Tag: Sting

Posted on

Sting operations in predatory publishing

In order to demonstrate that a given journal is predatory, some people have staged sting operations. That is, they submit a nonsense paper to see if it gets through the peer review, or whether these is any peer review at all.

In this article we look at a few papers that were submitted to test journals, whether these were submitted but never made it to publication, or whether the paper was actually published.

We also take the opportunity to look at a paper that we felt could have been a sting paper but, we suspect that it was submitted, and accepted, as regular paper. We just find it hard to believe that the paper went through rigorous peer review.

Sting operations

To show the danger of predatory publishing and to demonstrate the lack of peer review, there have been a number of sting operations.

Get me off your f@#&ing mailing list

Perhaps the most famous, certainly the one with the most evocative title, is a paper that was submitted with the title “Get me off Your F@#&ing Mailing List” and which just repeated this phrase hundreds of times in the body of the paper. The paper was submitted to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, which accepted it and then demanded USD 150 to publish it.

We have published a previous article, which focuses on this particular sting. If we are honest, it is probably our favorite sting, not only because it uses rude words, but also because it is so obviously nonsense and any cursory glance, let alone peer review, would have spotted this.

SCIgen

Not a sting in its own right, but there are ways that you can generate scientific papers. They will be nonsense, but could get past an editor who does nothing else other than glance at the paper. SCIgen is probably the most famous. This tool generates random Computer Science papers and, if you try it, it does produce gobbledegook, but it looks convincing at first sight. We plan to write a more detailed blog post about the automatic generation of papers but, if you want to give SciGen a try, take a look their at their website. 

You can see one of their generated papers here.

Who's afraid of peer review?

If you want a viewpoint, that is more scientific in nature, about a sting operation aimed at a predatory publisher, we would suggest you take a look at the following paper.

The paper starts by saying:

“On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Ocorrafoo Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s shortcomings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly fl awed that the results are meaningless.

I know because I wrote the paper.“

John Bohannon goes on to say that he submitted 304 versions of that paper to open access journals, with more than half of those journals accepting the paper.

The journal that accepted the paper (Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals) was published by Medknow, which publish more than 270 journals, as noted in Bohannon’s paper. Looking at the Medknow web site now (accessed, 5 Sep 2020), they now state that they publish 487 journals. The journal in question does not seem to exist anymore, which agrees with the statement in Bohannon’s paper that the managing editor agreed to close the journal down.

Given that Bohannon’s paper was published in 2013, it would be unfair to make any comment about the legitimacy of the journals published by Medknow seven years on, but we have added it to the list of publishers that we would like to investigate. If you have had any experience with Medknow, please let us know via our Twitter site.

As we said above, more than half of the 304 submissions of the paper were accepted. This included acceptances by Sage and Elsevier. It is credit to PLOS ONE, one of the leading open access journals, that the paper was rejected within two weeks after checking some facts with the fictional author.

The Bohannon paper is an interesting read and contain many more details than we can cover here.

Some actually made it

It is one thing submitting a nonsense paper, which is never published (usually as the authors do not pay the Article Processing Charges), but some nonsense papers have made it to being published; and some remain there for the world to see.

Mathematical proof of the law of Karma

In an article by Jeffrey Beall (“Predatory journals exploit structural weaknesses in scholarly publishing“) he cites an article from 2014, entitled “Mathematical proof of the Law of Karma“. Talking about the publisher, Science Publishing Group (SPG), he says:

“People are being fooled into believing SPG is a legitimate publisher or they are exploiting its automatic article acceptance to get easy academic credit, or both. Many of the articles it publishes are nonsense. For many years, I’ve used the article ‘Mathematical proof of the law of karma’ as an example in lectures I’ve given, an article that always draws laughter from the audience.“

The Karma paper is still available (follow the link above), if you want to take a look at it.

We cannot comment on the quality of SPG, as the Karma paper was published six years ago, but it is another publisher on our list that we would like to take a closer look at.

What's the deal with birds

This paper, we would like to think on purpose but it was probably just a happy coincidence, was published on 1 April 2020. If you don’t know, this is known as April Fools Day. 

The paper was received by Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews on 25 March 2020 and published on 1 April 2020. That is only eight days, including the day of receipt and the day of publication. Moreover, there was a weekend in there, so really only six working days between receipt and publication. In our experience, this is VERY fast and suggests that peer review was not carried out.

This view is supported by looking at the paper. The Introduction starts with this:

“Birds are very strange. Some people are like ‘whoa they’re flying around and stuff, what’s the deal with that?’ This sentiment is shared by people across socioeconomic backgrounds. Figuring out what the deal is with birds is of the utmost scientific importance.“

We would suggest that this is not the type of wording you would expect in a high quality, peer reviewed scientific paper.  But the acknowledgments, in our mind, are magnificent. They say:

“We thank Big Bird from Sesame Street for comments on the manuscript. Several trained monkeys transcribed videos.“

Isn’t that brilliant? More importantly, any form of peer review would surely would have raised a smile on the reviewer’s face before rejecting the paper.

The paper is no longer available. Following the publicity it received (for example, see this article) it was withdrawn. The DOI (10.33552/SJRR.2020.02.000540) is now reported as being not available.

Fortunately, before the paper was withdrawn, we retrieved a copy and you can download it from this link.

The publisher of the journal is Iris Publishers. This is another publisher that we have put on our list to look at more closely.

Sting, Exploitative or Genuine?

There are some articles that could be a sting operation, which have made it through to publication, they could be an author that is using predatory publishers to bolster their CV or the paper could be genuine.

An article published earlier this year, and we only mention it as we were discussing it with somebody on Twitter Direct Messages, we feel sure cannot be a genuine article, but if you are an expert in space exploration, please feel free to correct us.

The article claims to have a way of moving a spacecraft at 99% of the speed of light. There are two things that worry us about this paper. The first is that if this is true, we would have expected to have seen this widely reported in the international media. None of us here are physicists, but as science aware people, we do not believe that moving at 99% of the speed of light is currently possible.

The other worry is that the paper was received on 3 July 2020, was accepted on 7 July 2020 and published on 30 July 2020. For such an important claim, we would have expected the review time to be more than four days.

As we say, we are not physicists, or space scientists, so please take a look at the paper and draw your own conclusions. The details are as follows:

D. Kamalta (2020) Move the Spacecraft at 99% Speed of light by Rotation Technique, Journal of Space Exploration, 9(2):1-3. The DOI is 10.21767/2319-9822.1000163, but when we tried to link to the article using the DOI, it did not work, but we could access the paper using this link.

The journal is published by Trade Science Inc. Another publisher we have added to our list to investigate.

Finally

In this article, we have described a number of sting operations. No doubt there are others and we would be interested in compiling a comprehensive list, so if you know of any, please let us know.

As well as sting operations, where the paper did not make it into print, some been published. They may have subsequently be withdrawn (but not always), but the fact that they got through the peer review process, all the way to being published does not look good on the journal that published the paper. If you know of any papers that were designed to illustrate the lack of peer review for a predatory journal, please share it with us, especially if they made it all the way to being published.

We also looked at one paper that looks as if it cannot be true, but we are not expert enough to make a definitive judgement. If you are an expert in space exploration, please let us know your view. We would also be interested in other papers that look like they are totally nonsense, whether they were submitted as a sting operation or for some other reason.

The research for this article drew out four publishers that are certainly worth another look, these being Medknow, Science Publishing Group (SPG), Trade Science Inc. and Iris Publishers. If you know of any other publishers that are worth us investigating, please let us know.

FURTHER READING

If you want to read more about predatory publishing, you might want to take a one of our other articles, “Read these three articles to understand predatory publishing“. The articles mentioned in that article are all open access so are available to anybody.

Many people ask, “How do you identify a predatory journal?” Another way to ask this question is “How do you identify a non-predatory journal?” To answer this question, take a look at the article that we published. If you want to know three quick ways to identify a predatory journal, take a look at this article.

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 6 September 2020.
  2. The article was updated on 04 August 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.
Posted on

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.
Posted on

Spoof papers on our Only Connect wall

A fist (representing Spoof) and four spoof papers from our first Only Connect wall

We recently posted an “Only Connect” wall, where we challenged you to put sixteen clues into four groups.

 

This article looks at one of the groups, discussing it in a little more detail.

 

Before we begin

If you don’t know about Only Connect, take a look at the article we wrote which describes the BBC quiz show and also explains why we are attracted to it and which parts of the show we draw from.

 

The Only Connect wall that we presented, and from which this article draws from, can be seen here. It presents the wall and the answer.

The connection

The connection between four of the papers (see Figure 1) on the wall is that they were all sting (or spoof, if you prefer) papers. That is, they were submitted to scientific journals/conferences to test the robustness of the peer review process and to see if they could get the sting/spoof paper accepted.

 

All of these papers managed to get through peer review, and were accepted, which strongly suggests that there was not any.

Sting papers, answer to out first Only Connect wall
Figure 1: Sting papers, one of the answers to our first Only Connect wall

The papers

1. Get me off your F*@^ing Mailing list

This paper was originally written as a conference paper and was subsequently submitted to a journal (International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology), in 2014. The paper repeats the same phrase over and over again, even incorporating it into graphs and figures.

We have previously written an article about this paper, which looks at its history, so we will not repeat all this information here.

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.

The spoof paper was never actually published, as the authors did not pay the article processing charges, but we have archived a copy of the paper, which is available here.

2. Experiential Learning in Secondary Education Chemistry Courses: A Significant Life Experiences Framework

The title of this paper is intriguing, in that it could easily be the title of a legitimate scientific paper, but the tell tale signs are there immediately after that.

If you familiar with the TV series Breaking Bad, the author names should leap off the page at you. Bradley C. Allf is the person who submitted the paper (to US-China Education Review A) but the other two authors (Jesse B. Pinkman and Walter H. White) are characters from the show.

The paper, essentially (loosely), follows the story line of the show.

You can read about the story of the spoof paper, in an article written by the author (Allf) and we have also written about it, but with a focus on the journal/publisher, rather than the paper.

The paper is no longer available on the journal’s web site, although it was published for a while. We have archived the paper and you can download it from here.

3. What's the Deal with Birds?

This is a great example of a spoof paper. We love the abstract:

“Many people wonder: what’s the deal with birds? This is a common query. Birds are pretty weird. I mean, they have feathers. WTF? Most other animals don’t have feathers. To investigate this issue, I looked at some birds. I looked at a woodpecker, a parrot, and a penguin. They were all pretty weird! In conclusion, we may never know the deal with birds, but further study is warranted.“

,,, but our favorite part of the paper is the acknowledgement which says:

“We thank Big Bird from Sesame Street for comments on the manuscript. Several trained monkeys transcribed videos.“

To be honest, though, the entire paper is worth a read.

The paper was submitted to Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews and was published, even being assigned a DOI (10.33552/SJRR.2020.02.000540), but it has since been withdrawn and the DOI is no longer valid.

The paper attracted some publicity and we have mentioned this paper in one of our previous articles.

The paper is no longer available, but we have archived a copy.

4. Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification
of Access Points and Redundancy

This paper was generated using “SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator“. This was way before ChaptGPT.

 

The paper was accepted, albeit for a non-peer reviewed session at the conference, and a fee was requested.

 

We mention this paper in a previous article of ours and the authors provide more detail on the SCIgen web site, which includes correspondence with the conference.

Comments

We find the topic of sting/spoof papers interesting. Unfortunately, there is not any evidence that they do any good. The journals we mention above are still active and do not seem to have suffered from accepting an obviously spoof paper (Kendall, 2021).

 

Some authors (Teixeira da Silva, J.A., 2021) even go as far as saying that sting papers are unethical. They state:

“COPE, ICMJE and CSE are thus urged to rapidly and urgently reform their guidelines to recognize this serious growing threat to the integrity of academic literature, biomedical and other, to specifically indicate that sting papers, or any published document or paper for that matter, that carries any false element (fake name, fake email, fake affiliation, false or concocted content) is unethical, without exception.“

 

It would make an interesting study to identify all the sting/spoof papers that have been submitted and to see what (if any) effect it had on the journal/conference.

 

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 26 February 2023.
  2. The article was updated on 28 July 2023. We removed a profanity (at least, putting in special characters) we we felt that search engines did not like it.
Posted on

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.
Posted on

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.