I guess most of us know that one can easily [automatically generate a math-like nonsense paper](https://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/), and that it is possible to [have such a paper published](https://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102). However, I was quite sure that nobody actually does that.

But recently I was looking at papers which cite one of my colleague's articles, and I encountered *[edited] a paper that I do not want to discuss here, so let me omit the details.* Unfortunately I do not really have time to have a closer look at it. (Actually, I tried a bit, but, well, I could not understand a single sentence.) However, the way my colleague's work is cited, complete lack of proofs of theorems, and abundance of buzz words make it sort of difficult to believe that this article was not written in a computer-assisted way.

I do not really want to ask about that particular paper (and of course I might be wrong about it). What I am interested in is a broader picture.

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**Question.** *Do automatically generated nonsense articles ever get published in "decent" mathematical journals? If yes, how often does this happen? Does anyone keep track of that?*

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A quick online search did not yield anything interesting. The [Wikipedia entry on "sting articles"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_stings) only mentions the single paper from 2012 (which was eventually not published because APC have not been paid by the author). This is the same paper which is described under the links that I gave in the first paragraph. There are loads of information about other disciplines (e.g. [here](https://dailysceptic.org/2021/10/03/436-randomly-generated-peer-reviewed-papers-published-by-springer-nature/)), but, as far as I can tell, nothing about mathematics.