A Fantastically Fun Dig at Academic Writing Submitted and Published

Retraction Watch has a great post about "a group of Serbian academics who, fed up with the poor state of their country’s research output, scammed a Romanian magazine by publishing a completely fabricated article."

Here's a link to the manuscript.

The authors have an excellent grasp on how academic writing can make nothing sound like something.

The methods section includes this beauty:

Since, obviously, representative data is often expensive and difficult to provide, we conducted a multidisciplinary programming simulation, using World Wide Web and a statistical programming library to provide random, well-defined populations on which the various methods of data mining are used to discover a plethora of delicately-looking results.

I laughed.

I also love the key words: "data mining, randomness studies, hermeneutic heuristics , EU support."

I am trying to figure out a way to make it work as a reading on academic writing and the pitfalls of academese. Whether I succeed or not, it's just fun to know this is out there.

And if you do go and read the manuscript, don't skip the bibliography.