Can’t Publish in Nature? Your Rubbish Paper Might Still Get Noticed

Rubbish: a zero‑impact‑factor journal for “trash” research

After a failed Western blot image went viral on Xiaohongshu, a tongue‑in‑cheek journal named Rubbish was launched. It advertises an impact factor of 0 and states that any submission that is sufficiently “garbage”—a short paragraph, an odd experimental image, or an anecdotal lab story—will be accepted for free.

The first article, titled “My WB Result Looks Like a Panda,” was posted the next day (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzYzMjYzNDI1MA==∣=2247483708&idx=1&sn=22163b7ad35cec8451dfbfe46634ad21). Within 24 hours the account received over 7,000 likes and nearly 10,000 followers.

Rapid proliferation of “bottom‑journals”

Within a few months more than 200 similar titles appeared, including Call , NoTrue , Silence , S.H.*.T. , SHITORY , and a catalog site called Web of Absurd that assigns mock impact factors to these outlets.

Volunteer‑run publishing workflow

The founder could not keep up with the influx of submissions, so a group of students volunteered as editors and reviewers. They reproduced a full academic publishing workflow—submission, peer review, acceptance, indexing, and impact‑factor calculation—around the joke.

Representative submissions

Western‑blot meme : the original “panda” image was accepted as a legitimate article.

Supervisor typology : an article classified group‑meeting supervisors into two types—those who make students “flip the PPT up” and those who constantly demand “flip the PPT down”—and offered preliminary coping strategies.

GIS study of Guilin rice‑noodle shops : using POI data, the authors scraped 198 noodle‑shop locations, plotted them with ArcMap, and performed kernel‑density and standard‑deviation‑ellipse analyses. The conclusion identified the area near Yixian High School’s senior campus as the spatial centroid of all shops.

Non‑converging loss curves as art : a loss‑curve that never converges was compared to Picasso’s “Guernica,” arguing that before convergence the curve constitutes abstract art.

Community response and media coverage

Because the journal mimics a real publication, it quickly attracted attention. Nature cited Rubbish in a broader discussion of publishing pressure, repeated‑rejection cycles, and credibility crises in scientific research.

Despite its humorous intent, the rapid diffusion of Rubbish demonstrates a genuine need for an outlet where researchers can vent anxieties about publishing pressure.