Kim Kardashian West is not known for her scientific prowess. With her tendency to break the Internet, you might even say she was sent here to destroy one of the world's greatest scientific achievements to date.
Which is why we were pretty surprised to read that she is listed as an author on an incredibly complex scientific paper, co-authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin.
The paper, titled Wanion: Refinement of Rpcs, may not be obvious as Kim's chosen field of study, but then we weren't expecting her to be consulted by the President of the United States on prison reform either. 2018 has a way of surprising you.
Tomáš Pluskal, an MIT post-doc and the third author on the paper, explained to Retraction Watch why he wanted to work with Kardashian West in the first place.
"I have always thought that Kim’s scientific talents were a bit underappreciated, so I wanted to give her the opportunity to show this unknown side of her," he said.
"It was a very smooth and productive collaboration. Obviously, Kim is very busy, being a celebrity and all, so we never actually managed to meet in person. But she has been talking to me through her Instagram posts, and needless to say, the science presented in the paper would never have reached such high quality without her input."
How much science can she have really added to a scientific paper, you ask? Surely it's nonsense? Well, it looks pretty damn sciency.
But, of course, there's a problem with the paper, which was accepted for publication by the Drug Designing & Intellectual Properties International Journal. If you take a closer look, it's complete gibberish.
"In recent years, much research has been devoted to the synthesis of the Turing machine," it begins. By the end of the opening paragraph, it is talking about the unrelated topic of the commercial viability of vacuum tubes.
"In this work, we show not only that e-commerce can be made cacheable, semantic, and client-server, but that the same is true for vacuum tubes."
The paper was actually created using a random scientific paper generator called sci-gen. You can use it to generate your own fake papers, for whatever bizarre purpose you have in mind.
Of course, Kardashian wasn't actually involved at all, just like Nakamoto. Pluskal's paper was designed to highlight and call out predatory journals, particularly Lupine Publishers, who published the paper. Predatory journals prey on new, less well-established scientists by saying they'll publish their work – for a fee. You would have thought two very famous names would have been some kind of red flag to the publishers.
They, as this fake paper shows, have no interest in science, just money. Don't give it to them, Kim.
[HT: Retraction Watch]
