contact The retraction watch website

Sirwan Khalid Ahmed Thank you for sharing your thoughts. In my opinion, such a strategy would be more harmful to the authors than to the questionable journal.

https://clinicsearchonline.org/article/high-background-radiation-lower-risks-rethinking-radiations-role-in-cancer-through-a-novel-murine-study

Dear SMJ Mortazavi

Your experience is confirming the fact that the journal “International Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases” is a predatory journal. I see numerous red flags:

-Their indexing info (https://clinicsearchonline.org/abstracting-and-indexing ) is full of misleading metrics (https://beallslist.net/misleading-metrics/ ) often used by predatory journals/publishers

-They misleadingly suggest that they are PubMed indexed. Predatory journals often suggest this while (if real) the only thing that happens is that papers from authors with a NIH grant will be included in PubMed irrespective of the journal. By the way the links to PubMed papers are nonsense since they refer to other journal titles https://clinicsearchonline.org/journals/international-journal-of-clinical-infectious-diseases

-The APC they charge is ridiculously high for a basically non-indexed journal https://clinicsearchonline.org/article-processing-charges

-Google the contact info “701 Tillery Street Unit 12-1049, Austin, Texas 78702, United States” and it renders at best a virtual office

-In terms of lay-out I suspect a link to “Auctores Publishing LLC”, see for example https://www.auctoresonline.org/article/osteoporosis-as-a-process-conducive-to-tissue-biomineralization (they refer to “International journal of Biomed research” as one of their journals that is now ‘owned’ by these ClinicSearch people), see for example my reply of June 24th, 2024 here https://www.researchgate.net/post/Lets_talk_about_predatory_scientific_journals2/7

What (most likely) happened is that these fraudsters stole the preprint content present at Preprint.org https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202411.0972/v1 By the way I just checked three papers and they have done this with the following preprints as well:

The paper https://clinicsearchonline.org/article/comparative-analysis-of-5g-technology-in-the-agriculture-sector-of-bangladesh-challenges-and-potential-impact is stolen from https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202407.1474/v1

The paper https://clinicsearchonline.org/article/development-and-evaluation-of-novel-apomorphine-and-quetiapine-combinational-formulation-for-parkinsons-disease-in-rat-new-era-possibilities-for-pre-clinical-protocol-concept-review- is stolen from

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202305.0554/v1

The paper https://clinicsearchonline.org/article/prevalence-and-new-host-records-of-avian-blood-parasites-in-songbirds-from-the-west-of-iran-insights-into-haemosporidian-infections-and-the-impact-of-humidity is stolen from https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202309.0822/v1

I saw your message on LinkedIn, and you pretty much did everything to force these people to act. Being so bluntly fraudulent I am afraid that I am not that optimistic about their response. All I can think of is to ask the people behind preprints.org https://www.preprints.org to act, since this is a strong example of scientific misconduct that abuse the content of the preprints while this is I would say an infringement of copyright and ownership. This is damaging to the reputation of the platform of preprints.org

Best regards.

Rob Keller Thank you so much for your insightful comments. I will continue urging them to remove the paper. Let’s see how it unfolds.