  Recent years have witnessed the increase of competition in science. While
promoting the quality of research in many cases, an intense competition among
scientists can also trigger unethical scientific behaviors. To increase the
total number of published papers, some authors even resort to software tools
that are able to produce grammatical, but meaningless scientific manuscripts.
Because automatically generated papers can be misunderstood as real papers, it
becomes of paramount importance to develop means to identify these scientific
frauds. In this paper, I devise a methodology to distinguish real manuscripts
from those generated with SCIGen, an automatic paper generator. Upon modeling
texts as complex networks (CN), it was possible to discriminate real from fake
papers with at least 89\% of accuracy. A systematic analysis of features
relevance revealed that the accessibility and betweenness were useful in
particular cases, even though the relevance depended upon the dataset. The
successful application of the methods described here show, as a proof of
principle, that network features can be used to identify scientific gibberish
papers. In addition, the CN-based approach can be combined in a straightforward
fashion with traditional statistical language processing methods to improve the
performance in identifying artificially generated papers.
