That friendly solicitation is probably a scam if: 

The journal accepts manuscripts on a very wide range of topics. 
You have been contacted to submit an article, but you have no experience in the field described.
The fees for publication are suspiciously low. 
The contact email addresses for the editors are generic. 
The journal's website looks poorly home-made.


However it might just be lazy spam:

The email is written in incoherent English, or with very strange vocabulary.
It is addressed to you with the wrong title (usually Professor!)
There are sections which should have been auto-filled that are left empty.


Nothing I am doing here is clever or original: it is just for my own amusement. Far more marvellous are the efforts of Peter Vamplew (recently famous for having Mazieres & Kohler's "Get me off your fucking mailing list" accepted with minor revisions), Tom Spears (the plagiarised soil/biology/Mars manuscript which includes "seismic platelet activity"), Michael Eisen (the deliberately flawed arsenic DNA paper accepted by Science), John Bohannon (hoax cancer/lichen paper accepted by more journals than rejected it), and of course the SCIgen folks whose randomly generated texts have infiltrated journals and conferences everywhere. 

 

Monday 1 December 2014

IJCRAR - International Journal of Current Research and Academic Review

Journal name: International Journal of Current Research and Academic Review
Publisher: Excellent Publishers
Emailer: mprakashmicro@yahoo.co.in

An easy one to start with! Let's break this email down.

 International Journal of Current Research and Academic Review
  (ISSN:2347 - 3215) IMPACT FACTOR 0.425 

 An International, Monthly, Online, Peer Reviewed, Indexed, fast track, Scientific Research Journal Published by www.ijcrar.com

 Dear Academicians/Research Scholars,
International Journal of Current Research and Academic Review (ISSN 2347 - 3215) is inviting you to submit research paper for publishing in Volume-2, Issue-12. December- 2014.
Published paper will be abstracted and indexed in numerous search engines in worldwide....
Please click on the following link for IJCMAS Abstracting and Indexing……….
http://www.ijcrar.com/indexing.php
Please click on the following link for IJCRAR instructions to authors.
http://www.ijcrar.com/guideline.php
Please click on the following link for IJCRAR Experts in Editorial Board.
http://www.ijcrar.com/editorboard.php
Please click on the following link for IJCRAR current issue.
http://www.ijcrar.com/currentissue.php
with profound regards

 Dr.M.Prakash
Editorinchief

 International Journal of Current Research and Academic Review
(ISSN 2347 - 3215)
website: www.ijcrar.com
Email: editorijcret@gmail.com
Paper Submission E-mail: editorijcret@gmail.com
www.excellentpublishers.com
email:excellentpublishers2013@gmail.com
  • Meaningless title, which doesn't come up in impact factor search results despite their claims. 
  • Strange and inconsistent phrasing. 
  • The website is poor quality stuff, though it lists an extensive editorial advisory team. 
  • "Peer review" is by the chief editor and one chosen board member. 
  • The range of topics covered is vast, covering everything from biological sciences to hospitality management, petroleum technology to finance. 
  • All emails are gmail or yahoo accounts. 
  • The cost of publication is $100. 

My friend Tom Hanrahan created a text generator, and we put together a random article mashing up some H P Lovecraft. I've submitted it to IJCRAR, let's see what they say. The initial response reads:  
"Thankyou for Submit your Article.Also we Assign Manuscript number within 24 hours for your manuscript. If not received manuscript number >24 Hours kindly contact immediately to this email editorijcret@gmail.com. And resubmit your manuscript to this email id: editorijcret@gmail.com."

You can see the article here. I'm actually quite pleased at how readable it turned out to be!

Posted by at

3 comments:

  1. Unknown29 August 2017 at 08:34

    Great post.This article is really very interesting and effective.I think its must be helpful for us.
    We also have medical journals and clinical journals, If you want find here: Science journals

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown29 August 2017 at 08:35

    https://ophthalmologyconference.blogspot.in/2014/04/conference-on-clinical-experimental.html?showComment=1503992087726#c4885606878736305279

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pixie19 November 2018 at 17:27

    What response did you get?

    ReplyDelete

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