"I Published a Fake Paper on Pregnancy Cravings for Prime Numbers"

From Retraction Watch (Pascual Chiago); you can see the published paper here (perma.cc version in case the original gets taken down). An excerpt:

I had grown weary of the constant stream and abuse of spam invitations to submit manuscripts to journals and to attend fake conferences on the other side of the world, a trend extensively studied in academia. The last straw: a solicitation from the Clinical Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, well outside my work in mathematics education.

Accepting the challenge, I decided to submit a deliberately nonsensical, AI-generated manuscript in response to observe how the individuals behind these supposed journals operate.

In October 2025, I wrote to someone named Henry Jackson, who had sent the article invitation in August (despite the fact that no such person is listed on the journal's website). I sent a manuscript generated entirely by ChatGPT to test how far a publication created with zero genuine effort could go and whether there was any filtering mechanism in place to prevent a meaningless article from being published.

I proposed the following title in my reply: "Obstetric Paradoxes and Didactic Equations: The Impact of Mathematical Teaching on Childbirth and Beyond." The abstract read:

In an unprecedented quantum leap in interdisciplinary research, we introduce the concept of 'Gyneco-Obstetric Algebraic Didactics' (GOAD). This paper explores the impact of teaching mathematical models using obstetric metaphors on the cognitive flexibility of third-trimester patients and first-year mathematics students alike. Through the introduction of the Ovary-Function Theorem (OFT) and the application of the Cervix-Dilation Equation , the study reveals that explaining non-Euclidean spaces through pelvic retroversion significantly improves calculus test scores and reduces birth anxiety by 13.7%. A case study with pregnant mathematicians and aspiring gynecologists demonstrates that integrating the Fibonacci sequence into labor progression charts induces spontaneous appreciation for abstract algebra and mild cravings for prime numbers. These findings challenge the traditional boundaries between prenatal care and set theory, suggesting that mathematical didactics and obstetric gynecology, when merged, can birth new paradigms in both fields. Further research is encouraged, especially in the context of cesarean matrices and post-partum group theory.

There's more.

Referring to our own family's pregnancy experience, my wife has many virtues, but I regret to say that "spontaneous appreciation for abstract algebra and mild cravings for prime numbers" have not been among them. (Indeed, I'm more likely to experience mild cravings for prime numbers than she has ever been.) Maybe, though, that's because we didn't integrate the Fibonacci sequence into labor progression charts.

Comments

[Dr. Ed 2]

Alan Skoal did the same thing 30 years ago with a made up paper involving physics and social justice, he reportedly just strung together all the slogans he could think of, threw in some physics terms, and a refereed journal actually published it.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

At least one of the person has done it since then and I believe that also was a referred journal.

[Michael P]

For the "since then", you may be thinking about the "grievance studies" hoax papers by Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose.

Lots of people have published fake or worthless papers in low-quality journals, but usually not as an explicit hoax -- that was the core point that Somal was making with his hoax.

[Tallman]

This isn't going to help assuage concerns about the university-government grant complex.

FWIW, the establishment's response to the Sokal replication was to close ranks and punish the authors for, amusingly enough, conducting an experiment on the journal editors w/o their consent.

[Bill Poser]

The difference is that the Clinical Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology is presumably a sham journal, published for the sole purpose of generating income by people who know full well that they have no meaningful standards, whereas the journal in which Alan Sokal published his hoax piece, Social Text, is published by people who believe that they are publishing real scholarship. Alan's hoax revealed that the editor's of Social Text were out of their depth, unable to evaluate a physics paper, whereas Pascual Chiago's success in publishing nonsense appears to reveal grift.

[Tallman]

IDK. There is no real point to paying-to-play unless someone somewhere is being gamed and/or defrauded.

Ditto wrt @Glaucomatose's SuperLawyers

[Bill Poser]

The people being defrauded by sham journals are the employers of the authors, such as universities, which base decisions about hiring, promotion, etc. on the publication record of their employees.

[Glaucomatose]

This is amusing, but not notably different than the dozens of emails I get every December telling me that I've been selected for Massachusetts SuperLawyers or some other pay-for-play directory. Chambers and Legal500 still mean something, notwithstanding that there are fly-by-night operations out there that don't. My wife gets solicited to submit papers to a bunch of shady "open source" journals every year, but Nature is still Nature.

[Tallman]

>pay-for-play directory

I wonder how such things escape attention from our various attorney generals. IMHO, they are far more deceptive than e.g., Menard's rebate.

[Bwaaah]

EV: "I regret to say that 'spontaneous appreciation for abstract algebra and mild cravings for prime numbers' have not been among them"

I'm surprised you made such a statement without having the data to know whether or not that's true. To know for sure, you would need to gather and compare post-pregnancy measures to pre-pregnancy baselines. The observable difference probably isn't so pronounced as to make your sample size (of one person) be statistically significant. But even still, integration of the Fibonacci sequence might overcome that.

You should be more skeptical.