Friday, March 29, 2013

Sham journals scam authors

update - read the comments before clicking the links...

Jules pointed me to this article. Someone should warn BEST :-) 

(Yes, I know that technically it's not quite the same thing. Actually, a few years ago a colleague published something in a Hindawi journal, presumably a naive victim of a spam email. See also this article.)

Oh noes - on clicking through to the BEST paper, I see they have a second paper in the same journal! It's about the urban heat island, and according to the abstract, it concludes....drum-roll....that there isn't a significant contamination of the global temperature record. Phew. Somehow they failed to cite our magnum opus on that topic :-)

Rumour has it, their third paper addresses the defecatory habits of ursines in arboreal environments.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aehm... just that you know:
The URL behind the second BEST paper (http://www.scitechnol.com/GIGS/GIGS-1-104.php) distributes the Blackhole Exploit Kit (a Trojan Horse/Virus) in an embedded javascript file (tabcontent.js) on that page.

See:
https://www.virustotal.com/de/file/66b1bb037527efd2f89ce710508bedc9d87c7b02810d7bf7bb32ad65610a6daf/analysis/1365502082/

or

http://www.avgthreatlabs.com/sitereports/domain/scitechnol.com

So not only is it a crappy journal where they publish their papers. The journal also distributes viruses to their viewers ;)

So don't click the link if you have a browser or software like Adobe Reader, Java, Flash on your computer that is not up to date. Or otherwise you can get your trojan horse for free ^^

James Annan said...

Thanks for the warning - the Best laugh of the day just got funnier :-)

(hoping you didn't actually get troubled by it, of course)