It seems that grifters are taking advantage of the competitive nature that is now academia. I have recieved various emails asking me to publish an article, or to recommend articles for a special issue, or to be a keynote speaker in a conference somewhere in Asia. As an early-career researcher I get excited when I first click on these emails, but then I get a little suspicious. How can you tell a scam from the real deal? If anyone supervises research students, do you talk to them about these predators and how do you best advise?
Good question! That's a real issue in today's academic sphere. There are a number of, let's say, fake conferences and journals. They send us invitations on daily basis. It's highly recommended to avoid opening such e-mails, it could be trojan. I will suggest to use only trustworthy sources and academic journals from known databases. You may also ask colleagues or professors from your institution what journals and conferences they recommend. Personally, I tell my students about those issues and consult them where to publish, if needed.
It is generally safe to open the email itself, but do not click on any of the links within it or reply to it. Reading the email will usually provide some obvious clues: do they refer to you by name, do they use accurate English? If so, you might want to do some web searching to find out more about the source.
In general, however, successful journals do not need to send out emails to solicit articles, and conferences only recruit papers from authors whose work is closely connected to the conference theme. So, I would take Vardan Atoyan's advice and ask more senior colleagues about which journals and conferences to consider.
There are lots of scams or predators. For a journal inviting you to submit. I usually check indexing database and go on the database website to confirm authenticity of the journal.
Usually it is easier to tell by the nature and content of the email such as bogus impact factor, poor english, and addressing people with extra fancy words (i.e., honourable, prestigious...). Before submitting you paper to any of the potential predatory journals, you can check the journals on Beall's (https://beallslist.weebly.com) predatory journals list and cabell's list (https://www2.cabells.com/about-blacklist). Think, check, adn submit is another tool that can be used.
As others have already mentioned, invitations from deceptive and/or low quality journals/conferences will provide you clues to recognize their genuinity. Most of them pick your name and contacts from one of your previously published article. Also, they usually mention that 'we learnt a lot from ........... (the title of your article)' and they are very interested to publish your next article. These are some of the most common contents sent out by the so called predatory publishers. However, among these, you could also receive genuine invitations from guest editors of some reputed journals (usually for special issues), if you have published sufficient number of quality articles within a certain subject domain. Whatever you receive, read the e-mail carefully (yes, avoid click on Web links they provide), check the website of the journal, ensure whether the information included on the website is fake or not (check abstracting and indexing information, editorial board, specially check whether they charge a publication fee or not). Reputation of the publisher could also be used as an indicator of a genuine publication. Reliability of the mailing address of journal/publisher will inform you more about the journal/conference. In fact, there are a lot of clues one can use to filter good publications from fake publications. Beall's criteria provides detailed information on this topic.
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