Comment by Macuyiko

4 years ago

What any researcher needs to accomplish: more publications

What journal is going to accept a study like this if they haven't obtained proper consent?

  • IEEE, see the publications list at https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu/

    >>>On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits Qiushi Wu, and Kangjie Lu. To appear in Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland'21). Virtual conference, May 2021.

  • My guess is: a journal that does not focus on studies of human behavior and whose editors are a) not aware of the ethical problems or b) happy to ignore ethics concerns if the publication is prone to receive much attention (which it is).

That’s about as useful as to answer the question “what is this company doing?” with “trying to make money”.

  • But that question is as deep and important to answer as yours :D What can anyone hope to accomplish by doing fake research ? Progress, wealth, peer approval, mating, pleasure ?

    So answering that they hope to get more material for papers, which is the only goal of researchers (and their main KPI), is quite deeper an answer than the question required.

    • I wouldn't call this fake research. Maybe unethical, but they did do research, and they did obtain data,and they did (attempt?) to publish it.