Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean. Shorter, more focused posts specialising in astronomy and data visualisation.

Friday, 1 June 2018

My new favourite journal

I'm pretty sure this academic spam email is part of a competition to produce the most predatory journal ever.

Transylvanian Review, (ISSN 1221-1249) is a peer reviewed multi-disciplinary specialist international journal aimed at promoting research worldwide in Agricultuaral Sciences, Biological Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Medicine and Physics (all scientific fields).

OK, first off.... Transylvania ??? Seriously ? That's not even a country ! It's like having the Swansea Journal Of Anthropology except that it's much worse, because they've picked the one region on Earth whose major defining characteristic is that it's full of vampires. The only way to save this is to double down and put pictures of Dracula on the front cover making terrible vampire-themed puns about the leading article. Well, you'd need to be undead to be able to review "all scientific fields".

Just in case anyone hadn't twigged that this is a scam :

After 12 days Rapid Shite Review Process by the editorial board members or outside experts, an accepted paper will be placed under In Press within 24 hours and will be published in the next issue.

... if you send them a suitable sum of drachmas, I daresay.

Transylvanian Review is Abstracted/Indexed in Thomson Reuters, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, SCOPUS, EBSCO, Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, Scirus, CiteSeerX, Index Copernicus, Directory of Open Access Journals, Google Scholar, CABI, Chemical Abstracts, Zoological Records, Global Impact Factor Australia, J-Gate, HINARI, WorldCat, British Library, European Library, Biblioteca Central, The Intute Consortium, Genamics JournalSeek, bibliotek.dk, OAJSE, Zurich Open Repository and Archive Journal Database.

Impact Factor for 2016 (JCR) = 0.045

All that indexing and for naught. Because it's shite. Or, possibly it just doesn't have enough vampires.

5 comments:

  1. It must be that last one, just not enough ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. They probably want a pint of blood before they'll publish your article.

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  3. The biggest problem (of course) is that they're pay to play. Otherwise I'd happily waste my tiny amounts of free time writing physics-of-vampires papers for the sake of wasting their time.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Been getting quite a few from those guys, too.

    ReplyDelete
  5. On another note, using a region as the name of the journal as opposed to a country doesn't mean much by itself; one of the top medicine journals is The New England Journal of Medicine, e.g.

    ReplyDelete

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