Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

The worst predatory journals will publish literally anything, even the most obvious hoax. In 2014, the computer scientist Peter Vamplew became so irritated by the constant stream of junk emails from the predatory journal International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology that he submitted a joke article entitled ‘Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List’. The paper consisted entirely of the sentence ‘Get me off your fucking mailing list’ repeated over eight hundred times (including a helpful flowchart figure with boxes and arrows portraying the message Get → me → off → Your → Fucking → Mail → ing → List). The journal rated it as ‘excellent’ and accepted it for publication.30