Tag: Ethics

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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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Is this Fiverr gig ethical?

Header image: Showing images of two different people

This is a slightly different post as it’s not really about predatory publishing but rather about ….. let’s call it ethical publishing.

Since starting this blog, we have begun to realize that there are many more issues than just, what we refer to as predatory publishing. It is in the context of this that we decided to publish this article.

Previous Fiverr article

In a previous article, we reported an email that we had seen from Fiverr, asking the person that received the email to submit to a WSEAS journal.

Fiverr were good enough to respond to this article, saying that the email had been spoofed and it had not originated from one of their accounts.

We are grateful to Fiverr for this and we are confident that they do not want their platform to be abused just as much as we do. We appreciate them responding to us.

The rest of this article looks at another aspect of Fiverr, but we are not accusing Fiverr of acting unethically but we hope that our observation helps them in any investigation.

Is Fiverr promoting unethical gigs?

We were recently looking at Fiverr, just to see what type of services that they offer. We came across this entry. It is typical and is just the one we decided to focus our attention on.

The person’s tag line is “I will write qualitative research proposal, articles and methodology” (see Figure 1).

The gig offering from writing_axpert on Fiverr
Figure 1: Gig offering from writing_axpert on Fiverr

Later on they say (see Figure 2) what you will actually get.

However, this article is not about the gig being offered by this person, we can study that later. What we want to look at is how the person represents themselves, rather than two different images which might be assumed to be them.

Figure 2: Gig offering from writing_axpert on Fiverr (further details)

Misrepreseantation?

Figure 3 shows images a number of images when you look at the profile for writing_axpert on Fiverr. There are two different images, which seems strange as we would assume that somebody who was advertising their services would use a picture of themselves.

Figure 3: Profile page of writing_axpert on Fiverr

Digging a little deeper (essentially using backwards image search on Google Images), we managed to find the following.

The image on the left we found at job talent web site (see Figure 4). We did see it at a few other places but the job talent web page was the most prominent.

The two images on the right, we found in a number of places. For example, we found the image being used on the https://www.anytechtrial.com/blogs/ blogging platform (see Figure 5) and also at https://www.badasswebgoddess.com/ (see Figure 6).

The same image found on a job talent web site
Figure 4: The same image found on a job talent web site
Figure 4: Showing the same image being used on a blog
Figure 5: The same image being used on another blog
Figure 6: The same image being used that appears on badasswebgoddess.com

As we searched for the image, we actually found many references to Canva. We suspect that the images are available there and, as a consequence, has been widely used by many people and companies.

Does it matter?

Does it matter that this person (almost certainly) is using images which are not her (or him)? After all, many other people/companies seem to be using the same image so, if we are concerned about writing_axpert, surely we should have the same concerns whenever this image is used?

I think the issue we have is the entire package. Although we have not commented on the ethics of the service they appear to be offering, we do have some concerns about the gig being offered and the fact that the person does not give their real name and does not use a picture of themselves, you cannot be sure who you are dealing with.

Would you be happy about entering into a business relationship with such a person? How sure can you be that they can deliver? How sure can you be that what they deliver has not been copied (and changed to avoid plagiarism detection)? What about the ethics of what they are offering?

We’d be interested in what you think? Let us know on out Twitter account.

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Call for authorships, but paper already published?

In this article we address a question for which we have no answer. We are hoping that you can help us solve it.

We have become aware of a Facebook post seeking co-authors for a paper. Yet, we think, we think the paper was published almost a year earlier. We cannot really work out what is happening.

We seek your help in answering this question.

If you are interested in this aspect of predatory publishing (if we can call it that), we wrote a previous article we addressed a similar issue to that discussed in this article.

The Facebook post

Figure 1 shows a Facebook post (if you click on the link, you may not be able to see the post as you have to be a member of the group to view posts), in the Facebook Group called “Journals Indexed in Scopus/ Thomson Reuters“.

We would draw your attention to three points.

  1. This post was made on 4 December 2021 (green highlight).
  2. It is offering opportunities for collaboration in a Scopus Q3 journal (red highlight). From the author “positions” after each journal title it looks as if they are offering (we assume for a fee) the possibility of being an author on that paper.
  3. The main focus of this article is the sixth article (yellow highlight).

We go into more detail of each of these points below.

Facebook post: Cal for authors
Figure 1: Facebook post: Cal for authors

The paper we found

Given that the Facebook post was made at the start of December 2021, and we are writing this article in the middle of February 2022, it seemed natural to see if the paper had been published already, and then to see what conclusions, if any, we could draw (for example, how many authors there were, did any of the authors come from those who had expressed an interest to the Facebook post).

We searched for the paper title and found this paper (see Figure 2), which you can access via DOI 10.12973/eu-jer.10.1.497.

Figure 2: Paper from European Journal of Educational Research

The Journal

Before we look at the paper, let’s look at the journal, just for completeness.

The journal is the European Journal of Education Research, which is published by the Eurasian Society of Educational Research, which is based in the USA.

Looking at their archives, the journal has been published since 2012.

It has indexed by Scopus since 2018.

Figure 3 shows the information about this journal, as reported by Scopus (left hand side) and the information from the journal’s home page (right hand side). You’ll see that it has an SJR impact factor of 0.319 and is in Quartile 3.

Scopus details: European Journal of Educational Research
Figure 3: Scopus details: European Journal of Educational Research

Our Comments

Given the information we have presented above, we have the following observations, comments and questions.

  1. The titles of the two papers (Journal: “The Implementation of Mathematics Comic through Contextual Teaching and Learning to Improve Critical Thinking Ability and Character“, Facebook post: “Implementation of Mathematics Comic through Contextual Method to Improve Critical Thinking Skill“) looks too close to be coincidental. At least we think so.
    Perhaps we are wrong and the Facebook post is referring to a different paper, in a different journal. Maybe, time will tell but, at the moment, we think that the two papers are the same.
  2. It is telling that the Facebook post refers to a Scopus Q3 journal, which the European Journal of Educational Research is. This provides further support, albeit not definitive, that it is referring to the same journal.
  3. There are two things that we do not understand. The first is (assuming we are referring to the same paper) is why was the paper published in January 2021 (see Figure 2), yet the call for authors is put out in December 2021 (see Figure 1)? Does anybody have any answer to that question?
  4. The second thing we do not understand is, how the authors positions are “sold”? The Facebook post mentions that positions 1-5 are available. We are unsure how this works. Does anybody have any insights that they could share with us, particularly how this “scheme” works in the general sense, rather than just this specific example.
  5. Finally, even if the two papers (Facebook post and the published paper) are unrelated, we still question the legitimacy and the ethics behind the calls for authors that we can see in Figure 1. We would welcome any comments/views you have. Let us know in the comments.

Disclaimers

We need to point out, that we are not making any accusations, insinuations or drawing any negative conclusions about the authors of the paper shown in Figure 2. They published a paper, in a Scopus journal in January 2021 and we do nothing but congratulate them.

Similarly, we are not painting the journal in any negative light. They have published a paper and we have no reason to believe that anything untoward has taken place.

What we do question is the Facebook post (Figure 1). Even if that Facebook post is not related in any way to article shown in Figure 2, there are still questions that need to be answered about this parctise.

Final Remark

If you have any comments on this post, please make your view known in the comments section. We do moderate comments, for (we hope) obvious reasons, so any comments you make may take a little while to appear.

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Facebook post provides the opportunity to be an author

Featured image

A Facebook group is offering the opportunity to be an author of a paper, if you pay a fee. In this article we present what we have found, but there are still a lot of questions that need answering.

In this article we look at the Facebook group, from where the post came, an example post that has been made in this group and a paper that was published which, we believe, is the paper that is being referred to in the post. We also provide some of our own comments.

The Facebook group

The post that was passed to us came from a Facebook group called Journals Indexed in Scopus/Thomson Reuters (Wos) (see Figure 1).

If you follow the above link, you will be taken to the group. You have to be a member to see their posts. We note that the group has over 40,000 members, which suggests that it is quite easy to join so, if you want to see the type of posts that are made in this group, it should be easy to join.

The Facebook group "Journals Indexed in Scopus / Thomson Reuters (Wos):
Figure 1: The Facebook group "Journals Indexed in Scopus / Thomson Reuters (Wos):

The Facebook post

We were recently made aware of the Facebook post shown in Figure 2, that was posted in the group that we mention above (see Figure 1). The link for the post is https://www.facebook.com/groups/1997039280603383/posts/2646346535672651/, but you have be a member of the group to view the post.

Facebook post, call from collaboration
Figure 2: Facebook post, calling for collaboration

Figure 2 shows a call for collaboration. It’s not totally clear what is being offered, but it looks like that there are three papers that are being written and there are positions available in the author list for anybody that is interested. We assume that there would need to be a monetary exchange at some point.

Figure 3 shows some of the comments on this post.

Comments to Facebook post
Figure 3: Comments on the Facebook post

What strikes us about these comments is that the original poster quickly wants to get you to use DM (Direct Message) rather than post any further information in the public forum.

Not just on this post, but others that also appear in this group, if you ask what journal the paper will appear in, or ask anything about costs, you are asked to go to DM, or email. We have not found any posts where this type of information is provided.

We can only assume that this is not to show too much information, not to put people off with any financial information or to start a meaningful dialogue. Perhaps it is also aimed at collecting information that can be used to contact people later when other opportunities present themselves.

The resultant paper

Figure 4: The paper that was published

We have searched for some of the paper titles that are being advertised in this Facebook group. Most of them do not return a search result, at least not one that is conclusive. Perhaps this is because the title of the papers is purposefully mangled to stop people searching. Of course, it could be that the paper is never published.

However, some do return results that are interesting.

If you look at Figure 1, you can see that we have highlighted the first paper that is being offered as a collaborative opportunity. If you search for this paper, you can find a paper has been published with a very similar name in the Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies. You can access the paper (“CALLing the process of writing”: Facebook as language support learning tool in enhancing the EFL learners’ online writing performance) here.

You’ll see that the paper that was advertised in Figure 1 was titled:

Facebook as language support learning tool in enhancing the EFL learners’ online writing performance

The paper that was actually published was titled:

“CALLing the process of writing”: Facebook as language support learning tool in enhancing the EFL learners’ online writing performance

… apart from the additional words at that start of the title, they are identical. This suggests (to us anyway) that the paper that was advertised on the Facebook group was duly published.

Any other evidence?

Apart from the paper title, what else can we we say about the paper paper referred to in Figure 1, that suggests it is the paper that was subsequently published (see Figure 4).

Timeline

You’ll see from Figure 2 that the Facebook post was made on 16 October 2021. Figure 4 shows that the paper was accepted on the 12 November 2021. We would suggest that this timeline works for the Facebook post and the resultant paper, if they are referring to the same paper.

It is also interesting to note that the paper was submitted 07 September 2021, suggesting that the paper was submitted, then additional authors were sought and these added when a revision of the paper was submitted. At least that is our interpretation. It would be very interesting to see the audit trail of the review process for this paper but I suspect that we would not be able (allowed) to access this. But, if the editorial staff of the journal are reading this, we would value their comments on this interpretation. Let us know at admin@predatory-publishing.com.

Scopus Quartile

You’ll note from Figure 1 that the journal is stated as being a Scopus Q2 journal. If you look up the Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, on Scopus, it appears in three categories, Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language and Education.

Looking at the journals in the Language and Linguistics category (see Figure 5), we that there are 1,075 journals in this category, with the Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies being ranked 499, thus placing it in the second quartile (Q2).

Figure 5: Scopus percentile of the Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)

Another check we did was look at the journal’s web site. This had an image that says that the SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) is 0.17 and that the journal is in the second quartile (Q2). This is shown on the right hand side of Figure 6. We can validate this by looking at Scopus (see left hand side of Figure 6). This also shows that the SJR of the journal is 0.17, which matches with the information on the web site.

SJR and quartile of the Journal of Language and Linguistics Studies
Figure 6: SJR and quartile of the Journal of Language and Linguistics Studies

Summary

I think we have enough evidence to show that the paper that was “advertised” in Figure 1 is the same paper that was published a month or so later. If you disagree, let us know (admin@predatory-publishing.com).

Our Comments

Given what we have said above, we make the following comments/observations:

  1. We note (see Figure 1) that the Facebook post is seeking author ranks for positions 5, 6, 7 and 8. In the paper that was published there were five authors listed. Can we conclude that the fifth author paid to be on the paper and that they failed to attract authors for positions 6, 7 and 8?
    In fact, we cannot make that conclusion, without further evidence. It would also be unfair on the fifth author who has not had the right of reply (see comment 4). Therefore, unless we have more information, I do not think we can draw any firm conclusions.
  2. If this paper was submitted on 07 September 2021 (see Figure 4) and the Facebook post was posted on 16 October 2021, it would suggest that there was no authors in position 5, 6, 7 and 8 (noting what we said above about not wanting to be unfair to the fifth author).
    If we assume (and it is a big assumption) that the paper was submitted with only four authors, what was the process to add another author at a later stage?
  3. Given what we have said above, it would be very interesting to see the full review process of this paper. That is the various submissions and the reviewers comments. We do not expect the journal to release this information but it could be a way to show that the Facebook post was not successful in what it was trying to do.
    If the journal wants to let us have sight of this information, we invite them to contact us at admin@predatory-publishing.com. We will respect the confidentiality of the information that is provided.
  4. It is quite possible that the journal, and the authors of the paper, are totally oblivious to this Facebook post and what it may suggest. It would be interesting to hear from the editors and or the authors (admin@predatory-publishing.com).

Times Higher Education article

Whilst researching this article, we can across a very interesting, and recent, article that was published by Jack Grove, in the Times Higher Education. The article is very relevant to this article.

The article, “Academic fraud factories are booming, warns plagiarism sleuth” can be seen here and is based on the work of Anna Abalkina.

Let us know your experiences

If you have had experience with this type of publishing, we would like to hear from you. Please contact us at admin@predatory-publishing.com.

 

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Should proof reading be acknowledged in scientific papers?

We recently ran a survey asking if an acknowledgement is required if somebody proof reads your paper. The results revealed that 55.6% said that no acknowledgement is required, with 44.4% saying that an acknowledge should be provided. However, these results come with some caveats, which we explore in this article.

The survey

The question we posed was:

“If somebody uses a proof reading service (which might include adding refs, changing the structure, correcting grammar etc.) do you think they should acknowledge this in the paper, on the basis that the reader/employer/supervisor has a right to know that they received help?“

The answers that could be chosen were “Yes acknowledgement reqd.” and “No need to acknowledgement“.

The survey ran for about seven days (11th August 2021 to 18th August 2021).

Figure 1 shows the survey as presented on Twitter.

Figure 1: Survey as presented on Twitter

Survey results

The survey attracted 36 responses, with 16 people (44.4%) saying that that an acknowledgement is required 20 people (55.6%) saying that there is no need to acknowledge. These results can be seen in Figure 2. The Twitter result can also be seen here.

Figure 2: Results of Twitter survey

Comments on the survey

We provide our thoughts on the survey below.

Survey size

We recognize that a survey size of 36 people is not that large, so we have to bear that in mind when drawing any conclusions.

Survey demographics

In any survey, it is important that we draw our responses from the right demographics. This is often a random set of people from a given subset of the population.

In this survey, this was not possible for a number of reasons.

Firstly, those that participate in the survey are those that follow (or see) our Twitter account. This means that they have an interest in predatory publishing and do not represent the entire scholarly population which, ideally, is where we would like to draw our respondents from.

Secondly, both those that answered yes and no could have ulterior reasons for answering that way. For example, we could have got responses from those that charge for these services and would prefer not to be acknowledged. We could have got responses from supervisors who would prefer their students to acknowledge them.

Thirdly, we could have got duplicate responses from the same person who have more than one Twitter account.

For these reasons, we cannot take the survey too seriously, or at least draw any concrete conclusions.

Survey question

We know that the question was not ideally worded. You can only say so much on a Twitter survey.

However, in hindsight, we should have made the question a little clearer. There is a difference between ONLY proof reading paper, when compared to restructuring, adding references etc. We may run another survey, sometime in the future, where the question will be a little more targeted. 

What do we think?

Now the survey is over, we can give our view.

If a proof reader (service provider, whatever you want to call them) does anything above and beyond simply proof reading then we believe that the person(s) who helped should be acknowledged, if not be an author, if the contribution is enough to warrant it.

We also believe that if an author employs a proof reader, then that should be acknowledged. Our argument is that the person reading the paper has the right to know if the author (especially in the case of single authored papers) received help. It is not so much for the scientific/technical/contribution elements of the paper (the reviewers should see to that) but it is for potential employers, promotion panels etc. where the people looking at the paper have an interest whether the person can write good English, rather than having to have it corrected by somebody else, possibly using a paid service.

 

Figure 3: Is There a Role for Publication Consultants and How Should Their Contribution be Recognized?

One of the reason we carried out this survey is because of a paper that asked “Is There a Role for Publication Consultants and How Should Their Contribution be Recognized?” The conclusion of this paper said:

 

“Readers of academic papers have the right to know who contributed to the paper, whether this is by the list of authors, by the acknowledgments or by the work that is cited. Any help, not represented by the list of authors, should be acknowledged. This is often done by recognizing the funding agency, the efforts of colleagues, software providers etc. This acknowledgment should also extend to publication consultancy services, where assistance has been provided, albeit via a paid for service.“

We thought we would see what others thought.

Twitter Comments

As this poll was running it got a few comments. We have shown some of these below. You can see them on the Twitter post, but this just saves you having to click through to Twitter.

  • “I think if you’re being evaluated on the things the service provides, then supervisor/employer should be informed. Otherwise a brief acknowledgment of assistance is nice/thoughtful/completist, but it’s absence IMO wouldn’t be ethically disqualifying.“
  • “If the proof-reading would suggest me in the comments to change structure or add some references, I would acknowledge that.“
  • “I think there is no immediate answer here. Just proof-reading or correcting grammar needs no acknowledgment if done on a contractual basis, but adding references, changing the structure, etc., is a different thing. And this is not the proof-reader’s job either.“
  • “Agreed (sortof), the problem arises when it goes beyond proof reading. We say sortof as does a reader not have the right to know if the author can write fluent English if (say) they were looking at the paper for a job application?“
  • “I would say no when it comes to academic papers (but yes for jobs, even though an interview would help sort out the matter in extremis). Otherwise you are placing native speakers at an implicit advantage. After all, as a reader, why would I care about who did the language edit?“
  • “An editor doesn’t usually get credit for a novel or other work of literature. Many editors when have a policy that they do not want to be mentioned.“

 

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With your support, it will enable us to deploy some of the ideas that we have, and will also enable us to work more closely together. As an example, we will look at journals and/or publishers that you propose. You can read more here.

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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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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

Please consider supporting us by becoming a patron

Thank you for reading this article. If you would like to support the work we do, please consider becoming one of our patrons.

With your support, it will enable us to deploy some of the ideas that we have, and will also enable us to work more closely together. As an example, we will look at journals and/or publishers that you propose. You can read more here.