
One example of an article generated by SCIgen reads: "Constant-time technology and access points have garnered great interest from both futurists and physicists in the last several years. After years of extensive research into superpages, we confirm the appropriate unification of 128-bit architectures and checksums."
The program was devised in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
They used it to concoct meaningless papers that were accepted by conferences. The researchers later revealed the hoax and exposed flaws in safeguards.
"We are looking into our procedures to find the weakness that could allow something like this to happen, and we will adapt our processes to ensure that it does not happen again," Springer said.
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