To demonstrate that a journal is predatory sting operations have been carried out. A nonsense paper to see if it gets through the peer review and subsequently published.
In this article we look at a few papers that were submitted to test whether a journal is predatory, whether these were submitted but never made it to publication, or whether the paper was actually published.
“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”.
One of the solutions to our first Only Connect wall was four spoof/sting papers. In this article, we provide more details.
In 2014 a journal accepted a paper that just repeated the phrase “Get me off your f*@^ing email list”. This article looks at the history of the paper, as well as the journal in question.
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.
If you get an email from a predatory journal, you should delete it. Or should you? Here are a few other things you could do.