- As a simple rule, never trust the results of a paper. Often, scholars always cheat journals, their supervisors and their university with fake/cooked-up results.
- Frame your research problem only after testing/running/repeating some of the existing algorithms/models (that will be available in the default installation of a simulator - or available as an extension module for the simulator).
- Never trust a algorithm/model that you see on a published paper until you are able to implement it (from the available sources) and evaluate it and getting almost equal results that are published in the original paper.
In fact fake publication is common in all the domains of research. But, it is very very high in the CS/ECE/IT community - If you notice previously published work by the "computer science" related domain, you will find a lot of fake publications (publications based on fake results or cooked-up results or hypothetical models).
For example, you may find lot of fake "algorithms" or publications in UWSN, particularly, if they used ns-2/aquasim as a simulation tool. Of course, the original publications of the software aquasim were genuine. But, by default, all the mac layer protocols and network-layer protocols available in aquasim will not even work on a high-density network (for example 50 or 100 nodes). The reason is the protocol implementations available in aquasim are only at the elementary level (or not at all tested on a high-density network) - even if you try to move a single node, then all the nodes will just move to 0,0,0 - and the entire simulation will not even work at all. Even the latest ns-2 version of aquasim itself contains a lot of bugs that will lead to wrong results. One of the major bug in aquasim is : if you will try to use a node other than the 0th node as a sink, then the packets will never get delivered to the sink node.
But if you search papers that are using aquasim, you will see lot of paper that are using algorithms lilke "PSO", "ACO", "GA" and even AI/machine learning-based ones to solve "mobile" UWSN using aquasim - even the protocols readily available under aquasim will not work as per the original theory (because of some bugs/limitations in
ns-2 version of aquasim). You may understand the genuineness of those papers if you really try to run an existing protocol under aquasim.
Similarly, you can see a lot of fake publications on WSN, VANET and almost all the domains of networking.
Even you can find fake papers published on repute "top-rated" journals.
No journal review mechanism has a "foolproof" mechanism to detect "fake results" in a paper during its review process.
An intelligent scholar can easily fake things in a paper.
Fake publications can be eradicated if and only if the "scholar/researcher" himself/herself decides to publish a paper only with genuine models and results.
So, fake publications will live until the death of the universe - only you should learn to recognize them and avoid using them in serious scholarly research work.
You may understand about "fake publications" if you are reading the following posts:
Charles Pandian,