Tag: COPE

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Journal publishes a spoof Covid-19 paper

In a previous article we have looked at “Sting operations in predatory publishing“, where we described several sting operations that had targeted predatory journals and conferences. In this article we look at the case where a journal published a spoof Covid-19 paper.

“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”.

It is apparent that there was no peer review, even though the correspondence from the journal suggested that there had been.

The article that was accepted in a predatory journal

The paper, titled “Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” was published in the “American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research“. The paper is a spoof paper and the journal, by extension, is predatory.

The full citation of the paper is:

  • Utsugi Elm, Nasu Joy, Gregory House and Mattan Schlomi (2020) Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption. American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research 8(2). AJBSR.MS.ID.001256. DOI: 10.34297/AJBSR.2020.08.001256

The timescale, from submission to publication

The paper was was received on 14 March 2020 and published on the 18 March 2020.

The fact that the paper was published within four days is a worrying sign. You have to ask yourself how any paper can be received, be peer reviewed and then published within four days? We assume that no corrections were required.

The acceptance email

The author makes the email trail available here, and we show the actual acceptance in Figure 1.

Acceptance EMAIL

 

Figure 1: Acceptance email, see the full correspondence here

We note that the email says that the paper “has received positive comments.” We wonder whether these were ever passed to the author and what they actually said?

Cited papers

“Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” cites 42 papers. Some of these are are genuine papers, in that they exist, but many are fictional, which are humorous in the titles/authors. Many of the genuine cited papers are drawn from the predatory publishing literature, which have nothing to do with the subject of the paper.

A Pika, Leonardo da Vinci and a Pokemon

 

Figure 2: A Pika, Leonardo da Vinci and a Pokemon

  • One of the papers that is cited is:

    Wayne B (2016) Phobia of Bats and Its Applications in Criminal Justice. Gotham Forensics Quarterly 26(8): 807-81

    If you only have a passing knowledge of Batman, you will know that Bruce Wayne is the secret identify of Batman. Moreover, Gotham Forensics Quarterly is a fictitious journal, noting that Gotham is where Batman and Bruce Wayne live.
  • Three papers with reference to Jeffrey Beall (one of the first people to look at predatory publishing) are cited:
    1. Beall J (2016) Dangerous predatory publishers threaten medical research. Journal of Korean Medical Science 31(10): 1511-1513. DOI: 10.3346/jkms.2016.31.10.1511.

      This paper is a genuine paper, but it is referenced in connection to “pikas”, which is a small, mountain-dwelling mammal found in Asia and North America. The Beall paper certainly has nothing to do with pikas but rather, as the title suggests, the paper is about predatory publishers.
    2. Strielkowski W (2017) Predatory journals: Beall’s List is missed. Nature 544(7651): 416: DOI: 10.1038/544416b

      This paper is a genuine paper but it is referenced in connection with “sentrets”, which is a small Pokémon character covered in brown fur. Strielkowski’s paper does not mention Pokémon, but is purely focused on predatory journals.
    3. Beall J (2016) Essential information about predatory publishers and journals. International Higher Education 86: 2-3. DOI: 10.6017/ihe.2016.86.9358

      This is a genuine paper, but is referenced after the following sentence “To this literature we add a report from Cyllage City in the Kalos region, France, where an outbreak of the densely populated metropolis has to date produced 420 confirmed infections with seven deaths, all in the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions“. Beall’s article certainly has nothing to say on this topic.
  • There are another three papers that cite work on predatory publishers/journals:
    1. Winnfield J, Vega V (1994) What do they call a predatory journal in France? Pulp Nonfiction 521: 154

      This is not a genuine paper. The Pulp Nonfiction and the authors are references to characters in the film Pulp Fiction (Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega).
    2. Stromberg J (2014) ‘Get Me Off Your F*^@ing Mailing List’ is an Actual Science Paper Accepted by a Journal. Vox 21: 10-11

      This blog post tells the story of another sting operation, where a conference accepted a paper with the title “Get Me Off Your F*^@ing Mailing List“, and just repeats that phrase over and over again.

      We have written our own article that discusses this sting operation.
    3. Laine C, Winker MA (2017) Identifying predatory or pseudo-journals. Biochemia medica: Biochemia Medica 27(2): 285-291 DOI: 10.11613/BM.2017.031

      This is a genuine paper, that looks at how to identify predatory journals. In the paper it is cited in the context of “Most outbreaks of COVID-19 outside China have been traced to travellers from Wuhan or those who came in contact with them.” If you search through the paper, there is no mention of COVID or Wuhan. Indeed, as the paper was published in 2017, this was long before the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
  • There are many other papers, which bring a smile to your face, such as papers written by Winne the Pooh and A.A Milne, a paper written by George Orwell in 1984 and a paper co-authored by Leonardo de Vinci with the title “Effects of exposure to sewage on martial arts skills in turtles.“

    Please take a look at the references, as there are many that are not genuine papers, but they are comic genius.

Statements that the journal is predatory

“Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” has a statement within the paper that explicitly says any journal that publishes this paper does not carry out per review and that the journal must, therefore, be predatory.

In the paper, the following statement is made:

“Epidemiologists believe it highly likely that a journal publishing this paper does not practice peer review and must therefore be predatory.“

Publication Ethics

The American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research has a web page that defines its publication Ethics. On that page it mentions COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) five times, yet the journal is not a member of COPE.

If you look at the journal’s web page on publication ethics (see Figure 3) you will see that COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) is mentioned five times.

The publication ethics of the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research

 

Figure 3: The publication ethics of the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research (accessed 13 Nov 2020)

If you check the COPE web site, you’ll find that the journal is not a member of COPE. Not that the journal claims to be a member, but mentioning COPE five times might suggest to the unwary reader that the journal is a member.

Papers that cite this paper

If we accept that the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research is predatory and that the article “Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” should never have been published, it might be worrying that the paper gets cited. Yet it has been cited.

This article we are focusing on in this article was published in March 2020, and it was cited in May 2020 in the following article:

  • Marzouk Lajili (2020) The COVID-19 Outbreak’s Multiple Effects. International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) 9(5): 358-361. [link to article]

We had a brief look at the International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology. It deserves a closer look but we are concerned that this is also a predatory journal. To give just one example why we suspect this, on their Publications Ethics Policy page (see Figure 4) it displays the COPE logo, but if you check on the COPE web site, this journal is not a member of COPE.

International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology displays the COPE logo on its web site, but it is not a COPE member (accessed 13 Nov 2020)

 

Figure 4: International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology displays the COPE logo on its web site, but it is not a COPE member (accessed 13 Nov 2020)

We have not carried out a full analysis of the International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology, so we cannot say definitely whether we believe it is a predatory journal, but if you are planning to submit to this journal, we would advise you to carry out your own checks.

The journal

The paper that is the focus of this article was submitted to the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research (ISSN: 2642-1747).

In this section, we briefly look at various aspects of the journal, just to give some additional information in addition to the journal article itself.

Article Processing Charges

Looking around the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research web site we found that Article Processing Charges (APCs) are $1,179 or $1,479 (see Figure 5). This agrees with the amount requested to be paid by the author (see Figure 1).

 

Figure 5: The Article Processing Charges for the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research

There was also some information in their FAQ about article processing charges (see Figure 6).

An FAQ answer when looking for the Article Processing Charges for American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research

 

Figure 6: An FAQ answer when looking for the Article Processing Charges for the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research

Impact Factor

If you look at the home page (see Figure 7) of the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research, it states that it has an ISI impact factor of 0.823. This is NOT, as you might expect, a Clarivate Analytics Impact Factor, but an impact factor called International Scientific Indexing.

Home page of the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research, showing that it has an ISI (International Scientific Indexing) impact factor of 0.823.

 

Figure 7: Home page of the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research, showing that it has an ISI (International Scientific Indexing) impact factor of 0.823.

Figure 8 shows the web page that reports this impact factor.

The International Scientific Indexing impact factor for the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research

 

Figure 8: The International Scientific Indexing impact factor for the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research

We have written another article which looks at the difference between the Clarivate ISI impact factor and the International Scientific Indexing impact factor. Strangely, though a complete coincidence, the journal that started the investigation into that article is the same one that we are focusing on in this article.

Article Availability

In an editor’s note to the The Scientist article that reports this sting operation, it is stated that “Editor’s Note (November 1, 2020) – The American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research has informed Shelomi that it will be removing the paper that serves as the subject of this piece as he has not paid the publication fees.“

The last time we checked (14 Nov 2020), the article was still accessible via the journal’s web site, via this link. https://dx.doi.org/10.34297/AJBSR.2020.08.001256. We are not sure how long this link will remain valid.

If/when this link does fail to work, we have saved a copy of the paper which you can download from here.

Article in The Scientist

The author of “Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” has written an article in The Scientist called “Opinion: Using Pokémon to Detect Scientific Misinformation” which describes the sting operation that was mounted against the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research.

We drew heavily on that article, as you might imagine, but we also delved a little deeper to look at the article and the journal in more detail.

Conclusion

Most (sensible) scholars would agree that predatory journals and publishers are problematic for many reasons, many of which we explore in other articles (see the list of articles below). We summarize below some of the issues posed by predatory journals/publishers.

  1. Nothing in the paper we focus on in this article, has any scientific credibility, yet some people might believe some of the statements that are made in the paper.
  2. The paper under investigation has been published in a peer reviewed scientific journal, or at least readers may believe that the paper has been peer reviewed, thus making the assumption that the claims made must have been validated by experts in the field. It has been stated that the paper we are focusing on is a spoof paper, but what about other papers that are not spoof, yet the research has not been peer reviewed?
  3. The paper we focus on has already been cited by another paper. In this case, we believe that the article that is citing the paper is also published in a predatory journal, but the citation could easily have been made from within a respectable journal. This would give some credibility to the paper published in the predatory journal.
  4. If predatory papers are cited in the legitimate scientific archive, it will infect that archive and a logical conclusion is that we can no longer have faith in the scientific archive and it will fall into disrepute.
  5. Other researchers might take the “contribution” of papers published in predatory journals and use it as a basis for their own research, This is not only doomed to failure, but it also a waste of time and money and could be dangerous.
  6. If research that is based on a predatory journal article is funded by some agency, then that money is wasted. A lot of research is funded by governments, through the taxes that they generate. This is, in effect, stealing money from the man in the street.
  7. Predatory journals/articles can be dangerous, especially those that are related to health. The general public, or even medics, could take the information in the paper as true and use that to make, what could be, life changing decisions.

We conclude by saying that predatory journals/publishers are not wanted as part of the scientific archive but, more importantly, if we let them infect the scientific archive, predatory journals could be dangerous if others start to believe, and act on, the statements made in those papers.

You might also be interested in:

  1. Why do authors publish in predatory journals?
  2. Do predatory publishers respect the scientific archive?
  3. Sting operations in predatory publishing
  4. Why is predatory publishing evil?
  5. Will publishing in predatory journals harm your CV?

Image Acknowledgements

  1. Pika: Alan D. Wilson, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pika_2.jpg. Image has been cropped
  2. Leonardo di Vinci: Leonardo da Vinci, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonardo_da_Vinci_-_Uomo_vitruviano.jpg. Image has been cropped
  3. Pokemon: https://pixabay.com/vectors/pokemon-pikachu-cute-character-5426712/

Article history

Where an article has been updated since first being written, we provide a history of the changes. Why? Why not :-).

  1. The original article was published on 14 November 2020.
  2. The article was updated on 29 July 2023. We removed profanities (at least, putting in special characters) we we felt that search engines did not like it. It was actual in the title of papers, so the profanities should have remained, but we felt it better to remove them.
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Get me off Your F*@^ing Mailing List

A paper is accepted, making it obvious the journal is predatory

In 2014 a scientific journal accepted a paper that made it crystal clear that the journal was predatory. The article just repeated the phrase “Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list“, over and over again, and also included the phrase in figures and graphs.

 

In this article, we look at the paper, its history, as well as looking at the journal in question.

 

There have been many examples where researchers have submitted nonsense papers to predatory journals, only to have them accepted, usually very quickly. As long as the author pays the Article Processing Charges (APCs) the paper will be published and then be part of the scientific archive, albeit a very grey area of the scientific archive.

 

Perhaps the most famous of these is a paper that was submitted to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in 2014.  This paper just repeated the sentence “Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list” and also included the phrase in a figure and a table.

 

If you want to see the article, it is available here and here.

 

 

Note: We have updated this article to remove “profanities” (i.e. the “F” word”) as search engines/SEO do not like it, so we took the decision to replace all occurrences of that word with ‘f*@^ing”.

 

Update: Since writing this article, we are aware of a peer reviewed paper that has covered this case, looking at how the journal has performed since it was shown to be a predatory journal.

The paper titles "Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list"

In 2005 David Mazières and Eddie Kohle wrote a paper that simply had seven words, repeated. Those words were “Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list“. The paper also contained a figure and a graph (shown here – click on them to expand them), again made up using the same seven words.

They submitted the paper to the 9th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics conference in protest at the conference’s spamming and poor peer review standards.

In 2014, in response to an email from a predatory publisher, Peter Vamplew sent the paper to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology.

To his surprise, the paper was rated as “Excellent” by the journal and its reviewers. The acceptance email (PDF), the acceptance letter (PDF) and the review reports (PDF) can be seen by following the links.

When the paper was accepted a USD 150 fee was requested. The authors declined to pay, so that paper was never actually published. In some ways this is a shame, as it would have been interesting to see if the paper actually made it as far as appearing on the journal’s web site.

The fact that a journal could accept such a paper is astonishing. Some of the other stings, at least, had words that could be thought of as a scientific paper, until it was read a little more carefully. The “Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list” paper, even from a cursory glance, is obviously nonsense, that should never have got past desk review, let alone peer review.

Media Coverage for "Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list"

When it became known that the article had been accepted, it received quite a lot of press coverage. This included The Guardian, which reported the case on 25 Nov 2014 [view], and Inside Higher Ed which reported it on 21 Nov 2014 [view].

International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology

The journal that Mazières and Kohle submitted to (albeit via Peter Vamplew) was the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. This journal was in Beall’s list, which has since closed down, but an archive is available in several places including here.

Membership of COPE

On the journal’s web site (accessed 04 Jan 2020) it states “IJACT follows publication ethics during phases of online publication inline with the guidelines and standards developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).” We thought this was a good statement to make, but wondered if the journal is actually a member of COPE, as it is not clear from their statement?

If you search for “International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology” on the COPE web site, the closest match is “International Journal of Advances in Computing and Information Technology“. That journal has an ISSN of 2277-9140, whereas IJACT has an ISSN 2319-7900.

As a sanity check, we also searched the COPE web site for both ISSN’s. 2277-9140 was found but 2319-7900 was not. Therefore, IJACT is not a member of COPE, even though they state they follow COPE’s ethical guidelines and provide a link to the COPE web site. We are unsure why you would mention COPE, if you are not a member, as those that do not check the COPE web site might assume that IJACT is a member of COPE? At best, this is confusing and, at worst, it could be argued that the journal is trying to mislead the scientific community.

ISSN of the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology​

We next looked up the journal on the ISSN portal. If you search for 2319-7900 (accessed 04 Jan 2020), you get a message that says “This record corresponds to a suppressed ISSN as the related resource has never been published.“

Looking at the ISSN FAQ (accessed 04 Jan 2020), it says the following about suppressed ISSNs.

From this, it looks as if the ISSN was registered but has since been deleted? Just for completeness we also searched for 2277-9140 (accessed 04 Jan 2020) and this returned, as expected, the “International journal of advances in computing and information technology” (so we know the search functionality works).

The Editorial Team for the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology​

We also looked at the Editorial Team (accessed 04 Jan 2020). It is good to see that they all give their affiliations, and many have an email address. This information is often missing on predatory journal web sites.

It is also good to see that many of the editorial board members provide a URL, either to their Google Scholar page or to their home page.  Some of the URLs lead to “404’s” (i.e. page not found), but at least many are provided.

We have summarized the Editorial Team in the Appendix below. Of the twenty people listed, ten have provided a URL and ten have provided email addresses. We did not email the editorial team, but we did check their URLs.

Five of them went to a Google Scholar page. The image on the left shows the Editor-in-Chief (clicking on the image will take you to his Google Scholars page)

Four of the URLs did not work and one led to a University course page. So, of the 20 members, only five lead to useful pages (i.e. Google Scholar pages). It would actually be more useful if the URLs led to the institition’s home page so that their affiliation could be checked as well as their credentials to be an editorial board member.

How has the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology​ performed?

We thought it might be interesting to look at how the journal has performed since it was established in 2012. The graph (click on it to expand) shows the number of papers that the journal has published since its first issue in 2012 through to volume 8 in 2019.

It is noticeable that in the past few years (2017-2019) the number of papers that the journal is publishing has reduced significantly. This could have been due to the fact that they accepted the “Get me off Your F*@^ing Mailing List” paper, which was reported in the media in November 2014, although there was not a significant downturn immediately after this case came to light. What is striking is that through 2018 and 2019, they have only published one or two papers per issue whereas, on average, between 2012 and 2016 the journal published 11 papers per issue.

You might also be interested in:

This paper looks at how the journal has performed since accepting the paper, on the basis that the idea behind a spoof paper is to highlight the lack of peer review and alert scholars to submitting to the journal.

Spoiler alert: The journal performed better in the twelve issues following the acceptance of this paper, than it did in the previous 12 years.

Final Thoughts

The fact that this journal is still operating amazes us. You would have thought that accepting the “Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list” paper would have forced it to close.

What is perhaps even more amazing is the fact that authors are still sending papers to this journal and, presumably, paying the Article Processing Charges of USD 150.

Perhaps the journal has changed and it is now a reputable journal but there are some worrying points about the web site, in addition the points mentioned above about COPE, the ISSN and the editorial members. For example:

  • If you click on the “Review Process” link it gives a 404 error, meaning that the web page does not exist.
  • On the “About this Journal” page it says “Instructions to author are designed in a detailed manner so that rejection of manuscript should be minimize“.  This is a strange thing for a reputable journal to say.
  • The authors are required to assign the copyright to the journal. This is unusual for an Open Access journal where the authors are required to pay to publish.

Given the fact that this journal accepted a paper that is described in this article, and the worries expressed above, we would urge extreme caution for authors who are considering submitting to this journal.

Appendix: IJACT Editorial Team

This appendix lists the editorial team of the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. It is provided as a historic record and it also supports the analysis that is carried out in this article.

IJACT Editorial Team
MemberURL ResultInstitutionEMAIL
Prof. Harish BaraithiyaGoogle Scholar PageMaulana Azad National Institute of Technology, India-462003editor@ijact.org
Dr. Saleh Ali AlomariGoogle Scholar PageUniversiti Sains Malaysia && Jadara Universitysalehalomari2005@yahoo.com
Dr. Abd El-Aziz AhmedUniversity page, but person not foundCairo Universityzizoah2003@gmail.com
Dr. Jigar PatelLinks to a Degree Course page, not the personKalol Institute of Managemen, Indiadrjigarvpatel@gmail.com, jignesh_29284@yahoo.com
Dr. Asim Kumar Sen404 (Page not found)St. Francis Institute Of Technology, Indiaasim_sen@linuxmail.org
Dr. G. Rosline Nesa kumariGoogle Scholar PageSaveetha University, Indiaroseline@saveetha.com
Dr. B. NARASIMHAN404 (Page not found)Maharshi Dayanand University, Indianaru2000us@yahoo.com
Dr. Anil Kumar404 (Page not found)Sam Higginbottom University of Agricultureanil.mera2002@gmail.com
Dr. Dola Sanjay SGoogle Scholar PageRamachandra College of Engineering, Indiadicedola@gmail.com
Arvind MewadaGoogle Scholar PageMNNIT Allahabad, Indiaarvindmewada@mnnit.ac.in
Dr. Mokhtar HamhamNot SuppliedAbdelmalek Essaadi University, MoroccoNot supplied
Dr. Ajay Singh TomarNot SuppliedJiwaji University, IndiaNot supplied
Dr. Anandaraj SPNot SuppliedSR Engineering College, IndiaNot supplied
Dr.T.C. ManjunathNot SuppliedHKBK College of Engineering, IndiaNot supplied
Dr.HARDEEP SINGH SAININot SuppliedIndo Global College of Engineering, IndiaNot supplied
Dr. N. S. Murthy SarmaNot SuppliedBonam Venkata Chalamayya Engineeering College, IndiaNot supplied
Dr. VUDA SREENIVASARAONot SuppliedBAHIR DAR UNIVERSITY, EthiopiaNot supplied
Dr. Dhanamma Shankar JagliNot SuppliedV. E. S. Institute of Technology, IndiaNot supplied
Dr. NARAYAN A. JOSHINot SuppliedInstitute of Science & Technology for Advanced Studies & Research, IndiaNot supplied
Dr. R. V. KRISHNAIAH,Not SuppliedDRK Institute of Science and Technology, IndiaNot supplied

Article history

Where an article has been updated since first being written, we provide a history of the changes. Why? Why not :-).

  1. The original article was published on 4 January 2020.
  2. The article was updated on 15 June 2023. We removed the profanities. Although we felt they were justified, SEO does not like it so we thought it best that we removed them. We also took the opportunity to update the article a little.
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How do you spot a ChatGPT paper? Here is one easy way

Header image for article 152

Unless you have been living on Mars, you cannot have avoided the discussion over ChatGPT (and other large language models) that has been going on for the past few months.

 

The discussion is not only about the uses that ChaptGPT can be put to, but also how content generated with these type of tools can be identified, which is important in the context of scientific publishing.

 

In this article, we look at a journal which has published a paper generated by ChatGPT. We have to say, that this is an obvious example, due to the naivety of the author and the lack of peer review. But this should only serve as a warning that journals/authors are already publishing papers written by large language models and they will not all be so easy to spot.

Are we allowed to used ChatGPT?

The short answer is no, or at least AI tools do not meet the conditions to be an author on a paper. This is stated by many organizations, such as COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), which says:

 

“AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.” [See here]

 

The same COPE web page goes on to say:

 

“Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.“

 

Many other publishers and organizations have also come out with similar statements.

How can you spot a ChatGPT paper?

There is a lot of work being done on how to detect AI written papers. One of the world’s leading plagiarism detectors (Turnitin) is looking to upgrade its tool to spot AI generated content.

 

This is to be welcomed, although it is likely to lead to an arms race where there is as much work being done how to avoid detection by tools such as Turnitin, as there is on developing the tools to detect this sort of content. You only need to do a search on how to avoid plagiarism detectors to show that this has been going on for many years.

 

However, there are times when we do not need these tools, you just need to look at the paper itself and apply some common sense.

 

But, first, let’s take a look at a specific journal.

Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce

The focus of this article is the Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce (ISSN: 1204-5357), as well as an article it published.

 

The journal is an established journal, first being published in 1996.

Google Scholar

If you look at the journal’s Google Scholar page, there are articles going back to 1970 (see Figure 1). We note though that the papers marked as 1970, have volume numbers as 12 and 13, which are from 2006 and 2007 and those papers do appear in those years, so it looks like a Google Scholar metadata issue.

We also note that there are no papers on their Google Scholar profile beyond 2021 (see Figure 2).

Google Scholar page for the Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce
Figure 1: Google Scholar page for the Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce showing that some papers date back to 1970, even though it did not start publishing until 1996
Figure 2: Google Scholar page for the Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce showing that no papers are indexed after 2021

Indexing in Scopus

The Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce was indexed in Scopus from 2009 to 2016, but was then discontinued (see Figure 3).

Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce: Scopus Coverage
Figure 3: Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce: Scopus Coverage

Article Processing Fees

The Article Processing Fees (APC) for the Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce is USD 2,019 and the journal also participates in the Fast Editorial Execution and Review Process. For an extra USD 99 (payable at submission time) it provides a review in 3-5 days and publication two days after.

We have archived the journal’s APC page here.

H-index

We mention in passing, as this always frustrates us, that the journal says (see archived page here) that:

“Articles published in Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce have been cited by esteemed scholars and scientists all around the world. Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce has got h-index 35, which means every article in Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce has got 35 average citations.“

This is just the wrong definition of h-index.

The Article

The article that we are interested in, is titled “Stock Price Prediction based on Gradient Descent using a Back Propagation Neutral Network“. The citation is:

 

Selvamuthu D. (2023) Stock price prediction based on gradient descent using a back propagation neutral network. Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce 28(1).

 

You can access the article here. We have also archived the web page here. The PDF, as well as being available via the journal’s web site, is also available here.

Stock Price Prediction based on Gradient Descent using a Back Propagation Neutral Network
Figure 4: Screenshot of the journal article, highlighting that it was generated with ChatGPT (or similar)
Figure 4 shows a screen shot of the article. The part we draw your attention to is the text highlighted in yellow, which says:
 
“As an AI language model, I can give you some information …“
 
It is obvious that this text has been generated by ChatGPT (or some other language model). Looking at the rest of the paper we would guess that the entire paper has been generated by ChatGPT (or similar).
 

Our Comments/Thoughts

We have the following comments about this journal/paper.

  1. The paper cannot have undergone any peer review. Surely, any cursory read (by a reviewer, for example) would have highlighted the fact that the paper had been written by ChatGPT (or similar).
  2. This area (Artificial Neural Networks – ANN) is something we know a little about (otherwise we would not comment on the technical content of the paper). This paper is very naive and could have been written in the 1980’s when interest in ANN started to gain traction. Even though, the paper is really nothing more than a general introduction to ANN’s. There is certainly nothing that is reproducible.
  3. The references are all quite old, with only one from 2021.
  4. If the author, their institution or another stakeholder paid over USD 2,000 to have this published then they wasted their own money or, perhaps more likely, wasted the money of the tax payers. Of course, the journal will be very happy to have received this money. We can’t help feel though that the money could have been used for much better things.

Finally

If the journal, publisher or author feel that we are wrong in our analysis, or are being unfair, then we would be delighted to enter into a conversation and withdraw or update this article as a (possible) outcome.

Acknowledgements

We were motivated to write this article after seeing a LinkedIn post by Matt Hodgkinson. You can see the post here (assuming you have access to LinkedIn). Matt’s post not only features the paper we mention above but also has other examples which, if not so worrying, would be funny.

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Support us by becoming a patron

Cutting to the chase

If you do not have the time, or the inclination to read all of this article, the take home message is that we are asking you to consider becoming a patron in order to support our work.

You can see more details by going directly to our Patreon page.

PLEASE NOTE: Whenever you decide to support us, you will be charged for the full amount for that month. This is the way Patreon works, at least for the way we have joined the scheme.

So, if you join on the 15th of the month you will be charged the full amount for that month and then charged again on the 1st of the following month. We are unable to provide refunds, or accept part payment for the month you start supporting us. If you want to avoid this (although you can still access all the services offered in that month), we suggest that you join us at the start of a month, so that you get the full benefit for that month.

Background

Our Predatory Publishing Twitter account has been running for about two years. At the time of writing (15 Aug 2021) we have tweeted almost 21,000 times, ranging from EMAIL snippets from (probably) predatory journals, quotes from papers on predatory publishing, looking at common terms and highlighting journals/publishers that you might want to be wary of. We also use our Twitter account to promote our blog.

Our blog has been running for a similar amount of time and we have published around 50 articles. We would like to publish many more. We have lots of ideas but there are always time pressures and writing a blog posts takes quite a lot of time.

Our web site also supports our Twitter account and blog. We hope to develop the web site in the future to provide even more information.

 

Thank you

We have been delighted with the level of engagement we have received since we started this initiative.

We do track some metrics, albeit in an ad-hoc way, and it shows a general increase in interaction since we started our Twitter and blog.

We are indebted to all those that have supported us. Thank you.

 

Controversy

We recognize that we are tackling a very controversial area, where others before us have faced significant difficulties. This is the reason why we are, at the moment, remaining anonymous. Once we have the trust of the scientific community and some traction, we will be more transparent about who is behind this initiative. The target we have set ourselves in 10,000 Twitter followers but we do review this as a goal from time to time but, at the moment, this is still out goal. At the time of writing we are about 37% towards that goal.

"Can you help/advise me, or do you have a view?"

As we have gained more exposure and traction, we are often asked questions, or for our views, about journals and publishers. Although we respond, we often have to say that “we will add it to our ever growing list and will look at the journal/publisher when time allows.“

We do work through that list but it is a little ad-hoc and, to be honest, we choose the ones that we think are most interesting. It might be useful if we had a way of prioritizing the journals/publishers that we look at.

What are our plans?

With your help, we hope that we can develop this platform even further and do more than we are doing at the moment.

We have the following ideas that, with your help, we can progress.

  1. We are asking our patrons (see below) to request reviews of journals and publishers, this will not only make the content we produce more relevant but it will also provide a constant source of content that we hope our supporters will find interesting.
  2. As we develop our database of journals and publishers, we will compile a searchable database so that others can find out about the journals and publishers that we have investigated.
  3. The number of blog posts we can produce at the moment is limited, due to time limitations and other calls on our time. If our patrons are keen to write about predatory journals (see below), this would not only add additional blog posts but also give a different perspective, rather than just hearing our views all of the time.
  4. We are considering starting a YouTube channel that focuses on Predatory Publishing, but this is not possible at the moment. We are keeping this idea on the “nice to do” list, but we need more time and/or support to be able to progress.
  5. We would like to develop some short courses, so that scholars can have a more structured way to learn about predatory publishers, enabling them to avoid the pit falls. Like the YouTube channel, we require more time/support.
  6. We have reported on several occasions sting operations against predatory journals. We believe that this is an effective way to highlight those journals that are operating in a predatory way. We would like to have a sustained way of testing suspected journals, rather than just having one off examples. That said, we must be careful not to waste the time of legitimate journals.
  7. We would like to publish peer reviewed papers, in (obviously) non-predatory journals that record the results of our findings. If others are willing we would be delighted to co-author papers with like minded researchers.
  8. Given the data and knowledge that we have accumulated during our journey, we would like to publish a book that provides the history of predatory publishing, the state of predatory publish at the present time and what can be done about it going forward. This will be a longer term project but the first stage is to find potential co-authors and then develop a proposal for a suitable publisher.
  9. For those of you that follow our Twitter account, you will see that we tweet on various topics, such as EMAIL snippets from (probably) predatory journals and quotes from papers on predatory publishing. Some of you may have noticed that these tweets follow a similar layout and the reason that we are able to tweet so regularly is because we have automated much of the processes behind these tweets. It is not really to do with predatory publishing but we are thinking about sharing some of the ways we do this, perhaps on a different platform.

Our longer term plans include working with research institutes to provide a more bespoke service that we can offer at the moment.

Become a Patron

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.

If you would like to be come a patron, please use this link and below we outline the various levels at which you can support us.

PLEASE NOTE: Whenever you decide to support us, you will be charged for the full amount for that month. This is the way Patreon works, at least for the way we have joined the scheme.

So, if you join on the 15th of the month you will be charged the full amount for that month and then charged again on the 1st of the following month. We are unable to provide refunds, or accept part payment for the month you start supporting us. If you want to avoid this (although you can still access all the services offered in that month), we suggest that you join us at the start of a month, so that you get the full benefit for that month.

1. Supporter

You will receive a monthly newsletter, that contains information that is either exclusive to our patrons or is provided ahead of time of being published on our other platforms. We will also use you as a sounding board for some of the ideas that we have.

2. Contributor

If you are interested in predatory/fake publishing and/or want to get some experience in writing/blogging, we would welcome one blog post a month from you. This will be published on our blog site (subject to editorial controls). We will help you to get the blog post as good as it can be so that it is a credit to you and us.

3. Journal Review

In each calendar month, you can request a review of a specific journal. We will provide some key data points (assuming the data is available). We will try to include:

  1. Whether the journal is recognized, or a member of, organizations such as ISSN, COPE, DOAJ and Scopus.
  2. Where the journal is located?
  3. How long it has been operating?
  4. How many articles have been published?
  5. Whether it is an open access journal.
  6. What are its Article Processing Charges (APCs)?

We will also provide our thoughts/comments as we carry out the investigation.

We will share this review on our blog site, so as to help others, but we will delay that post for at least a month so that you have the information before anybody else.

4. Publisher Review

In each calendar month, you can request a review of a specific publisher. We will provide key data points (assuming the data is available). We will try to include the following:

  1. How many journals the publisher has in their portfolio?
  2. Where the publisher is located?
  3. How long they have been operating?
  4. Whether they are indexed/members of organisations such as ISSN, COPE, DOAJ and Scopus?
  5. Whether they are only an open access publisher.

We will also provide our thoughts/comments as we carry out the investigation.

We are happy for you to request a review of a journal, rather than a publisher.

We will share this review on our blog site, in order to help others, but we will delay that post for at least a month so that you have the information before anybody else

5. Multiple Journal Reviews

This level of support provides the same as an individual journal review, but you can request up to four journal reviews in any calendar month. This provides one review free of charge when compared to the single journal review option.

6. Multiple Publisher Reviews

This level of support provides the same as an individual publisher review, but you can request up to four publisher reviews in any calendar month. This provides one review free of charge when compared to the single publisher review option.

7. Premium Supporter

This provides access to all of our other services. You will receive our newsletter, you can write a blog post each month and you can request both journal/publisher reviews, up to 10 in a calendar month, split across journal and publishers, whichever best meets your requirements.

As a premium supporter we will also provide you the other reviews that we have done at least a week before we publish them on our blog and/or web site, so that you get to see them before others (expect those that requested the review – they will get them first).

"I can't provide financial support at the moment"

We welcome any help that people can afford but if you cannot help at the present time (for whatever reason) no problem.

We hope that you will stay engaged and help us say spreading the word so that others can see what we are doing.

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How many editors does a journal need? The case of SCIREA

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 aim of these articles is to gain an insight into a specific journal or publisher and get a view of their practices and how they operate. We are particularly keen to provide an evidence based analysis, rather than being (too) subjective.

We occasionally give a view as to whether we believe a journal, or publisher, is predatory but we would rather present our findings and let others be the judge.

In this article, we present the data we have collected for SCIREA, with regard to the number of editors they have.

Who are SCIREA?

SCIREA is an open access publisher that publishes 39 journals (as at July 2021). Its Article Processing Charges (APC) are about USD 230. Each journal has its own APC page, but the ones we looked at were all USD 230.

None of the SCIREA journals appear to have an ISSN and they do not seem to be members of either COPE or DOAJ.

Looking at their web site, the majority of the journals started publishing in 2016. They generally publish each year, but there are some notable exceptions. For example, the SCIREA Journal of Hydraulic Engineering has published four articles, one in October 2016, one in October 2019, one in February 2019 and one in February 2021.

SCIREA is listed on the Stop Predatory Publisher web site.

SCIREA is listed on the Stop Predatory Publisher web site

Data collected for SCIREA journals?

To carry out our analysis we collected the following data:

  1. The journal names
  2. The journal URLs
  3. How many editors each journal has
  4. How many papers each journal has published

The data for each of the journals was collected manually, which was an easy task as there are only 39 journals. We also captured the URL of the journal as this would be useful later.

The editors are listed at one URL (as well as being listed on each journal’s pages). Nineteen editors are listed on each page and there are 700 pages (the final page has less then 19 editors listed). Each editor has their name, country, institution and the journal they serve. It was an easy matter to write a script to scrape the data from the web site. We had to scrape the web site, as manually collecting all the editor data was not possible.

Each individual journal lists all of the articles that it has published on a single page. It was easy just to collect the total number of papers each journal had published, by inspection. Note, we did not collect information about each article, just the number of articles that had been published.

This data collection showed that SCIREA publishes 39 journals, they have 13,288 editors and have published 654 papers (as at July 2021).

SCIREA: Number of Editors by Journal

Figure 2: The number of editors for each of SCIREA's journals (click to see larger image)

Figure 2 graphically shows the number of editors for each of SCIREA’s journal. There is a lot of data on the image, and if you click on it, you’ll see a larger version. We have also presented this data in Table 1, as this may be preferable for some people.

In total, SCIREA has 13,288 editors across its portfolio of 39 journals. That is an average of 341 editors serving each journal.

The number of editors ranges from 1,054 (SCIREA Journal of Physics) to 25 (SCIREA Journal of Surveying and Mapping). The number of editors, alone, is not really relevant unless you make a relative comparison, with the number of papers that the journal has published, which we do below.

[table id=072_001 /]

SCIREA: Number of Articles by Journal

Figure 3: The number of articles for each of SCIREA's journals (click to see larger image)

Figure 3 shows the number of articles that have been published by each journal in the SCIREA portfolio. SCIREA has published a total of 654 articles.

The number of papers published ranges from 85 (SCIREA Journal of Clinical Medicine) to one article for three journals. Two journals have yet to publish.

It should be noted that this is the number of articles since each journal started publishing which, is typically in late 2016. As we mention above, some of the journals publish regularly, but others are a little more erratic. We assume that the publication schedule is dictated by the submissions (and acceptances) that the journals receive.

We realize that Figure 3 is quite detailed. You can see a larger image by clicking on it, but we have also provided the data in Table 2 for those readers that find it easier to access the data in that format.

[table id=072_002 /]

How many papers does an editor handle?

Table 2 also shows (final column) the average number of articles that each editor has handled. This is calculated by taking the number of editors (see Table 1) and dividing it by the number of articles that have been published (see Table 2). In looking at this figure, the following should be noted:

  • The total number of articles is the total that have been published since the journal was started. That is, it is NOT the number of articles in (say) a twelve month period.
  • The number of papers we have calculated that has been handled by each editor is measured over the lifetime of the journal, NOT how many articles have been handled (say) every year.
  • Most of the journals started in 2016 so, if you want to calculate how many articles are handled each year by the editors you would need to divide the number by about 5.

The journal that has the highest “Articles per Editor” figure is the SCIREA Journal of Astronomy. On average, each of the 26 editors has handled 0.23 papers. This journal has only published six articles, one in 2017, two in 2018 and three in 2019. They are still inviting submissions, so we assume that the journal is still active.

This figure of 0.23 assumes that the number of papers published was the same number as were submitted. This is not a good assumption as any journal will have rejected a number of papers, but these still have to be handled by one of the editors.

If we assume that the rejection rate is 50%, then the number of papers handled by each editor would be 0.46.

You might feel that a 50% rejection rate is unrealistic. Let’s say that the SCIREA Journal of Astronomy rejects 75% of the papers it receives. This would mean that, on average, each editor would handle 0.92 papers.

To be absolutely clear, even if the journal rejected 75% of the papers it received, the 26 editors of SCIREA Journal of Astronomy, would have handled less than one paper each. And this is over the lifetime of the journal (four years), so that would be less then 0.25 papers each year, for each editor.

Every other journal in SCIREA’s portfolio has an average less than the SCIREA Journal of Astronomy, meaning that, on average, none of their 13,228 has handled more than one paper since the publisher started in (typically) 2016.

Final Remarks

Given how many papers SCIREA has published, they appear to have a lot of editors. So many in fact, that on average each editor would handle less than one paper every five years, and possibly a lot less.

In our experience, a typical editor would be expected to handle 5-6 papers a year. Of course, disciplines differ and that number could be a lot less and we know of editors that have handled many more.

Perhaps our analysis is in this article is wrong and that we have not fully understood how the journal works. Perhaps the editors carry out more work than we are suggesting?

We would be delighted to hear from an SCIREA editor who we would give the opportunity to relate their experiences in a blog post. We would also be delighted to hear from the the journal itself and we offer them the same opportunity to respond to this article, which we would be delighted to publish.

Finally, we have been tweeting about SCIREA and if you want to see these tweets, please follow this link.

 

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What is the Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE)?

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was established over 20 years ago.  COPE educates and supports editors and publishers, aiming to bring about a culture of ethical publishing, which becomes the norm within scientific publishing.

History of COPE?

COPE’s history can be traced back to April 1997, when it was founded by Mike Farthing, Richard Smith and Richard Horton. By 2003 COPE had 90 members.

In 2003 Fiona Godlee became the Chair of COPE. Godlee was appointed the Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious BMJ in 2005, a position she still holds at the time of writing (23 Mar 2021).

By 2006, COPE’s membership had risen to 350, which is the same year it became a charity and Harvey Marcovitch took over as the Chair.

By 2009, the membership had risen to over 3,000. This significant rise, we suspect, is due to the fact that some publishers now signed up all of the journals in their portfolios.

COPE also started producing flowcharts for various workflows. This is something that they still do today and this link shows you all the flowcharts they they currently produce.

As examples, there are flowcharts for “What to do if you suspect plagiarism” (see Figure 1) and “What to do if you suspect fabricated data“, along with many others.

Figure 1:Sample of COPE flowchart. See their web site for more details

Liz Wager took over as COPE Chair in 2009 and between 2009 and 2012 COPE held its first USA, Australian and Middle East seminar, as well as delivering its first eLearning course. To this day, COPE still has eLearning courses available, which are available to its registered members.

During this period, COPE also released their first retraction guidelines and released their publishers code of conduct. They also employed their first member of staff and published their first newsletter. 

Between 2012 and 2017 Ginny Barbour was COPE’s Chair. COPE held their first South American seminar and the first European seminar outside of London. Guidelines of cooperation between research institutions and journals were released, as well as a Code of Conduct, best practices for journal editors and ethical guidelines for peer reviewers.

COPE issued the “COPE Digest: Publication Ethics in Practice“, a newsletter that has been published since 2013.

Between 2017 and 2019 COPE had Co-Chairs (Chris Graf and Geri Pearson). As well as producing, and updating many guidelines and processes, COPE held its first China seminar, produced its first infographic and celebrated its 20th anniversary.

In 2019, Deborah Poff took over as Chair and developed a new strategic plan which included universities being accepted as members. The COPE web site now contains more than 600 cases and DOI’s are assigned to all key COPE resources.

At this time, COPE has more than 12,500 members from 2013 countries.

Deborah Poff’s term as Chair will end in May 2021, when Daniel Kulp will take over.

The information about the history of COPE is largely drawn from their infographic which can be seen here. This page also contains a lot more descriptive information.

Resources available from COPE

COPE provides a number of resources to the general public (by which we mean those who are not members of COPE). COPE has three types of resources available.

Flowcharts

The COPE web site states

“The flowcharts are designed to help editors follow COPE’s Core Practices and implement its advice when faced with cases of suspected misconduct and have been translated into a number of different languages. They can be downloaded individually (English only) or as a complete set.“

At the time of writing COPE had 36 flowcharts available. They can be accessed here.

Figure 2: Screen of the COPE flowchart area of the web site

Guidelines

Figure 3: Screen of the COPE guidelines area of the web site

COPE (at the time of writing) has 12 guideline documents available.

The guidelines cover topics such as “A short guide to ethical editing for new editors” and “Ethical guidelines for peer reviewers“.

Cases

The cases section of the COPE web site is by far the largest of the three types of resources that are available.

If you navigate to this area of the web site, you will find (at the time of writing) that 623 cases are available. Looking at the numbering scheme, it appears that the cases go all the way back to 1997.

Figure 4: Screen of the COPE cases area of the web site

These cases are very interesting just to browse through. Doing so provides many insights, even to experienced scholars.

COPE members can submit new cases, where they are seeking advice.

Becoming a member of COPE

Different entities can apply to become a member of COPE, these being (taken from their web site):

  • Editors of peer-reviewed academic journals;
  • Companies that publish peer-reviewed academic journals; and
  • Individuals or companies who are interested in publication ethics and are working in or associated with the publication of peer-reviewed scholarly journals may become an individual or corporate member. Journal editors or publishers are not eligible for individual or corporate membership.

When you apply, you will be assessed against a set of criteria before your membership application is accepted.

Checking for membership of COPE

Anybody is able to check if a journal or publisher is a member of COPE simply by using the search box at the top of their home page. You can type in the name of a journal (either by name or ISSN) or a publisher.

Figure 5 shows an example when we search for the publisher “Taylor and Francis”.

Figure 5: Sample search result returned from the COPE web site.

Using our tool

We have developed a tool that enables you to check if a journal is a member of COPE, a member of DOAJ and whether the journal’s ISSN number is recognized. You can do this yourself by going to the individual web sites but the tool we have developed enables you to check these three things at the same time.

An example of the output from our tool is shown in Figure 6 and full details how to use it are available in our article “Check if a journal is recognized by ISSN, COPE or DOAJ“.

Figure 6: Our tool to check if a journal is recognized by ISSN, COPE and DOAJ

Closing remarks

From a predatory publishing point of view, establishing whether a given journal or publisher is a member of COPE is a strong indication that the journal/publisher is legitimate. You may want to carry out additional checks but being a member of COPE should give you a strong steer that the journal you are dealing with is not predatory.

One word of caution, if a journal is not a member of COPE, it does not necessarily mean that the journal is predatory. The journal/publisher may have just decided, for good reasons, that they do not wish to become a member of COPE.

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Check if a journal is recognized by ISSN, COPE or DOAJ

Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. This means, at no additional cost to you, we receive a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

When we start looking at a journal, to determine whether if it is predatory or not, we always check to see if it is recognized by:

  1. ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)
  2. COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)
  3. DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)

To do this we use the ISSN as this is a unique identifier, or at least it should be. Not being a recognized by one of these organizations is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does start to raise warning bells that warrant further investigation.

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 provide a few more details about using this tool later in this article.

Why would you want to check a journal's membership?

The reasons we carry out initial checks to check whether a journal is recognized by ISSN, COPE and DOAJ are as follows:

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

ISSN is the body responsible for maintaining the register of all ISSN numbers. If you are unsure what an ISSN is, take a look at our article What is an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)?

They have their own web site at https://portal.issn.org/.

 

Figure 1: ISSN Logo

If a journal is claiming that it has an ISSN, the ISSN portal is the place to check that claim, just to make sure that ISSN has a record of that ISSN number and that it matches with what you believe it to be.

IMPORTANTLY, check that the journal name matches the journal name that the journal is claiming. You might find this a surprising thing to say, but look at our article How to spot a fake journal | A case study. This case study showed that the journal had an ISSN of 0378-1844. Using our tool (see Figure 2), you can see that the journal is recognized by ISSN, with the journal name being Interciencia.

Figure 2: Checking which organizations ISSN 0378-1844 is recognized by

If you look at the journal’s home page, that the case study was investigating, you will see that journal is called Interciencia Journal. The name is ever so slightly different, yet it claims to have the same ISSN number (0378-1844). For completeness the home page of the real journal is here.

In this case, we have two different journals, but one of them is fake (i.e. trying to leverage off the other ones reputation). Importantly, both journals use the same ISSN.

Apart from checking that the ISSN actually exists, it is worth looking a little further and making sure that the journal name matches exactly.

Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE)

Figure 3: COPE logo

COPE is an organization, where subscribing journals/publishers agree to adhere to the ethical guidelines that COPE publishes.

It may not be a problem if a journal/publisher is not a member of COPE. Many reputable, high quality journals aren’t, so it is not immediately a black mark if a given journal is not a member of COPE.

If a journal is a member, that is a good sign as you know that the checks/balances that COPE carry out have been passed by the journal/publisher.

What is more of a worry is that some journals may not be entirely truthful, so it is worth checking the following:

 

  1. If a journal uses the COPE logo on its web site, but has no right to do so (i.e. it is not a member of COPE). That is, you should not take at face value if a journal is displaying the COPE logo. ALWAYS go to the COPE web site, or us our tool, to validate this claim.
  2. Some journals do not display the COPE logo but say things such as “Our ethical guidelines, with regard to peer review and editorial practices, follow those prescribed by COPE“. This should start to ring warning bells as, even if that is true, if they are not actually a member of COPE, who is checking that the guidelines are followed. It could just be a bland statement which is not verifiable. Moreover, it could be trying to mislead potential authors that they are members of COPE, when they are not.

Directory of Open Access Journals

DOAJ is a membership based service. Journals apply, are vetted by DOAJ and, if they pass DOAJ’s admittance criteria they are accepted.

We have written an article about DOAJ if you want to know more details, see What is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)? 

Figure 4: DOAJ logo

What is important to note about DOAJ is that, as its name suggests, it only applicable to open access journals. So, if a journal is not open access, it will not be registered with DOAJ, no matter how good or bad it is.

Even if a journal is open access and it is not a member of DOAJ, this is not necessarily a bad sign. It is worthy of further investigation but an open access journal is not required to be a member of DOAJ.

Some journals will incorrectly display the DOAJ logo, so even if you see the logo on a web site it is worth checking through our tool or directly with the DOAJ web site. Do not just assume that, because the DOAJ logo is displayed that the journal is a member of DOAJ. Carry out the check yourself

How do you check a journal?

As we said, we always check whether a journal is recognized by ISSN, COPE and DOAJ. We can do this by going to the relevant web sites and putting in the information. Indeed, we would suggest that you do this if you want to be totally sure that the information is correct and up to date. We believe our tool is accurate and up to date, but if you want to be really sure go directly to the source.

Of course, you can also use our tool. Essentially, this accesses the three web sites for you and displays the results on a single page (see Figure 2). To do this, we take advantage of the web site’s API (Application Programming Interfaces) or by directly accessing the underlying elements that make up the web page. This often referred to as web scraping. The purpose of this article is not to teach you how to use an API, or how to scrape a web page, but there are plenty of resources out there that allow you to do that. You can search for it, and follow the various pages and/or videos. Alternatively, you might find these books helpful (affiliation links).

This is what you need to know

To use our tool, you use the URL below, adding the required ISSN to the end. For example, if you want to check ISSN ‘3456-6789’, you would use the URL:

https://predatory-publishing.com/ISSNCheck/?issn=3456-6789

If you click on the link above, it will show that the ISSN does not exist, but you can now simply edit the URL to put in the ISSN that you want to check.

Note, the format of an ISSN is four digits, followed by a hyphen, followed by another four digits (although the final digit can be an ‘X’ as it is a check digit).

Summary

When we are checking a journal, three of the initial checks we carry out are to find out if the ISSN number they are using is recognized by ISSN. We also check whether they are members of COPE and DOAJ.

You can do this by going to the individual web sites but we have developed a tool that carries out these three check using a single web page. The URL for this web page is https://predatory-publishing.com/ISSNCheck/?issn=3456-6789. You just need to supply your own ISSN.

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Is this a legitimate journal? How we respond

We are getting an increasing number of people asking us “Is [insert journal] a legitimate journal?”

Typically, we are sent a journal name, in the hope that we can tell them whether a journal is predatory or not. Our usual response is that we do not have a list of journals that we can simply refer to. That is not a service we offer, indeed, not a service we can offer at the moment, but there are others that do; for example Cabells.

At the present time, we see ourselves more as educators, trying to tell researchers what they should look out for.

In any case, we do not want to be the sole arbiter, deciding whether a journal is predatory or not. This is one of the things that Jeffrey Beall was criticized for. He, and he alone, decided whether a journal should appear on his list and some publishers were upset by this. We have written about this in one of our other articles.

Start by seeing if the journal is a member of COPE and/or DOAJ. You should also check if the journal is registered in Scopus and/or Web of Science. These will not provide a definitive answer as to whether the journal is predatory, but it’s a good start.

Sample Correspondence

Here are examples of typical questions that we get, together with our responses. We have, for obvious reasons, respected the confidentiality of the person who asked question who, we recognize just wants to know if they should submit to the journal in question.

  • “Could you please check whether the journal called [journal name] is a fake Journal or not? I have already published a paper with them in January 2020, but cannot find it through Google.”


    We had a quick look at this journal and it does look predatory, and we told the author that. We followed up this correspondence by writing an article, in which we provide a case study of the journal, which led us to the conclusion that the journal in question is a fake journal, although the evidence trail that led to this conclusion was far from straight forward. Please take a look at the article, it is an interesting read.

  •  “Could you please tell me about the Authenticity of these two Journals if whether they’ are Fake Journals or not? Thank you.” We were provided with images of two journal covers.


    In response to this question we asked “What is your view? Have you done any analysis?“, to which the answer was “No. I just ask if you know about them, then please just tell me. I was thinking that you are a group or organisation having database about fake journals.“

    We had to say “We don’t have a database, not even for predatory journals, let alone fake journals. We have to look at every journal individually. We will add it to our list of journals to investigate – but it will take time. But you can see the steps we went through from our previous article so if this is urgent, please take a look yourself.“

  • “Have you checked this journal [journal name]? Would request to hear your verdict on it. Wanted to publish with them and I found some contradicting reviews; some say predatory, others recommend it. So I was looking for an independent objective review.”


    Our response was “We do not have time to do a full review, but just had a quick look and we would (personally) avoid. Not least of all as you have to pay 60 USD just to submit, but there are other worrying things. We would look elsewhere. Not saying it is definitely predatory, but erring on the side of caution.“

Education is Important

Rather than trying to be the sole arbiter of whether a journal is predatory (or fake) or not, we are more inclined to help educate people, so that they can come to their own conclusion, and make a decision based on that. We believe that this is much more effective than maintaining yet another white/black list of journals.

Previously, we have made some judgments, which we back up with evidence, but we do not generally just say that a journal is predatory (or not) after just a cursory glance. To be frank, sometimes it is obvious, but we do not believe it is our place to make statements that might be biased, based on too little information or simply drawing an incorrect conclusion.

Another comment we often make, when asked for our view of a journal, is “What is your view?” Many people either fail to respond, or say that they do not know, which is the reason they asked us. That is fine, but if we just give our view that may not be fair on the journal as it is just one view, perhaps, based on limited information. There is a more of a need for education, to inform researchers what to look for when trying to decide if to submit to a journal or not.

What can you check?

We have written a number of previous articles on what you can check when trying to decide whether to submit to a particular journal. The case study we did, we think, will be useful in this regards. You might also want to take a look at “Three quick was to spot a predatory journal” and “Analysing a journal: An Example“.

Four quick checks

Whenever we look at a journal, there are four quick checks that we always carry out.

  1. Is the journal a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)? COPE is a member based service, which publishers and journals can apply to join. If they pass the checks made by COPE than they will be accepted.

  2. Are they listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)? DOAJ maintains a list of open access journals that they have validated. DOAJ did have some issues a few years ago but that is in the past and, in our view, it is now a valuable and reliable resource.

  3. Is the journal in the Scopus bibliographic database? Scopus is one of the recognized bibliographic databases that provides, among other, this impact factors for the journals that they accept. To get accepted by Scopus is a robust process.

  4. Is the journal listed in the Web of Science bibliographic database? The Web of Science database provides a similar service to Scopus. It is arguably more difficult to get accepted by Web of Science than it is to be accepted by Scopus.

If you want more information, below we have linked to some video’s which goes into further detail about COPE, DOAJ, Scopus and Web of Science.

Testing it out

We thought we would take a look at the journals we were asked about using the above four criteria. We have not included Interciencia Journal as this is fully discussed in the article that looked specifically at that journal.

Table 1 shows these journals and whether they are recognized by COPE, DOAJ, Scopus and Web of Science.

[table id=058_001 /]

What if they all say No?

It is IMPORTANT to note that, even if the answer, for a given journal, to each of the questions above is No, this is far from a definitive indication that the journal is either fake or predatory. As an example, if a journal is not an Open Access journal, then DOAJ would not list it. That does not make it a bad journal. It just means that it is not even on the radar of DOAJ and will not be evaluated.

Similarly, not being included in the other three databases we mention is not necessarily a negative.

Therefore, we cannot immediately infer anything about the second and third journal in Table 1 just because they are not members, or recognized, by any of those organizations. It does suggest though that further investigation is required.

But, and it's a big BUT

If the journal does have at least one “Yes” next to it, it starts to build confidence, but you should still carry out additional checks.

This was particularly apparent when we investigated Interciencia Journal. Everything looked fine, and it ticked a few boxes, but it became apparent that it had hijacked the ISSN of a legitimate journal and so, of course, everything looked good, until you dug a little deeper.

We decided to delve a little deeper into the two journals that had some positive indicators in Table 1, just to show you what additional checks you may want to do.

Humanities & Social Sciences Research

On its home page Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews claims that it is listed in Scopus (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Home page of Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews (accessed, 10 Jan 2021)

Just because a journal says something on its home page, does not necessarily mean that it is telling the truth. You need to double check. Figure 2 shows this check, when we accessed the Scopus web site using the ISSN for Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews.

Figure 2: Checking Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews on Scopus

It is good to see that this appears to check out. Not only does the the ISSN check out, which cannot always be totally trusted as we saw from our previous case study, but the journal name and the publisher also align with the journal’s home page.

More checks should be carried out, but the fact that the journal has been verified as a Scopus journal bodes well.

International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (IJCIET)

The International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology was also found when we searched the Scopus database. Figure 3 shows the journal’s home page. It claims to be recognized by Scopus. That is easy to check, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 3: Home page of International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (accessed, 10 Jan 2021)

Figure 4 shows that the journal is recognized by Scopus. This is good news, but it is worrying that all the various metrics are shown as “N/A”. This needs a little further investigation.

Figure 4: Checking International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology on Scopus

Clicking on the journal name, leads us to a screen that is shown at the bottom of Figure 4. We have highlighted the important part, with a yellow highlighter, which shows that the journal has been discontinued in Scopus. This is a worry and is deserving of further investigation.

We are not going to carry out a detailed investigation, but we will make a couple of comments, just to show you some of our thought processes.

  1. Looking at Figure 3, there is a box that mentions journal impact, giving a list of impact factors from 2010 to 2020. This looks impressive as the impact factor is increasing and shows that the journal has been publishing for at least 10 years. The issue we would raise is that there are no links on the page and we do not know what impact factor the journal is referring to.

  2. Again, looking at Figure 3, the journal makes reference to the Scope Database. We are not aware of this database so we would suggest that it requires more investigation, just to check on its validity and authenticity. It might be fine, but (personally) we would want to check.
There are some concerns about this journal, despite it being listed by Scopus. This is why, the four checks we suggest in this article should only be the start of your investigation.

Conclusion

We are getting an increasing number of requests to give our view on a given journal. We are not happy to provide a view, without carrying out an extensive, evidence based study. Given the number of alleged predatory journals, that is simply not possible.

We see a need for education so that researchers can arrive at their own conclusion about a journal. In this article we provide four quick checks that we carry out, which anybody can do, especially if you have the ISSN for the journal that you are investigating.

It is important to realize though that these four indicators are just that, indicators, and they should be used as a starting point for further investigations.

We did that for two journals and got very different results. One journal was validated as being an active registered journal with Scopus, while the other was registered with Scopus but its listing has now been discontinued. At first sight the journals look the same, with regard to their Scopus status, but digging a little deeper shows that this is not the case.

As we have said before though, the world is not short of legitimate journals so, if you have any doubts just move onto the next journal on your target list, rather than taking a chance on a journal that you are unsure of.

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What type of journal publishes a fake scientific paper?

Publishing a fake paper in a predatory, scientific journal appears to be relatively easy. The example we focus on in this article shows just how easy.

We have published several articles on sting operations against predatory publishers, but we make no apology for highlighting another one. Indeed, we will continue to highlight them whenever we find them.

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.

In this article we primarily focus on the journal and the publisher. We do this as the story behind the paper has already been covered in another article by the author himself.

We are keen to look at the type of journal that publishes a fake scientific paper so that other researchers might be able to draw on some of our insights to decide if a journal is predatory, or perhaps, when planning their own sting operation to expose a predatory journal.

TEDx Talk by Bradley Allf

Since writing this article, we are delighted that Bradley Allf has done a TEDx talk on the paper that we discuss in this article. It’s a great watch and we would encourage you to take a look.

 

The fake paper

The fake paper was published in “US-China Education Review A.” The full citation of the article is:

Allf B.C., Pinkman J.B. and White W.H. (2020) Experiential Learning in Secondary Education Chemistry Courses: A Significant Life Experiences Framework. US-China Education Review A 10(4):158-164. DOI: 10.17265/2161-623X/2020.04.002

In the rest of this section, we look at some aspects of the paper that we found interesting, if not amusing.

The article’s home page

Figure 1 shows the page that is displayed, when you follow the DOI link.

Publishing a fake paper: Screenshot showing the page that is displayed when you follow the DOI (accessed 28 Nov 2020)

 

Figure 1: Publishing a fake paper: Screenshot showing the page that is displayed when you follow the DOI (accessed 28 Nov 2020)

We make the following comments on this web page:

  • It is interesting that the journal title is not displayed anywhere on the page.
  • The “Cite this paper” section is not a live link, so we are unable to retrieve an example of how the paper should be cited.
  • The “References” is not a live link. You need to access the paper to look at the references. This is actually not too much of a hindrance as the paper is open access and we only make the point to highlight the shortcomings of the web site.
  • Indeed, none of the links on this page are live, including the DOI and the keywords.

The paper’s authors

Many fake papers that are published often have a comedic element to them. We still smile when we think about some of the author names and paper titles that we reported in “Journal publishes a spoof Covid-19 paper“, with regard to their papers that they cited, which were figments of the author’s very active imagination.

For the paper that is the focus of this article, we find it very amusing that the authors, in addition to Bradley Allf, are Jesse B. Pinkman and Walter H. White.

Publishing a fake paper: This paper was co-authored by Jesse B. Pinkman and Walter H. White, who are characters from the TV series Breaking Bad

 

Figure 2: Publishing a fake paper: This paper was co-authored by Jesse B. Pinkman and Walter H. White, who are characters from the TV series Breaking Bad

Jesse Pinkman and Walter White are the two main characters in the TV series Breaking Bad. We hope that Bryan Lee Cranston and Aaron Paul Sturtevant (the actors real names) are impressed that their characters were able to publish a peer reviewed, scientific paper, which is based on the story line of the hit TV series.

Pinkman’s and White’s affiliation is given as “J. P. Wynne High School, Albuquerque, USA“, which is the fictional school from the TV series.

The paper’s “storyline”

For those of you not familiar with the story line of Breaking Bad, it is essentially about a high school chemistry teacher (Walter White) who starts producing drugs to support his family after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He teams up with his former student (Jesse Pinkman) and they soon become major players in the drugs market due to the high quality drugs that they produce.

The fake paper, as well as having the main characters from Breaking Bad as authors, also draw on the underlying premise of the TV series in the preparation of the paper.

One of the quotes we like from the paper is:

“a largely insignificant aside: the new teaching style was not actually employed in these courses, and was instead taught in an one-on-one basis with a single student, already graduated from the school: JBP; as another insignificant, almost unnecessary-to-state aside, White soon left his post at Wynne HS to pursue his drastic new instructional techniques in a “freelance” capacity.”

This just about sums up one of the main story lines of the Breaking Bad series, or at least explains how the two main characters came to be working together.

There is also “nonsense” in the paper, such as stating that “Albuquerque is part of the Galapagos Islands.” It then goes on to give various geological details, which have no relevance to the main content of the paper. The section in question concludes “The first fossil evidence of humans in Albuquerque is from approximately 109 years ago.” If these are not red flags to any sensible review process, we are not sure what is?

We recommend that you take a look at the paper, especially if you are aware of the plot line of Breaking Bad. You will appreciate the subtleties (perhaps not so subtle) hidden within the paper.

Review and publication timescales

When we look at papers from predatory journals, we are always interested in the times scales. That is, how long did it take to get the first review back and then how long did it take before the paper was published.

We are also interested in the reviewers comments.

It would also be interesting to see the email that was the catalyst for the paper. In his article describing his experiences of why he submitted the article, the authors says:

“I received a strange email from a pair of academic journals inviting me to submit my research to one of their latest issues.“

It would be interesting to see this strange email. If nothing else we could include it in our database of strange things said in emails from predatory journals.

Unfortunately, none of this information is available but, if the author is willing to share this, we would be very interested to see it.

The Journal

It is always interesting to take a look at the journal in cases such as this, just to see if we can establish if the journal is legitimate, or not. In this section we take a look at some features of the journal. If you think we have missed anything, let us know and we will update this article.

US-China Education Review A

The paper was published in “US-China Education Review A“. This journal is published by the “David Publishing Company” (we look at the publisher below).

Just for the sake of record, we have captured the journal’s home page (accessed 28 Nov 2020). We have not put the image on this web site, as it only has limited appeal, but it is available to those that want to view it.

We also note that, in addition to the journal in question (US-China Education Review A), there is also another journal (US-China Education Review B). We have also captured the home page of this journal.

US-China Education Review A: Indexing

Figure 3 shows the indexing page of the journal.

Publishing a fake paper: The "indexing" page of US-China Education Review A, the journal which published the fake paper (accessed 28 Nov 2020)

 

Figure 3: Publishing a fake paper: The “indexing” page of US-China Education Review A, the journal which published the fake paper (accessed 28 Nov 2020)

We note that many of them are not really indexing services, in that they are no mark of quality. For example, listing Google Scholar, Scribd and Sherpa Romeo, although very worthwhile organisations, do not give any guarantee of quality. It is probably not wrong to use the term “indexing” but in the context of an academic journal this term is usually associated with services such as Thomson Reuters and Scopus and the term, to the unwary, would suggest that being indexed by an organisation is somehow a validation of the quality of the journal.

Others are misleading. For example, there is an entry that says “SJournal Index“. There is no link associated with this entry (any of them actually) so if you carry out a Google Search, the top entry is ‘Scientific Journal Rankings – SJR” (see figure 4).

Searching for "SJournal Index"

 

Figure 4: Searching for “SJournal Index”

If the journal is registered with Scimago, this would be an indicator of quality.

However:

  • Note that the search that was returned is actually for “Journal Index“, not “SJournal Index“.
  • If you click on the link to search instead for “SJournal Index“, this returns results which point back to David Publishing (see Figure 5). This is a worry and suggests that David Publishing is using “SJournal index” so that, if it is searched, it gives the impression that the journal is recognized by Scimago.
  • Just to be be certain, we searched the Scimago database, and the journal was not found (the screen shot is here, accessed 28 Nov 2020).

Forcing Google to search for "SJournal index"

 

Figure 5: Forcing Google to search for “SJournal index”

We mentioned above that none of the indexing items are live links. We wanted to say a few more words on this point. If the journal wanted to be transparent, then it should provide a link so that the reader can easily validate what the journal is saying, as well as saving the reader the bother of having to carry out the search for themselves and, perhaps, having to interpret the results.

To show how easy this is, we searched a few of the indexing terms and have provided live links in the list below.

  1. Citefactor
  2. Google Scholar

Some of them were not valid. For example, Electronic Journals Library (EZB) does not recognize the journal (see the screen shot here).

We also looked at Scribd and could find articles for 2013, but struggled to find other years.

Social Media

Looking at Figure 3, there are some social media platforms mentioned at the bottom left of the home page. We just note that none of these links are active.

We searched some social media platforms but we were unable to find any mention of the journal.

Memberships of DOAJ and COPE

Whenever we are looking at an open access journal, we always check whether they are a member of DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and COPE (Committee of Publication Ethics).

The US-China Education Review A is not a member of DOAJ or COPE.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but if a journal is a member of DOAJ and/or COPE it can be seen as a positive, but not being a member is not always a negative, but it just gives another piece of the jigsaw and can inform the conclusion we reach about the journal.

Article Processing Charges

We looked for the article processing charges (APC) but struggled to find anything. However, if you look at Figure 6, you will see that the journal has a subscription link (highlighted in yellow). Clicking that that, leads to a page which lists all the journals, giving the “Print” price. We have extracted the part for US-China Education Review A, (shows in the red ellipse) which shows that the price is $600.

Publishing a fake paper: The subscription charges for "US-China Education Review A", the journal which published the fake paper

 

Figure 6: Publishing a fake paper: The subscription charges for “US-China Education Review A”, the journal which published the fake paper

This is of the same magnitude that the author reported they were asked to pay. The author was asked to pay $520, which many other journals in the David Publishing Company portfolio, state as the price. It looks like that they have recently increased the price for this journal.

So, although it is listed as a subscription cost, it looks as if this is a APC. This might simply be a mistake but it could be done on purpose to make any authors believe that this is a subscription based journal, rather than an open access journal. It is only when they receive an invoice does it become clear.

David Publishing Company

US-China Education Review A is published by the David Publishing Company.

We thought that we would just take a quick look at the publisher, just so that we have it on record, at this point in time (28 Nov 2020).

David Publishing Company: Journals

Table 1 shows the full list of 52 journals that we found on the David Publishing Company web site (accessed on 28 Nov 2020)

Title ISSN Link
China-USA Business Review 1537-1514 Home Page
Chinese Business Review 1537-1506 Home Page
Communication and Public Diplomacy 2578-4277 Home Page
Computer Technology and Application 1934-7332 Home Page
Cultural and Religious Studies 2328-2177 Home Page
Economics World 2328-7144 Home Page
History Research 2159-550X Home Page
International Relations and Diplomacy 2328-2134 Home Page
Journal of Aerospace Science and Technology 2332-8258 Home Page
Journal of Agricultural Science and Technology A 2161-6256 Home Page
Journal of Agricultural Science and Technology B 2161-6264 Home Page
Journal of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering 1934-7375 Home Page
Journal of Civil Engineering and Architecture 1934-7359 Home Page
Journal of Communication and Computer 1548-7709 Home Page
Journal of Control Science and Engineering 2328-2231 Home Page
Journal of Earth Science and Engineering 2159-581X Home Page
Journal of Electrical Engineering 2328-2223 Home Page
Journal of Energy and Power Engineering 1934-8975 Home Page
Journal of Environmental Science and Engineering A 2162-5298 Home Page
Journal of Environmental Science and Engineering B 2162-5263 Home Page
Journal of Food Science and Engineering 2159-5828 Home Page
Journal of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering 2332-8223 Home Page
Journal of Geological Resource and Engineering 2328-2193 Home Page
Journal of Health Science 2328-7136 Home Page
Journal of Hydraulic Engineering 2332-8215 Home Page
Journal of Life Sciences 1934-7391 Home Page
Journal of Literary Anthropology 2687-8232 Home Page
Journal of Literature and Art Studies 2159-5836 Home Page
Journal of Materials Science and Engineering A 2161-6213 Home Page
Journal of Materials Science and Engineering B 2161-6221 Home Page
Journal of Mathematics and System Science 2159-5291 Home Page
Journal of Mechanics Engineering and Automation 2159-5275 Home Page
Journal of Modern Accounting and Auditing 1548-6583 Home Page
Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology 2328-2150 Home Page
Journal of Physical Science and Application 2159-5348 Home Page
Journal of Shipping and Ocean Engineering 2159-5879 Home Page
Journal of Sports Science 2332-7839 Home Page
Journal of Statistical Science and Application 2328-224X Home Page
Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Management 2328-2169 Home Page
Journal of Traffic and Transportation Engineering 2328-2142 Home Page
Journal of US-China Medical Science 1548-6648 Home Page
Journal of US-China Public Administration 1548-6591 Home Page
Journalism and Mass Communication 2160-6579 Home Page
Management Studies 2328-2185 Home Page
Philosophy Study 2159-5313 Home Page
Psychology Research 2159-5542 Home Page
Sino-US English Teaching 1539-8072 Home Page
Sociology Study 2159-5526 Home Page
US-China Education Review A 2161-623X Home Page
US-China Education Review B 2161-6248 Home Page
US-China Foreign Language 1539-8080 Home Page
US-China Law Review 1548-6605 Home Page
Table 1: Journals that are published by David Publishing Company (as at 28 Nov 2020), which includes the journal which published the fake paper.

We have not looked at any of these journals, but we have added the David Publishing Company to our list of publishers that we believe require further investigation.

Read more

The author, Bradley Allf, has written an article about his experiences in writing and publishing this article. A lot of the material we report above is drawn from Bradley’s article but it is still worth a read, as it contains many more details than we have included here, as it is pointless us repeating the same information.

Conclusion

At the time of writing (29 Nov 2020), the article was still available on the journal’s web site. You can access it via it DOI, 10.17265/2161-623X/2020.04.002. But, if the article is removed, we have archived a copy here.

From the experiences reported in this article, we would suggest that you avoid submitting articles to US-China Education Review A. Indeed, we would avoid the journals in the David Publishing Company portfolio.

If you believe that you would like to submit to this journal, or another journal from this publisher’s stable, please carry out your own due diligence and, remember, there are plenty of journals to choose from so if you have any doubts just move onto the next one.

You might also be interested in …

  1. Journal publishes a spoof Covid-19 paper
  2. Sting operations in predatory publishing
  3. Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List

Acknowledgements

  1. Breaking Bad image #1: From www.hdwallpapers.net/tv-and-movies, CC BY-SA 3.0
  2. Breaking Bad image #2: From www.hdwallpapers.net/tv-and-movies, CC BY-SA 3.0 (we have incorporated this image into a shark’s jaw to create the header image)
  3. Shark’s Jaw: https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-omgan

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How to spot a fake journal | A case study

We were recently contacted via a direct message on Twitter which 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 document the process we went through to answer this question, using the journal in question as a case study.

How to spot a fake journal?

  1. Check the journal name very carefully. The fake journal may have very subtle differences to the journal they are impersonating. They may even have the same name, which is just another element that you will need to investigate.
  2. Check the URL of the journal. Does it agree with what you might expect to see.
  3. Look at the journal’s home page and investigate all the claims that they make with regard to membership (such as DOAJ and COPE), impact factors and whether they are listed in bibliographic databases such as Scopus and Clarivate.
  4. Do not just rely on the ISSN, as the fake journal may be using the ISSN of the legitimate journal and all the checks you make will validate the journal as legitimate.
  5. Check the journal’s web site, editorial board, previous papers, open access policy etc. Does it look like a legitimate journal?
  6. Try to track down the journal that it is impersonating. This will be your strongest evidence as you can then compare the two.

At first it may seem daunting to try and establish whether a journal is fake, but you only need to find one thing and that will lead to other things and the body of evidence will quickly build up.

In this article, we provide a case study which documents our investigation. Every investigation will be different, but we hope this article provides some ideas as to how you can carry out your own investigation.

Like predatory journals, if you have any doubts, just move onto the next journal. The scientific world is not short of journals that you can submit to.

We will keep the identify of the person who asked the original question confidential (it was a private direct message after all), but will send a link of this article to the person that asked the question by way of a response, which we hope they find useful.

What is a fake journal?

It is important that we understand what we mean by a fake journal, at least for the purposes of this article.

A fake journal represents itself as another journal in the hope that it can get researchers to submit to this fake journal, rather than the researcher submitting their research to the legitimate journal. Invariably they will want to charge for publishing your article, even if the legitimate journal it is impersonating does not have an Article Processing Charge (APC).

Fake journals are different to predatory journals. Predatory journals use the open access model of publishing but have little (or no) peer review, and will accept most (if not all) papers. Fake journals take this one stage further. They are predatory, but also leverage on the good name and reputation of a legitimate journal.

Predatory journals, as are fake journals, are primarily motivated by financial gains. They have no interest in ensuring that the integrity of the scientific archive is maintained.

If you want to read more about this topic, the following articles may be of interest:

  1. What is Predatory Publishing? | … and should you care?
  2. Do predatory publishers respect the scientific archive?
  3. Three quick ways to spot a predatory journal

What started the investigation?

As mentioned in the introductory remarks, we received a Twiter direct message which said:

“Hello

Thanks for all your efforts for ridding Scientific Research and Publications from Predatory/fake Journals. Could you please check if the Journal Interciencia Journal is a fake Journal or not?

I have already published a paper with them in [redacted] and I did not yet find it in Google Search.

Regards“

We have redacted the date that the author had published a paper, to further protect their identity.

Initial investigation

Our aim is to ascertain whether Interciencia Journal is a fake journal, or not. First of all we looked through various metrics, organisations – just to see if the journal was listed and recognized by them.

  1. Search for the journal

As you might expect the first thing we did was to search for the journal. The first entry in the search results was a link to a journal, with a URL of http://www.intercienciajournal.com/, which led to the home page shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Home page of Interciencia Journal, accessed 22 Nov 2020

From this home page we note that (see the blue highlights):

  1. The journal has an ISSN (0378-1844).
  2. It says that some of the source data comes from “Thomson Reuters Citation Data“. This is encouraging.
  3. It says it is indexed in the “Science Citation Index Expanded“. This is good to see.
  4. It says it is indexed in Scopus, again good to see.
  5. It says that is has been evaluated by the Directory of Open Access Journals. Not sure what “been evaluated” means.
  6. It has a link to the Thomson Reuters ISI Index page. This is a good sign

This what we would expect to see for a high quality, open access journal. So let’s take a closer look at these some of these to verify them.

  1. ISSN

If you want to read more about ISSN’s, take a look at our article “What is an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)?” where we go into more depth about what they are.

Whether a journal has an ISSN, or not, is no indicator of quality but the ISSN can be used to find out about the journal, as it it is a unique identifier.

Figure 2 shows the result returned from the ISSN portal.

Searching for ISSN 0378-1844 on the ISSN portal
Figure 2: Searching for ISSN 0378-1844 on the ISSN portal

This looks good. At least the ISSN is valid and we can use it in other searches, knowing that the ISSN is recognised.

  1. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

The Directory of Open Access Journals maintains a list (via a membership scheme) of legitimate open access journals. If you want to know more about DOAJ, take a look at the article we we wrote on this organisation.

Using the ISSN (0378-1844), it is easy to find out of a journal is a member of DOAJ. Figure 3 shows the result.

Searching for ISSN 0378-1844 on DOAJ. Three articles are returned, but not journal
Figure 3: Searching for ISSN 0378-1844 on DOAJ. Three articles are returned, but not journal

The search returned three results, but these are all articles. The expected journal is not returned. This is a red flag, which deserves further investigation. It is not necessarily bad, but it is something to be noted, especially as the journals says that it has been evaluated by DOAJ.

  1. Committee on Publications Effort (COPE)

COPE is an organisation that journals can join, committing them to uphold certain ethical standards with regard to scientific publishing.

Although Interciencia Journal does not claim to be a member of COPE it is often a check we make. If it turns out to be a member, that is a positive. It is not necessarily a negative if it is not a member, but it is worth the ten seconds it takes to check.

Figure 4 shows the result of the search.

Searching for ISSN 0378-1884 being a member of the Committee of Publication Ethics
Figure 4: Searching for ISSN 0378-1884 being a member of the Committee of Publication Ethics

The result of the search show that ISSN 0378-1844 is not a member of COPE.

  1. Thomson Reuters (ISI)

One of the claims made by Interciencia Journal is that it is indexed by ISI. If you look at Figure 1, you can see where this claim is made. The highlighted area (bottom right of Figure 1) is a clickable URL. If you follow this link, it leads to the screen shown in Figure 5.

Following the Thomson Reuters link on the Interciencia Journal web site
Figure 5: Following the Thomson Reuters link on the Interciencia Journal web site

This leads to the Clarivate web site (which is what we would expect) and the ISSN/journal appears. This looks good.

As a secondary check, we also searched Web of Science, from outside of the Interciencia Journal web site and saw the information shown in Figure 6. This confirms that the journal is recognised by Web of Science.

Moreover, it has an impact factor of 0.448 and, for those of you who are interested in these things it has been indexed since 1997 (across two different categories), ranking as Q3 or Q4. Since 2008, when it transferred from the “Multidisciplinary Sciences” category to the “Ecology” category, it has always been Q4 (at least up to 2019, which is the latest figures available when we chanced on 25 Nov 2020).

Verifying that ISSN 0378-1844 is recognised by Web of Science
Figure 6: Verifying that ISSN 0378-1844 is recognised by Web of Science

  1. Scopus

Figure 1 shows that Interciencia Journal is indexed by Scopus. There is no link on the journal’s home page, but it is easy to check whether it is a Scopus recognised journal or not.

We logged into Scopus and searched for the journal. The result is shown in Figure 7.

Validating that ISSN 0378-1844 is listed by Scopus
Figure 7: Validating that ISSN 0378-1844 is listed by Scopus

This confirms that 0378-1844 is recognised by Scopus.

What does this tell us?

After this initial investigation, what do we know.

  1. The ISSN is a valid ISSN and is recognised by the body which looks after ISSN.
  2. The journal is not registered with either DOAJ or COPE
  3. The journal is recognised by Thomson Reuters (Web of Science, ISI or Clarivate; or however you refer to it).
  4. The journal is recognised by Scopus

Given that the journal is recognised by ISI and Scopus, we can forgive it not being a member of DOAJ or COPE and this profile would certainly suggest that we are looking at a legitimate journal and we can go ahead and submit our research paper.

But, and there is a big but ….

The Journal Name

So far we have focussed on the ISSN, as this is a unique identifier and it enables us to check on website sites such as DOAJ, COPE and Scopus a lot more easily that typing the journal name in.

But what about the journal name? We are looking at a journal called Interciencia Journal, but if you look at Figure 2 (ISSN), Figure 5 (Web of Science), Figure 6 (Web of Science) and Figure 7 (Scopus) you might have noticed that the journal name is given as Interciencia. The “Journal” is “missing“.

Is this something we should be concerned about? After all, if somebody told you that the journal was called Interciencia, it would seem reasonable to search for “Interciencia Journal”.

Searching for Interciencia

Rather than searching for “Interciencia Journal“, we searched for “Interciencia“. Figure 8 shows the search page that was returned.

Searching for "Interciencia", rather than "Interciencia Journal"
Figure 8: Searching for “Interciencia”, rather than “Interciencia Journal”

When we searched before (for “Interciencia Journal“), the third entry in Figure 8 appeared at the top of the list. When we search for “Interciencia” (without Journal) that entry is now third in the list and there is a new item as the first entry.

The first item has a URL of https://www.interciencia.net/, and the third entry has a URL of https://intercienciajournal.com/.

Both of these links lead to journals with an ISSN of 0378-1844. You can see this in Figure 1, and Figure 9 shows the page that https://www.interciencia.net/ leads to. We have highlighted the ISSN (0378-1844) shown at the top of the page.

The home page of Interciencia
Figure 9: The home page of Interciencia

This is a worry as we have found two different home pages, which are using the same ISSN.

Interciencia versus Interciencia Journal

We are now in a position where we have two journals that have (or at least claim to have) the same ISSN. Which journal is the correct one, and which one is the fake one.

The name is the giveaway. One agrees with Scopus, Thomson Reuters and the ISSN portal. That is, Interciencia WITHOUT “Journal”, is the legitimate journal. Interciencia Journal is a fake journal.

Just to be absolutely clear, Interciencia is a legitimate journal and Interciencia Journal is a fake journal, trying to leverage off the success of the legitimate journal.

Observations

Now that we have established that there are two journals with the same ISSN, but one of them is fake, what else can we say?

We make the following observations, noting that this is related to just these two journals. As we say above, any investigation that you carry out will be different but we hope that our observations will give you some idea of areas that you may want to look at.

  1. We have already commented on the Interciencia Journal home page. Most of its information is leveraging on ISSN 0378-1844.

    What we have found about ISSN 0378-1844 is largely correct, with the exception of having any association with DOAJ, although it did only say that it was being “evaluated“, not that it was a member of DOAJ.

    The key point is that Interciencia Journal is not the journal that has an ISSN of 0378-1844. This ISSN belongs to another, legitimate journal, with a very similar name.

  2. Looking at the “Policies” page for Interciencia Journal (we have provided it here if you want to see it), it states “All papers will be double blind peer reviewed by 2-3 expert reviewers with 2 weeks from the submission time.” In line with many predatory journals, one thing they offer is fast review (and publication) times.

    Note: we have not shown some images on this page, but have provided a link to them. This is an attempt to not “clutter up” up this page but to still make the images accessible to those that would like to see them.

  3. Both journals are publishing volume 45 in 2020. In the case of Interciencia Journal you can only access the archive back to 2012 (Volume 37). Strangely Interciencia only goes back to 2009 (Volume 34). We are unsure why you cannot access back to Volume 1?

    Here are the screenshots of the relevant pages.
    Archive for Interciencia (taken 22 Nov 2020)
    Archive for Interciencia Journal (taken 22 Nov 2020)

  4. If you are still not convinced that they are different journals, take a look at the papers published in (say) Volume 45 Issue 10. The paper titles for both journals are totally different.
  5. When we tried to access the papers, the papers in Interciencia are freely available, but Interciencia Journal asks for 2,000 USD to access all of their content (here is a screenshot of the web page).

    If you click on this link you are taken to a Knowledge Insights web page, where you can make payment (a screenshot is available here). We have had a quick look at Knowledge Insights. It was not on the original Beall’s List, but is now (22 Nov 2020), marked as “may be predatory“. See https://beallslist.net/ (accessed 22 Nov 2020).

  6. When you look at the papers on Interciencia Journal, you are unable to see who the authors are (unless, we assume, you pay US$ 2,000 and access the full paper). This is not necessarily bad, but is a little strange.

    We would like to have checked whether the the paper had been published by the person who contacted us. You might recall, they said “As I have already published a paper with them in [Redacted] and I did not yet find it in Google Search !!!” We don’t have access to the author name, or the paper title, so we are unable to check whether it has actually been published.

  7. The editorial boards of both journals are different. Just so that we have it recorded, here is the editorial board of Interciencia and Interciencia Journal.
  8. If you look at some of text describing the journals, you will find this on Interciencia Journal (screenshot here) web site:

    “The journal is dedicated to stimulating scientific and technological research, to its humane use and to the study of the social context in which scientific and technological development occur.“

    If you look at the web pages of Interciencia, you will find the following text (screenshot here)

    “It is dedicated to stimulate scientific research, its humanitarian use and the study of its social context, specially in Latin America and the Caribbean and to promote communication between the scientific and technological communities of the Americas.“

    The two pieces of text are different but you cannot help but notice the similarities.

  9. Interciencia Journal does not provide any information about its Article Processing Charges (APC) but we were informed by the person that originally contacted us that they were required to pay a fee. They were unwilling to tell us how much.
    Bear in mind that readers also have to pay (US$ 2,000) – see point 6 above.

    Interciencia is an open access journal and charges US$225 per published page, as well as offering some concessions. See the screenshot here.

What does Interciencia have to say?

Looking at the legitimate journal’s web site they are aware that others are making use of their name. Figure 10 shows a screenshot from their web site warning of unscrupulous practices.

Note that this is dated 2017, so they have recognized the problem for a number of years.

The warning given on the web site of Interciencia (accessed 22 Nov 2020)
Figure 10: The warning given on the web site of Interciencia (accessed 22 Nov 2020)

Conclusion

What started off as a simple question led us down a path of discovery. We quickly came to the conclusion that Interciencia Journal was a fake journal, giving it a very similar name to another journal and publishing statistics on its web site which, although true, are related to an ISSN that belongs to the legitimate journal.

The choice of journal name is also part of the con. If you know that the journal is called Interciencia you are quite likely to search for “Interciencia Journal“. However, by doing so, this shows the fake journal at the top of the search results.

There were some warning signs that the authors might have looked for. They could have verified the journal through Thomson Reuters and Scopus, paying special attention to the journal name. They might have also looked at the web site, which looks a little cumbersome and amateurish.

When they received a demand for payment, this should have raised a red flag, as there is nothing on the web site to say that the journal is open access and will charge a publication fee.

It is always useful to look at some of the papers that have been published which does not seem possible for Intercencia Journal, unless you pay $US 2,000, which goes against the principles of open access.

So, the clues were there, but it is so easy to get conned that we can only feel sorry for the authors and we hope that this article helps others not to suffer the same fate.

Acknowledgments

  • We would like to than the person who raised this issue with us. We have said that we will not publish their name, but we owe a debt of thanks nonetheless.
  • Header image: https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-qztso