“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”.
In 2014 a journal accepted a paper that just repeated the phrase “Get me off your f*@^ing email list”. This article looks at the history of the paper, as well as the journal in question.
Generators, such as ChapGPT, cannot be listed as authors on a paper, yet this is happening and (in some cases) it is easy to spot.
We would like to invite those that are interested in our work to become one of our patrons.
This will support us financially, which will enable us to do even more but, importantly, it will also enable us to be more targeted in areas that are of direct interest to the community.
We will also be able to engage with our patrons in a more meaningful way, especially those who, like us, want to eliminate predatory publishing and fake journals.
SCIREA is a scientific publisher that has a portfolio of 39 journals. These 39 journals have 13,288 editors, meaning that each journal has an average of 341 editors. Each of these editors has handled less than one paper each, over the last five years.
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was established over 20 years ago. COPE educates and supports editors and publishers, aiming
We have developed a web page that enables you to check whether a journal is recognized by these organizations, rather than having to go to the individual web sites of each organization. The URL to access our web page is https://predatory-publishing.com/ISSNCheck/?issn=1234-5678.
We are often asked if a journal is legitimate. We can’t answer every request but we can provide some advice, which is to carry out an initial check to see if the journal is a member of COPE, DOAJ, Scopus and/or Web of Science.
In April 2020, Bradley Allf published a paper in “US-China Education Review A.” The paper, entitled “Experiential Learning in Secondary Education Chemistry Courses: A Significant Life Experiences Framework” was totally fake, including authors on the paper being characters from the TV series Breaking bad and the paper loosely following the Breaking Bad story line.
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.