A (strange) case of academic misconduct?

A reader (who is a well-established philosopher) writes in with a rather odd case:

A question, which I'd prefer you ask anonymously:

What should you do if you find your work being cited in [BS] dissertations?

The situation: I was feeling vain the other day, so I looked up my google scholar profile and saw that a couple of my papers had some new citations. So I went looking for where they were cited. 

What I found was a series of 'dissertations' that all cited my papers. I put 'dissertations' in quotes because they were, at best, jumbled collections of something just barely above word-salad. All of these dissertations came from the same [non-philosophy grad] program, all of them having some permutation of the same three faculty members as a committee. 

And they're just gibberish. Incoherently constructed, hundreds of pages long, they're nothing but long strings of vaguely sentence-shaped arrangements of words that never quite rise to the level of meaningfulness. 

What should I do? I'm lazy by nature, so my instinct is to ignore it. But I also feel like there's something sinister about this that I really don't *want* to ignore. On the other hand, I have no idea who to contact.

In general, I'm inclined to think that the standards of different academic disciplines are so heterogeneous that one should tend to 'let things go.' I mean, there are entire fields I've come across that seem to me (as a philosopher) to use 'nonsense methods.' While I actually think there is something deeply problematic about such fields, I don't think it's my place to 'contact anyone about it.' Rather, it seems to me that the thing to do is to argue in print that the methods in the fields in question are problematic--that or engage in something like the Sokal Hoax to display how problematic the relevant fields are (though this kind of stuff can get you in a lot of trouble if you're not careful).

However, the case the reader wrote in about seems like it may not just be 'weird disciplinary standards' but rather something more nefarious: an entire department illegitimately conferring higher degrees on students who write 'dissertations' that don't meet even the most basic standards of scholarship. If that's what's going on, it seems to me a case of academic misconduct. How should it be dealt with? I guess my first suggestion would be to approach your own department chair or dean, telling them that you have serious concerns about what is going on at another university. I think this is probably a prudent case of action for two reasons: (1) if your chair or dean decides to act upon the complaint themselves, it may have more effect than if you (a random faculty member did it), and (2) your dean or chair might appreciate knowing in advance if you plan to pursue the issue yourself. After this step, though, I'm not sure. Should one contact the chair of the department in question to express one's concerns? Should one contact their dean? As I've never raised complaints of any sort, I'm really not sure.

What do you all think should be done here, if anything? I realize it is a very odd case, but I have to confess I'm curious to hear people's thoughts.

Comments

[sage]

I think the person should talk with someone on an ethics review board at their own university. Explain their concerns. See how a more impartial person assesses the situation. Also, they can give advice on the next steps, if next steps are required.

[ha]

This made me lol: "long strings of vaguely sentence-shaped arrangements of words"

[Anonymous Abonymous]

I confess that my first reaction is to wonder if this is a case of Reviewer 2 getting too excited. From a distance, one might not expect someone who describes themselves as vain and lazy to be especially charitable readers.

[Carl]

If they're as incoherent as described then perhaps they're not actually written by humans, and are (e.g.) output from a comp sci automated text generation project or something. "Make a corpus-scanning algorithm that can write a philosophy dissertation" sounds like a plausible assessment item to me ;)

[pendaran]

Are they really gibberish or just very poorly written? There is a difference, although sometimes I guess it can be hard to tell.

[Joe]

I would find a friend or acquaintance in the relevant field and ask them to see if they can make sense of it. I wouldn't share your concerns, but see if it causes any concerns in them on its own.

[Christopher Hitchcock]

I had a similar reaction to Carl. Perhaps these are not poor quality dissertations written by students and allowed to pass. Perhaps this is a scam of some kind. Perhaps, e.g. the faculty members/dept./school get paid by the number of dissertations they supervise, so there are fictitious students writing "dissertations". Perhaps there are students enrolled in dummy courses because they need to credits to maintain their scholarship/immigration status/athletic eligibility. Perhaps this is a citation ring designed to generate theses citing the faculty in question to drive up their counts on Google Scholar.

[NarsiMarsi]

Perhaps it's unrelated, but I think it's not: I've recently been cited, together with other papers on the philosophy of lying, in what looks like a bot-generated paper "Artistic Study of Elegant and Concise Chorus Conducting Style". My Google Scholar newsletter was then flooded with recommendations of similar fake papers in musicology, all quoting *exclusively* recent papers in philosophy of language. My impression is that we're experiencing a wave (dare I say pandemic?) of spam publications, and that Google hasn't yet stepped in to weed them out of the system.
(Oh, and of course, in case you want to know more about elegant and concise conducting style: http://www.studiamusicologica.com/index.php/path/article/view/277/278 )