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.
at

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9/4/13 11:18 am

    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 ^^

    ReplyDelete
  2. James Annan9/4/13 2:29 pm

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

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

    ReplyDelete