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    As another example there is also Donald Knuth's (quite hilarious) "The Complexity of Songs" which was published in ACM SIGACT - a quite serious and prestigious journal. So the tradition of posting joke papers does not just exist on arXiv but is a wider phenomenon at that.
    – Voo
    Commented Mar 12, 2017 at 21:11
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    -1, because I was planning on using my time productively before seeing this. (+1!)
    – Nat
    Commented Mar 13, 2017 at 1:58
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    So how do non-experts know when they're reading a joke article? That sounds unprofessional and childish to me.
    – Cape Code
    Commented Mar 14, 2017 at 13:22
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    @CapeCode Articles on arXiv are targeted at experts. Other people generally won't understand what they're reading whether it's a joke or not.
    – David Z
    Commented Mar 15, 2017 at 14:19
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    Not on arXiv, but relevant: Another article that makes bibliometric analysis a bit harder
    – E.P.
    Commented Feb 10, 2023 at 16:24