To lay out or not to lay out?

This paper seeks to raise awareness of some negative phenomena in science. It happens more and more frequently that somebody carries out research in one field but finds that the results are not strong enough for publication and then submits them to be published in a related but not identical field as an application. The Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) is known as one of the most difficult problems in integer programming, and it has a nice combinatorial formulation. Therefore, it is a suitable experimental field for many algorithmic ideas including artificial intelligence methods. On the other hand, these methods must compete with the special methods of QAP. The latter are far better in many cases. Thus, the experimental methods cannot be published in their own right. Their authors try to convert them to layout problems because QAP is well known as a basic model in that application area. However, it is easy to show by data analysis methods that the problems solved by some layout authors are not truly layout problems.