58
votes
What do I do if my thesis is stolen
Inform your advisor and the department, maybe also the Dean of the school what happened. Don't pay any money to extortionists. Let the authorities deal with it. Your university may have a legal ...
- 399k
39
votes
Is Academia.edu's "mentions" feature real?
It is so clearly a hoax, trying to get more subscribers. Please, Academia.edu software engineers, do not try the "we make errors" card, as it is not believable.
I do believe they are legit, but this ...
- 501
34
votes
Accepted
WCAM speaker invitation: scam, and how does it work?
A good technique to research questions of the form "is X a scam?" is to google "X scam".
I just googled "Annual World Congress of Advanced Materials WCAM scam".
One of ...
- 2,939
33
votes
Invitation to a new conference: possible scam?
It is shady at very least. Covering a wide range of topics, with barely any mention of the organizing committee or keynote speakers - there is hardly any information to go by at all! Even the ...
- 8,519
32
votes
Accepted
Invitation to help writing and submitting papers -- how does this scam work?
This is how I believe the actual scam works. There is some poor sod who has a low quality research paper and who wants it to appear in a reputable journal by unethical means if need be. Maybe they ...
- 8,017
31
votes
Accepted
Got roped into (what I’m pretty sure is) a scam conference. What now?
You can be plagiarized even if you never attend a scam conference
The two concepts (plagiarism & scam conferences) are unrelated. This is because plagiarism is taking someone else's work and ...
- 137k
27
votes
Accepted
Is there a website that lists the journals that are actually scams?
There used to be one, called Beall's list, which listed predatory journals. The author however took it offline, apparently partly because of legal threats. If you search online you will be able to ...
- 8,141
26
votes
Meeting dishonest ex-supervisors at large international conference -- Should one speak out?
There is a lot going on here. If you want to play power politics make sure that you have the power first.
You contemplate making an accusation. Depending on local law and custom this could open you ...
- 399k
25
votes
Do journals avoid you as a reviewer if you are too fast?
In my experience, the unusual thing is not that you haven't been asked to review recently but that you had a batch of review requests all at once.
Most journals that I have worked with, as either ...
- 191k
23
votes
Invitation to help writing and submitting papers -- how does this scam work?
Who pays for those services in an amount sufficient to pay me and those middlemen?
Oh, a lot, lot of people!
Only a fraction of the people who can benefit from publication credit actually have the ...
- 14.1k
21
votes
Is Academia.edu's "mentions" feature real?
This is definitely a scam. (+1 for Dominique Kenens)
I registered 7 years ago, and haven't logged in for many years. I'm definitely not a premium user. Still I have received several of such emails ...
- 17.7k
19
votes
Got roped into (what I’m pretty sure is) a scam conference. What now?
Do you have a supervisor?
Have you discussed this with them or someone else at the university?
Surely in the long run it's better to err on the side of being totally honest with them and explaining ...
- 4,835
17
votes
Accepted
Elsevier Editorial System: is this scam?
This is the usual way reviewer invitation arrives. Go for it.
(Maybe check if the email and the links you received are really from an Elsevier domain).
- 4,082
16
votes
Is Academia.edu's "mentions" feature real?
I'm a software engineer at Academia.edu. We have a feature which allows users to see which papers mention which users.
That feature is only available to premium users. During the first month, you ...
- 332
16
votes
What do I do if my thesis is stolen
It's worth remembering that in most locales around the world, you owned the copyright to your thesis the moment you recorded it in a durable format (on paper, in an electronic document, etc). Someone ...
- 2,187
15
votes
Do journals avoid you as a reviewer if you are too fast?
I am not sure if you made the journals suspicions, but here is what I do when my reviews take extra-short or extra-long time. I let the editor know what is going on. For example, I just finished a ...
- 9,358
15
votes
Invitation to a new conference: possible scam?
If the list of topics spans a page, you should already be suspicious. Conferences that have no focus typically imply that they are not where people with deep knowledge in a reasonably well ...
- 105k
13
votes
Is Academia.edu's "mentions" feature real?
I have a college email address that was used when I was researching one paper, so I was easily able to look back at the number of times I get emails from Academia.edu, telling me that my name has been ...
- 131
13
votes
Accepted
Meeting dishonest ex-supervisors at large international conference -- Should one speak out?
If I might propose an alternative?
Your goal here isn't necessarily to accuse the supervisors in question, but to warn potential vulnerable victims to their scam. I don't work in academia, but I do ...
12
votes
I got an offer of admission to a post-graduate program in a totally different field. How to know if it is legit?
Yes, this is a legitimate offer from a real school.
I also took a quick look at online reviews. There are too many negative reviews such as "don't go there" or "avoid this place at all ...
- 5,425
11
votes
Is there a website that lists the journals that are actually scams?
There are at least a couple of lists. You'd have to judge for yourself how much you trust them since apparently none of them is affiliated with a University or some other "reputable" curator:
List of ...
- 2,849
11
votes
How to quickly assess the legitimacy of a conference?
The fastest way possible is to use a policy of "don't call me, I'll call you" with venues (conferences, journals, etc.). If you don't already know them, discard correspondence from them. In most cases ...
- 21.4k
9
votes
Do journals avoid you as a reviewer if you are too fast?
I can add a sample size of one from personal experience here:
In my field (somewhere between physics and applied mathematics), the actual workload of a peer review is at most one day of work while the ...
- 65k
9
votes
Accepted
I got an offer of admission to a post-graduate program in a totally different field. How to know if it is legit?
Saint James School of Medicine seems legit. It is a private, for-profit medical school. They appear on Wikipedia's list of medical schools in the Caribbean, and they are ECFMG eligible, meaning that ...
- 73.4k
8
votes
Accepted
Are the conferences by Acavent legit or a scam? - subquestion to general question "How to detect if a conference is a scam"
To me at least, this does indeed raise a lot of red flags. I googled the company out of curiosity, and found a similar thread to your's on ResearchGate. In that thread, a person who claimed to be ...
- 1,032
7
votes
Do journals avoid you as a reviewer if you are too fast?
Do journals avoid you as a reviewer if you are too fast?
No.
might they have mistrusted my reviews because they were too quickly done?
No. Reviews are judged by the contents.
are editors letting ...
- 100k
6
votes
Is conpher.com / conpher legit?
I work for Conpher.
Conpher was started by 35 postdoc researchers who want to share journal article publication experiences in order to share advice on where best to publish your research. Conpher is ...
6
votes
Is Academia.edu's "mentions" feature real?
I agree that the "mentions" emails (1) are just trying to convince me to pay to subscribe and (2) are becoming less and less likely to be true mentions of my name. Today's was "A paper published in ...
- 69
6
votes
Got roped into (what I’m pretty sure is) a scam conference. What now?
These conferences usually do take place. The work presented there might not be of great quality, and the sessions may be too broad, so you will not get such a relevant audience, but they usually do ...
- 1,594
5
votes
Is Academia.edu's "mentions" feature real?
I receive these messages on a weekly basis, with texts like "mentioned in influential papers" or "mentioned in a paper published in The Journal of xxx". I have a unique name, so it ...
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible