Indian entrepreneur gets gibberish paper that quotes 'My Cousin Vinny' accepted at academic conference

In order to expose a money-making scheme that requires many students in India to get two papers accepted and "published" at academic conferences, Indian entrepreneur Navin Kabra used the SCIgen app to create two gibberish papers that referenced the Hindi movie Sholay and contained sections of dialogue from Hollywood hit My Cousin Vinny.

Despite the nonsensical nature of the works, both were accepted by the International Conference on Recent Innovations in Engineering, Science & Technology after they were allegedly read by an “international jury” of engineers and university professors.

Here’s an excerpt:

“It is a self-evident truth that Sholay is the best movie ever made (at least according to the wife of the author of this paper). Now, if you’re paying attention, the first author of the paper appears to be Riaa Seth, which would indicate that she cannot have a wife, because the Supreme Court of India just upheld Section 377. But, samajhne ki baat yeh hai ki, Riaa Seth is not really the author of this paper -- instead it is Navin Kabra, whose wife is Meeta Kabra, the owner of wogma.com. Please visit wogma.com for great movie reviews, which don’t give the movie away. She is currently reviewing Dhoom 3, and we predict that she will give it a rating of ‘Even the keen, wait for DVD’. But our AAF algorithm indicates that it will be a box-office hit.”

Kabra turned in the “scientific” works because he thinks the paper-publishing system is just a scam to get students to pay submission and conference fees.

“I got a whiff of this racket while mentoring an undergraduate engineering student two years ago. He told me he had to submit a paper to a conference and get it published as per the rules of the University of Pune,” Kabra said.

In one paper, Kabra simply writes out the dialogue of the scene in My Cousin Vinny when stars Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei discuss whether he is man enough to go deer hunting.

“She: Whoa. You’re gonna shoot a deer?

He: I don’t know. I suppose. I mean, I’m a man’s man, I could go deer hunting.

She: A sweet, innocent, harmless, leaf-eating, doe-eyed little deer.

He: Hey Lisa, I’m not gonna go out there just to wimp out, you know. I mean, the guy will lose respect for me, would you rather have that?”

The paper concludes:

"In this position paper we described UIB, a method to use the browser to check IMDB.com to lookup box office performance of movies, and AAF, a method to ask friends on Facebook about how a movie is doing, and a hybrid algorithm AAFtUIB in which we ask a friend to use IMDB.com. And we've managed to reference Hilbert, HHGTTG, Sholay, My Cousin Vinny, Jeff Naughton, the Wisconsin Database Performance Paper, Xeno's paradox, Meeta Kabra and the wogma.com website, and we even referenced the Sokal Affair in the heading of the paper (actually in the name of the institute that the authors are from, but you get what I mean, right?) proving once and for all that nobody has read this paper."

“My original intention of doing this was to spread awareness amongst students about the true nature of such conferences,” he said. “But now, after having gone through the experience, I am a bit depressed. I don’t know how awareness about this issue is going to help.”

[Mid-day] [Navin Kabra's blog]