The Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) have withdrawn more than 120 Gibberish Science and Engineering Papers after they discovered that they were computer-generated. An investigation by Cyril Labbé, computer scientist of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, resulted into list of computer-generated papers which were published in more than 30 conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013.

The published papers were based on proceedings on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering by the 2013 International Conference held in Chengdu, China. Cyril discovered that most of the computer generated papers were generated using computer program designed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2005.

In order to test the review process for conferences, students created a program, SCIgen, which could create fake research papers. Students also submitted similar SCIgen paper to raise awareness among of unsound procedures among public.

It has been reported that the Open-access journals publish fake research papers for some money. Cyril cited an example of an incident which took place in 2009, in which a graduate student paid $80 to the Journal to publish fake computer-generated paper.

A website was created by Cyril in 2012 to detect SCIgen papers by searching for words typically used by the program, which resulted in 85 fake papers that were published in IEEE. Earlier some issues were raised with Ike Antkare, Google Scholar, when he was declared as the 21st most-cited scientist in the world, despite he did not published even a single research paper.

The Cyril and the Springer will search for more 2,200 journals and 8,400 books to identify fake SCIgen articles.