In 2017, James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose initiated "The Grievance Studies affair", a project to create bogus academic papers on cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies and submit them to academic journals. The authors' intent was to expose problems in "grievance studies", a term they apply to a subcategory of these academic areas in which "poor science is undermining the real and important work being done elsewhere".
The hoax began in 2017 and continued into 2018, when it was halted after one of the papers caught the attention of journalists, who quickly found its purported author, Helen Wilson, to be nonexistent. By that time, four of the 20 papers had been published, three had been accepted but not yet published, six had been rejected, and seven were still under review. One of the published papers had won special recognition.