More and more frequently, some of my students get very confused about papers
published in the literature and ask if they should follow the same style in order to get
their work published more quickly. My answer to such questions is always: The only
thing that is worse than not publishing is to publish wrong or bogus results. As wrong
results are easy to tell and correct, the question boils down to what constitutes “bogus
results.” Very surprisingly, I could not find any precise, satisfactory description for
them in the literature.1 The reason may be that there has never been a period in the
history of science when bogus results could be produced and reproduced with such
efficiency and at such volume, due to the rich computational and information resource
now available. So I have decided to give it a try myself. Realizing that subtleties of
the definition could differ a lot for different people or for different fields, I hereby try
to only identify some of the most common troubling signs of bogus results, tailored to
the resource-rich scenario, and hope to provide some guidelines for my students.
