Entertaining Read: Author responds to journal's phishing email with fake paper on "pregnancy cravings for prime numbers"

Image by Kris from Pixabay

Retraction Watch published a guest post on an author's experience submitting a fake paper to a likely fraudulent journal. In addition to being an entertaining read, the post provides a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at some of the predatory tactics employed by potentially fraudulent publishers. 

Spoiler: The author's fake paper was, in fact, published, and, as noted by a commenter, is searchable in databases like OpenAlex and Google Scholar. The paper can also be helpfully summarized by AI tools such as Elicit (which isn't surprising, as Elicit, like many AI literature summarizers, crawls OpenAlex as one of its data sources). 

For a firsthand account from someone who had fallen victim to a predatory publisher, I highly recommend checking out this 2019 article from Science by Alan H. Chambers.

Thanks for reading, and hope everyone has a great Monday!