Scandal in Academia: “daSB” Insult Appears in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Paper, Investigation Underway
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A publication in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (T-MM) has sparked controversy after the discovery of a vulgar insult embedded within its text. The article, titled “MPCT: Multiscale Point Cloud Transformer With a Residual Network,” published in 2024, inexplicably contains the phrase:… small number for numerical stability. liujiamingshi-daSB Then, we use farthest point …
The inserted phrase "liujiamingshi-daSB" directly translates from Chinese pinyin to "Liu Jiaming is a big idiot," a severe personal insult. Remarkably, Liu Jiaming is listed as the second author of the paper. The presence of this slur within a formal academic context has led to widespread speculation about possible motivations and responsibility.
Author Background and Journal Reputation
- First Author: Yue Wu, Deputy Director, Key Laboratory of Cooperative Intelligent Systems, Xidian University.
- Second Author: Liu Jiaming, completed his Master's degree at Xidian University in June 2024, currently pursuing a Ph.D. at another leading university in China.
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia is recognized as a leading journal in multimedia technology, boasting:
- Impact Factor (JIF): 8.4
- 5-Year Impact Factor: 8.0
- Ranking: Top 5% (Q1) in Telecommunications according to Web of Science
- Google Scholar Rank: #2 in Multimedia category (h5-index = 101)
Speculation on Incident Origin
Speculation on how the slur bypassed editorial review includes:
- Sabotage: Authorship disputes leading to intentional sabotage.
- Self-publicity: Deliberate insertion to attract widespread attention.
- Practical Joke: Inserted by colleagues without authors’ knowledge.
These scenarios expose vulnerabilities in current editorial workflows, particularly multilingual profanity filtering.
Editorial Response and Investigation
The journal’s editorial team confirmed awareness of the issue, actively investigating under IEEE's publication ethics guidelines. Possible outcomes include issuing corrections or retraction of the paper.
Broader Academic Context
This incident isn't isolated; previous cases involve explicit protests against citation coercion or predatory publishing practices, indicating a broader tension within academia, driven by:
- Declining research funding rates.
- Increasing publication pressures.
- Citation coercion.
- Stressful university policies such as "up-or-out" evaluations.
These systemic pressures may contribute to frustration-driven misconduct.
The outcome of the T-MM investigation remains pending. Nevertheless, this incident highlights the urgent need for strengthened quality assurance measures in academic publishing.
Have you encountered similar hidden messages or problematic insertions in peer-reviewed papers? Share your experiences and insights below.
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This is not the first time to have "F" word in journal paper, but it's on the most impactful journal.
One of the ridiculous paper published was on International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, originally created by two computer scientists in 2005 as a joke response to spammy academic invitations, with the title: <Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List>.
Then, there is an other paper published by Vamplew, Peter tilted: "Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List." in Зборник Матице српске за друштвене науке 154 (2016), abut this.
Vamplew has this written in the abstract: "A paper titled “Get me off your fcking mailing list” has been accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. But, as Joseph Stromberg reports for Vox, there’s more going on here than just a hilariously missing-in-action peer-review system – it highlights the bigger problem of predatory journals, which try to get young academics pay to have their work published, and shows just how shonky they are. Despite how fancy the journal sounds, the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology is actually an open-access publication that spams thousands of scientists every day with the offer of publishing their work – for a price, of course. Back in 2005, US computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler created this 10-page paper as a joke response they could send to annoying and unwanted conference invitations. As well as the seven-word headline being repeated over and over again, the paper also contained some very helpful flow charts and graphs, [....] [See Figure 1 above!] The PDF went pretty viral in academic circles, and then recently an Australian scientist named Peter Vamplew sent it off to the pain-in-the-ass International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in the hope that the editors would open it, read it and take him off their fcking list. Instead, Scholarly Open Access reports that they took it as a real submission and said they’d publish it for $150. Apparently the journal even sent the paper to an anonymous reviewer who said it was “excellent”. As Stromberg writes for Vox: “This incident is pretty hilarious. But it’s a sign of a bigger problem in science publishing. This journal is one of many online-only, forprofit operations that take advantage of inexperienced researchers under pressure to publish their work in any outlet that seems superficially legitimate. They’re very different from respected, rigorous journals like Science and Nature that publish much of the research you read about in the news. Most troublingly, the predatory journals don’t conduct peer-review – the process where other scientists in the field evaluate a paper before it’s published.” Not only that, but in this instance the journal didn’t even seem to care that the scientist who submitted it wasn’t actually the one who wrote the article. This isn’t the first time these predatory journals have been caught out, Stromberg reports, but unfortunately it shows that the problem doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Read Stromberg’s excellent full story on the paper and predatory journals over at Vox. And next time we get spammed by unwanted emails, we know what we’ll be sending back."
