Ever come across "fake journals" or predatory conferences?


#1

During summer I bookmarked “10 Tips on Identifying Preatory Journals and Conferences” at https://www.enago.com/academy/top-10-handy-e-tools-for-researchers/ Enago recommends to avoid 1) journals with low ranking; large conferences with 2) generic topics and/or/ 3) combining different fields 4) invitations form free email accounts, 5) unknown speakers and/or unclear agendas 6) promises for short peer review procedures
and to check the background and history 7) of a journal 8) of the reviewers 9) the organisers of the conferences - and of course to visit finally their homepage :wink:

I’ve compared them what we summariset in our guidelines on publication strategies: knowing your community, journals and main conferences is part of the planning - we additionally added the following questions:
• What do I know about the conference, journal or publisher at hand?
• Are they searchable in a reliable database, an open access journal list or the library?
• What is known about the editoral board? Who are the contact persons?
• Who has attended the conference or published in this journal before? What is the quality of these publications?
• Did I receive an email that looks like it has been randomly distributed?
• Whom may I ask for further advice, e.g. at my university, my supervisor, my colleagues?

How are you dealing with these issues?
Do you have experiences or advice ot share on this topic?


#2

They are some specific information that researchers tend to look for before they decide whether to attend such conference, journal or seminar, which you can find here


#3

Hi Daniel, thank you very much for sharing!
The links you posted offer indeed some useful and interesting tips on how to plan or attend a conference succesfully for your own career and personality. Some of these points are also part of our Publication Guideline, for example who else attends the conference and how this is useful for your own career. Or how you can contact other interesting attendees and scientists and what your might be able to offer to them.
Do you believe that attendees of conferences use these strategies regularly? Or do you have any further experiences or advice?


#4

Nice article! Thanks