Introduction
If you follow us on Twitter, you may be aware that one of the things we do is to feature quotes from EMAILs from (possibly) predatory journals. You can see these tweets here.
We ask people to forward EMAILs that might be suitable for this part of our Twitter feed, and we are very grateful to everybody who does.
One EMAIL we saw, did not really have anything in it that was unusual, or particularly funny, but we were drawn to it for another reason. It was asking for 20 more articles, as they had 10 in hand but required more. Moreover, they were offering a special price of $749 for submissions received before 22 December 2021.
We thought that it might be worth taking a look at that journal, just to dig into the facts behind the email..
The EMAIL
The EMAIL we saw is as follows:
Date: 18 December 2021
Title: Accelerate your research work
“Dear Professor,
Greetings from Lupine Publishers.
We are joyful to inform you that, as we are celebrating Christmas and on this occasion we are providing special waiver of $749 to authors for first 30 articles for submission before 22nd December 2021.
Moreover, we have 10 articles in our hand but, we lack 20 articles. Hence, we need your support to fulfill this event successfully.
Hope you will join us with your eminent work.
Await your participation.
Sandra Christopher
Nursing & Health care (LOJNHC) ISSN: 2638-5945 | ISI Impact Factor 0.695
Lupine Publishers LLC, 57 West 57th Street, 3rd floor, New York – NY 10019, USA”
Lupine Publishers
Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care is published by Lupine Publishers. They have a Twitter account, if you are interested.
Lupine Publishers have a portfolio of 45 journals. We have archived this page, which you can view here (archived 28 Nov 2022).
The Article Processing Fees (APCs) for all of Crimson Publishers’ journals is shown in Figure 1. We note that this is taken from a page at the level of the publisher. That is, the APCs appear to be the same across all of their journals. We have archived the APC page, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).
The editorial board for the journal is comprised of 34 people. None of the entries provide an EMAIL address (we always find this frustrating). We have archived this page, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).
Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care
Published articles
At the time of writing (28 Nov 2022), Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care has published 65 articles. The first article was published on 8 February 2018 and the journals has published two articles dated 23 September 2022.
The journal has published 3 volumes, with volume 1and 2 publishing publishing five issues. Volume 3 has published 4 issues with, we suspect, one more to come this year.
Number of published articles by volume/issue
Figure 2 shows the number of papers published (as at 28 Nov 2022) by Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care. The figures splits the number of published papers by Volume and Issue. For example, Volume 1, Issue 5 published three papers.
The make up of the volumes
As we were analyzing the papers, we were struck by the structure of the volumes of Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care. Here are some stats and comments.
- Volume 1 published its first paper on 8 February 2018 and its last paper on 10 September 2018. That is a period of 215 days, all of which are in 2018.
- Volume 2 published its first paper on 17 October 2018 and its last paper on 11 May 2020. That is a period of 574 days.
- Volume 3 is (probably) not yet complete but its first paper was published on 19 April 2020 and its latest paper was published on 23 September 2022. That is a period of 889 days (and counting).
We are unsure of the rationale behind the way the volumes are organized. Generally, in our experience, Volumes are organized by calendar year but this journal has volumes which (to us) appear almost random. Even if that is not the case, we cannot understand why the volumes have lasted 215, 574 and 889 days respectively. Why would a journal do this?
We also noted that one paper in Volume 3(1) was published (19 Apr 2020) before a paper published (11 May 2020) in Volume 2(5). Not that this is a huge problem, but you assume that papers would be published in chronological order with respect to volumes/issues.
Frequency of publication
It is interesting to look at how often the journal publishes papers.
On average, the journal publishes a paper every 26 days. On seven occasions, they published two papers on the same day, giving a count of zero towards the average.
The largest time period in publishing a paper was 351 days (11 May 2020 to 27 April 2021). There were also periods of 136, 129, 108 days).
Long breaks in publishing papers is not necessarily an issue but it does make you wonder how many papers are received and why there are such long periods when no papers are published.
Did they need another 20 papers?
The catalyst for this article was that Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care said that they had 10 papers in hand but they were lacking 20 papers. Here’s what we believe, based on the data/evidence we have collected.
The EMAIL was sent on the 18 December 2021. The last paper they had published was on the 11 November 2021. It looks like they only had one paper under review that was received on 25 November 2021. This paper was eventually published on 12 January 2022.
According to the received dates on the papers that were published, they did not receive any papers before the deadline they gave in the EMAIL (22 December 2021), so nobody was able to take advantage of the reduced rate of $749.
Of course, they may have received papers that were subsequently rejected, but we have no way of knowing this. If the journal wishes to comment on this, would be be happy to update this article.
However, based on the data available to us, we find it difficult to believe that the journal had ten papers in hand.
Since sending the EMAIL above, they have published seven papers which were received on 8 Mar, 9 Mar, 4 Apr, 5 Apr, 5 Sep and two papers on the 11 Sep (all in 2022).
Based on this observation, it adds more weight to the argument that they did not have ten papers in hand. Moreover, they did not receive the 20 papers they said they wanted.
We conclude from the above observations that the email sent by the journal was purely marketing and the facts it presented in trying to persuade people to submit a paper were untrue.
If the journal believes that we are mistaken, we would be very happy to hear from them and have a conversation.
One other observation
We noticed that there are two articles that have the same title (“Nurses’ Knowledge Regarding Prevention of Ventilator Associated Pneumonia“). The first is listed in Volume 1, Issue 5 and has a DOI of 10.32474/LOJNHC.2018.01.000124. We have archived the page where this paper is listed, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).
The other version is in Volume 2, Issue 1. It has a DOI of 10.32474/LOJNHC.2018.02.000129. We have archived the page where this paper is listed, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).
The two papers are almost identical. The titles, abstracts and conclusions & recommendation certainly are, and much of the content is also identical, including graphs and figures. If you want to see the two papers, we have made them available here and here.
Final Comments
This is not a full review of Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care, so we are not saying whether the journal is predatory or note.
We would say that there are some worrying signs, which deserve a deeper investigation, so we have added it to the list of publishers that we plan to take a closer look at.
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