Good Samaritan, I'll Remember You!
Sensing something was wrong, Qi Hao asked, "Where's the post?"
Liang Wenhao took out his phone, tapped a few times, and handed it to Qi Hao.
Qi Hao took Liang Wenhao's phone and saw the all-too-familiar Tieba interface on the screen.
The post's title was in bold red text, making it stand out among a slew of posts discussing math competitions and graduate entrance exam questions:
[Shocking] 985 university undergraduate publishes SCI paper, but every reference was fabricated! Another scandal rocks academia!
Qi Hao's spirits sank the moment he saw the title.
What the hell was with the "shocking" clickbait in a Tieba post?
He scrolled down to the main text.
Hello, everyone. I'm a math PhD student, and I make a habit of browsing the latest math papers.
A few days ago, I came across a paper in "Discrete Mathematics" with a very novel perspective. When I first saw it, my eyes genuinely lit up, and I thought, This author has a really solid foundation.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the author.
What I found left me stunned. The author was an undergraduate, apparently even a freshman!
A freshman, listed as the sole author, without a supervisor's name attached, had gotten a paper accepted by "Discrete Mathematics"!
My first thought was that I'd found an academic superstar!
I've been doing my PhD for three years, and the senior students in my research group have only managed to get two papers into journals at this level between them. This student had published one independently as an undergraduate, and for a moment I wondered if all my years of study had been for nothing.
But.
Here came the twist.
As a matter of academic practice, I started checking the references in his paper one by one. The paper cited five references in total, all mathematical literature from the Soviet Union era.
I first searched Google Scholar, arXiv, and ResearchGate, but found nothing.
I even checked MathSciNet and Zentralblatt MATH, two mathematics literature databases. The result: all five references, without exception, were nowhere to be found.
I don't know why a freshman from Huaguo would cite papers by Soviet mathematicians from the 1950s and 1960s. What puzzles me even more is that the authors' names, journal titles, and even volume and page numbers for these Soviet references are all listed convincingly and look very professional.
If these references really exist, why can't any of the world's major academic databases find them?
If they don't exist, then what are the so-called extensions and improvements in this student's paper, supposedly based on previous work, actually built on?
I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I think this matter needs the attention of the academic community.
A freshman independently published an SCI paper and cited five nonexistent references. Was this an oversight, or carefully planned academic fraud?
I won't post the paper's details, so no one can accuse me of making a personal attack. But if anyone here is interested, you can look through the table of contents of the latest issue of "Discrete Mathematics" yourselves. The author's institution is a 985 university in Huaguo, so it's easy to spot.
That's all.
I hope the academic world can have a little more sincerity and a few fewer tricks.
There were a great many replies below, and Qi Hao couldn't resist reading on.
Floor 1, Ramanujan's Notebook
I checked and found it. The author's from D University, right? The paper really is well written, but if the references are fake, then there's a great big question mark hanging over its credibility.
Floor 2, Algebraic Geometry Laborer
A freshman independently published in DM? I didn't even publish in DM before getting my PhD. This person's either an academic superstar or a fraud, and right now the latter seems more likely.
Floor 3, Euler's Coffin Lid
I'm dying. He actually fabricated references? This guy's got some nerve! Five of them! Not one or two, but five! He made them look so real even the reviewers didn't notice!
Floor 4, Mathematics Tieba Junior Moderator
The original poster investigated in great detail. You've got my support. Academic fraud should be exposed no matter who commits it, whether they're an undergraduate, a PhD student, or a professor. Rules are rules.
Floor 5, Cauchy Inequality
Fabricating references is actually nothing new in academia.
Let me share a real case: a Dutch statistician once discovered a paper called "The Art of Writing a Scientific Article." The paper didn't exist at all, yet it had been cited nearly 400 times in various academic papers!
Why did this happen? Because many people never actually read the references they cite when writing papers. They just see someone else cite them and follow suit. One person tells ten, ten tell a hundred, and before you know it, a nonexistent paper has brazenly appeared on the reference lists of hundreds of papers.
I've posted the image. Anyone interested can read the original article.
But this freshman's case is worse. He didn't just follow the crowd; he fabricated five Soviet references out of thin air. Soviet literature is hard to verify to begin with, and he probably counted on exactly that.
I've got to say, if he'd put that brain to proper use, he'd probably have published in Nature by now!
Floor 6, Riemann's Sorrow
Floor 5 is right. And did you notice? He deliberately picked Soviet-era references to fabricate. What does that tell you?
This guy calculated that the reviewers wouldn't be able to find them, and that's why he dared to do it.
Clever. Really clever!
Floor 7, Postman
As a math major, I'm genuinely heartbroken. Mathematics is the purest of all disciplines. It doesn't need experimental data or surveys; all its conclusions are built on rigorous logical deduction.
That's precisely why fraud in a mathematics paper is harder than in other disciplines, and more shameful!
If you commit fraud in physics, it might be because the experimental conditions aren't good enough. If you do it in sociology, it might be because you don't have enough samples.
But if you commit fraud in mathematics, that's pure deception!
Someone like that doesn't deserve to do mathematics!
Floor 8, Terence Tao Fan
I just want to know, does this guy's supervisor know? Oh, wait, he doesn't have a supervisor. He was the sole author. Then does his department know? Does his university know?
I suggest reporting him directly to the university's academic committee and having the university launch an investigation. This can't be swept under the rug!
Wait, why wasn't a single person on my side?
After scrolling through more than a hundred floors, he found that aside from one guy on floor 13 who had said "understandable," everyone else was baying for blood. That one remaining kind soul had been pinned to the ground and rubbed into it repeatedly by a reply on floor 15.
Ah, good Samaritan, I'll remember you.
Qi Hao also knew that such an explanation sounded far too weak in the current climate of public opinion, because most people's logic was simple: can't find it = it doesn't exist = you committed fraud.
As for the objective facts that Soviet literature had a low level of digitization and that a great deal of academic material was lost after the breakup, nobody cared, and nobody was willing to find out.
After all, the story of a freshman committing academic fraud spread far more readily than the fact that Soviet literature databases were incomplete.
Liang Wenhao might not have been good at research, but he was an upright man. Beside Qi Hao, he fumed with righteous indignation. "I'm telling you, if I find out who this person is, I'll give him a piece of my mind to his face. What a piece of work. Instead of learning to do things right, he picked up all those crooked tricks. People like him are the ones muddying the waters in the math community. Now even the people at our university doing serious research are being dragged through the mud with him, right?"
As he spoke, he even waved his fist, looking every bit a champion of justice.
Qi Hao looked at him, speechless, and said, "Is there a possibility..."
"That you know this person?"