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Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone offer some insight as to why that junk paper was submitted in the first place? Are the authors trying to farm reputation somehow? To what end, and does it actually work? Are the authors even real people? What's their goal?

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Well, the authors' byline says they're from Northeastern University, Shenyang 110169, China and Faculty of Management and Economics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China. I've heard that Chinese universities sometimes have explicit publication quotas or offer cash bonuses for publications. Having never worked at a university in China, I cannot personally verify that though.

MDPI also spams anyone it thinks might be willing to submit a paper or serve as an editor, and does not seem to care much about the quality of the submissions it receives.

Same as every other academic: publish or perish. Collect more citations and note them in your next grant proposal.

The modern academy is fucked, the whole system is being gamed and very little is being done about the mess created. The author here is fighting a tough battle and I wish them continued success.

Publication metrics. This has been a problem for at least the last few decades, especially when it comes to papers from some parts of the world. Before the current breed of low quality journals, we saw this happening with conferences that were often branded with professional societies like IEEE, but if you looked carefully it would be “IEEE Section of (random place in Asia)” and not a conference sanctioned by IEEE itself. Those used to be full of garbage plagiarized papers and junk. I think the idea is that nobody usually reads the papers when they make a decision based on publication metrics, so pumping a CV with garbage often goes unnoticed. It’s not a wise practice: in many places getting caught doing this would be a career ender.

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