“Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” is a spoof paper that was accepted and published in a peer reviewed journal. The paper even contained the sentence “Epidemiologists believe it highly likely that a journal publishing this paper does not practice peer review and must therefore be predatory”.
We outline a new direction for this web site (and our Twitter feed). We will still focus on predatory publishing but will also have a much wider coverage.
We have become aware of a Facebook post seeking co-authors for a paper. Yet, we think, we think the paper was published almost a year earlier.
A Facebook group is offering the opportunity to be an author of a paper, if you pay a fee. In this article we present what we have found, but there are still a lot of questions that need answering.
For any impact factor, you should be able to verify (i.e. reproduce) it. With Google Scholar, this is possible but can be time consuming and it also requires a certain level of knowledge that many may not posses.
The International Journal of Management (ISSN: 0976-6502), which is published by IAEME Publication has two Google Scholar entries. Each one shows a different number of publications, citations, h-index etc. In this article, we take a closer look as well as comparing against the journal’s own records, from its web site.
The Scope Database web site, in some places, looks the same as the Scopus web site. As far as we can see there is no relationship between the Scope Database and Scopus and we can only conclude that Scope Database is trying to fool the unwary researcher.
We were recently contacted on Twitter and asked if a particular journal was a fake journal. This was an intriguing question and one which we felt we had to answer, or least look at to see if we could offer advice.
In this article we describe the investigation that we carried out.
The Global Impact Factor (GIF) ranks journals using quantitative and qualitative methodologies in order to evaluate the prestige of journals. The evaluation considers factors such as peer review, originality, quality, technical editing quality, editorial quality and regularity.
Predatory publishing is the practice of publishers/journals charging fees to publish scientific articles, yet not providing the services that would normally be expected of a scientific journal. This includes not having robust peer review, thus not ensuring the quality and integrity of the papers which will form part of the scientific archive.