What is a Predatory Conference?

These conferences are almost always real events, with attendees participating either in person or virtually. What sets them apart from reputable conferences is that they are organized by groups not connected to the discipline, and their primary aim is to generate profit rather than disseminate information. In some cases, the conference may fraudulently list individuals who are not actually participating to lend the event a false sense of legitimacy.

If They are Real, What is the Problem?

These conferences often target researchers who are new to their disciplines and may not yet be familiar with the major conferences in their field. A personalized invitation, especially one promising a prominent role such as a keynote speaker, can be particularly enticing since such roles are beneficial for CVs and promotion packets. Additionally, if the conference is located in another country, it can be listed as an international conference on CVs, which carries extra weight at some academic institutions.

A common attitude towards these predatory conferences is that there is no significant harm in attending them. Some may argue that even if no one attends your talk, at least you get to travel and add a line to your CV. However, attending these conferences can have substantial costs, both financially and professionally.

The primary issue is that these conferences often require a significant financial investment, depleting valuable funds that could be better used for attending reputable events, covering publication charges, or even contributing to salary. These events are inexpensive for the organizers to run, as they often encourage attendees to stay in the conference hotel (which then provides discounts to organizers), rely on web-based conference materials, and charge high registration fees that cover meeting room and A/V expenses.

The most problematic of these conferences will falsely list well-known researchers as members of the organizing committee or as keynote speakers without their consent. This fraudulent practice can damage the reputations of these individuals and mislead other researchers into registering for the conference under false pretenses.

Red Flags to Identify Predatory Conferences

Here are some tips to identify and avoid falling victim to registering and contributing to a predatory conference:

1. Check Affiliation: Verify if the conference is affiliated with a respected organization or society. Many reputable conferences are sponsored by or connected to professional organizations, which typically have a leadership board, regular events, and may also publish journals and other content.
   
2. Examine Organizers and Speakers: Look at the names on the organizing committees or the list of featured speakers. If no names are listed, if they lack identifiable information, or if you cannot find them through an internet search, this is a major red flag. Be cautious if the individuals are retired or their research is unrelated to the conference topic.
   
3. Consider the Conference Theme: A common warning sign is an extraordinarily broad theme covering disparate research areas that rarely hold joint conferences. Conversely, if the focus is unrelated to your research area and yet you are invited as a speaker, be suspicious. Invitation emails may also contain multiple grammatical errors and use excessive flattery to encourage you to accept the offer.
   
4. Compare Registration Fees: Predatory conferences often have higher registration fees and charge different rates depending on the type of presentation you choose to give. For example, they may charge more for an oral presentation than for a poster or virtual presentation. This suggests that you will be assigned whatever type of presentation you request, unlike reputable conferences that peer-review submissions. Figure 1 shows registration fees where an oral presentation is more expensive than other types.

In the end, your research and experience are valuable and you deserve to present them in the most impactful venue possible. Don’t waste your time and funding on conferences that exist solely to generate profit for a company. You want to present to and be questioned by others working in your area of focus. There are many legitimate conferences to attend, so take the time to analyze before registering to avoid falling victim to a predatory one.

Additional Readings:

Chen, T. Y. (2021). PreDefense: Defending Underserved AI Students and Researchers from Predatory Conferences. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 142, 1–6. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v142/chen21a

Godskesen, T., Eriksson, S., Oermann, M. H., & Gabrielsson, S. (2022). Predatory conferences: a systematic scoping review. BMJ open, 12(11), e062425. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2022-062425

Ro, C. (2024). What is it like to attend a predatory conference? Nature, 631(8022), 921–923. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02358-w

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Why is This a Problem?

These predatory journals charge money to publish and often are an avenue for research that is not sufficiently peer reviewed and may even not be suitable for publication.  It may seem innocuous to publish in such a journal but there can be real harm to a researcher’s reputation.  These negatives include loss of research impact, overcharging for publication costs, and it may hurt the researcher’s reputation when colleagues see where the article was published.

Examples of Predatory Journals in Science

A recent example involving publication ethics illustrates another pitfall of predatory journals. All reputable journals operate under a policy that authors may not submit the same manuscript to multiple journals at the same time for consideration.   An article in Science (2019), describes how a new faculty researcher fell into the trap of a predatory journal where it refused to release his article from consideration unless he paid a substantial amount to that journal.  He eventually had to threaten legal action against the predatory journal so he could finally submit it to a legitimate journal. 

Another interesting example of a fake journal is “Ciencia e Tecnica Vitivinicola“, which is masquerading as the real “Ciencia e Tecnica Vitivinicola“ published by EDP.  

Note that the fake website has many formatting errors, sparse information, and, if you search for recent articles listed, almost all are not connected to the journal’s subject.  The editorial board is also suspect because it just has initials with last name, degree, and country.  If we take a look at the real journal’s website, you will notice that it has the journal’s impact factor and editorial board prominently listed.  At the bottom of the site, it also has a warning alerting researchers not to send money to the pretender journal.

Best Practices to Avoid Predatory Journals

Here are 4 basic steps to avoid being scammed by a predatory journal:

1. Examine the articles that have been published recently.  Is their content relevant to the journal and do they show dates indicating peer review?  Do their bibliographies cite articles in reputable journals?  If you see errors that should have been corrected during peer review and if many articles in the bibliography are from the same journal you are evaluating, these are red flags. 
   
2. Check the editorial review board members.  Are they active researchers in the topic area of the journal?  If you know them personally, consider contacting them to ask about their experience with the journal.  Some red flags are if none of the names are recognizable or if the board member’s research experience is not related at all to the journal’s scope.
   
3. Use a database like Dimensions.ai to search for citations to articles published within the journal.  Remember that your Papers software also gives citations and other metrics to use in evaluating articles you have saved. Are these articles being cited by other reputable authors and journals?
   
4. Contact your organisation’s library for assistance.  Universities have subject librarians who are very familiar with the reputable journals in a discipline and ones that should be avoided.  If you are not affiliated with a university, reach out to a public university library (many offer a chat service) and most will be quite eager to assist you with journal questions.  

Resources to Learn More

Are you interested in reading more about predatory journals and the harm they do to research and academia?  Here are a few resources to get started:

• Boukacem-Zeghmouri, C. (2023). Predatory journals entrap unsuspecting scientists. Here’s how universities can support researchers. Nature, 620(7974), 469–469. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02553-1
• Elmore, S. A., & Weston, E. H. (2020). Predatory Journals: What They Are and How to Avoid Them. Toxicologic Pathology, 48(4), 607–610. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192623320920209
• Think. Check. Submit. : A website with resources and tools for authors to locate reputable journals.  This site, developed by a collaboration of research organisations, publishers, and libraries, includes a checklist for authors to ensure that they are selecting trustworthy journals for publication. 

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Exporting your Metadata

If you don’t already have it installed, you’re going to want to download the Papers desktop app – available for both Mac and Windows – to your computer. There are two stages to getting your information out of Mendeley and into Papers. We’ll start with exporting your metadata.

Select all your references from My Documents. Don’t worry about grabbing the PDFs – we’ll get them a bit later. Once your references are selected, right-click to pull up the menu and choose Export. A dialogue box will appear where you can name the collection and save it to your computer. We recommend keeping the file name simple (along the lines of ‘My Collection’) and saving it to your desktop.

You can also choose what type of file to save your library. We recommend saving the file as a .bib or .ris file. The .ris file is more commonly used for transferring information and includes more fields that aren’t necessarily for writing a paper. 

You can use .ris if most of your library consists of references without any PDFs attached. Both will transfer traditional metadata (like the DOI, title, authors, etc.) but the .bib file type may not transfer custom fields that you may have created in Mendeley.

Download your PDFs

Now that you have all the metadata ready to import, there’s one more step: grabbing your PDFs. Neither .bib nor .ris files can download the full-text, so we have to manually extract those PDFs out of Mendeley.

File Organizer options

If you set up File Organizer for your Mendeley library, then all of your PDFs are already downloaded to your computer. To locate where Mendeley is storing those PDFs, head to Mendeley Desktop > File Organizer and you’ll be able to see the file folder path.

The advantage of having the File Organizer set up is that it will allow you to easily transfer your folders. You’ll want to create the same folders in Papers—if you have a folder called ‘Elephant Shark’ in Mendeley, you’ll want to create an ‘Elephant Shark’ in Papers. Then, you can simply drag the folders from your Mendeley Desktop folder (or whenever the folders live on your computer) to the new folder in Papers. This makes it easier to keep your folders instead of moving references one by one.

While this is the easier method (because  your PDFs are already out of Mendeley) if you have a large folder structure, you may have to cope  with multiple folders that will take up storage on your computer.

Manual Download

If you don’t have the file organizer set up, you’ll have to manually transfer your PDFs from Mendeley into Papers. The easiest way to grab all the PDFs in your library is to arrange and sort your library so that your references are files first.

Once you’ve sorted your library, you can then highlight all the references with files attached. Right-click and choose to Export PDF(s) with Annotations.

Choose a place to save the PDFs. We recommend creating a folder on your desktop and saving them there.

Now you’re ready for the transfer.

Transferring your Data

Are you still with us? Although it took a few steps to get here, the good news is that moving all your data in Papers is the easy part! We’ll start with moving over your .ris/.bib file. Simply drag and drop that file into Papers and your reference metadata will begin to populate. Next, open the folder that holds all the PDFs you exported and drag those into Papers.

During the PDF transfer, the files will import first. Then, Papers will begin resolving each PDF individually— if the metadata does not immediately appear, please give it time to sync. 

Papers is going through each article’s metadata and matching it against the information from the .bib/.ris file to find and match any duplicates. Once it has deduplicated any files, it will then start looking for the metadata on the remaining articles and auto-resolve the metadata.

Got more questions? Check out these common transfer FAQs

Do I need to do both steps – first export a .bib file and then import PDFs into Papers?

Yes, a .bib or .ris file will not grab the PDFs from your library. Using the .bib will guarantee all your metadata for any manual references or references without PDFs is transferred over.

Will transferring a .bib/.ris and PDFs create two items for each entry?

If the reference metadata in the .bib/.ris files contains DOIs then it will automatically merge itself to any PDFs that Papers can identify with a DOI.

If the references do not have DOIs, duplicate entries may occur because Papers will think that it’s a different reference. You will then have to manually merge the duplicates.

Will my notes, highlights, and annotations transfer?

Yes, any markings made on your PDFs will transfer into  Papers. That said, the highlighting colors, sticky notes, and other features may appear different. Papers uses different colors than Mendeley, but the software will try to match the colors as closely as possible.

Will my Tags transfer?

Tags will transfer in the .bib or .ris file.

Do I need to keep the Mendeley desktop app?

If you’re satisfied with the transfer and you no longer need to use Mendeley, you can delete the app from your computer.

We’re here to help you

If you do get stuck with any part of the transfer, please reach out to us for help!

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While Papers has a 95% match rate for imported articles, there are times when an article can be imported without metadata. The article may import unresolved if the PDF is a scanned version and not a digital copy. Because Papers can’t read the content, the software is unable to look for the metadata. 

An article can also import without metadata if there’s a cover page on the article. Some publishers will include a receipt or invoice as a cover page. Because the matcher only scans the first page of the PDF, it may not capture any metadata that lies on the second page of the PDF.

The good news is when articles are not resolved, Papers makes it easy for you to find the metadata with our matcher. The Papers matcher will automatically appear on the Info panel when it can’t auto-match metadata.

When the matcher opens, there will be several fields you can fill in with data to help Papers try and find the correct metadata. Below are some dos and don’ts to help get you to the correct paper faster.

What you should do with the matcher

• Double check the suggested matches: By default, the matcher will give a selection of articles it may think to be a match. Double check that the metadata is all correct (DOI, title, authors), as there can be slight differences if it’s suggesting a pre-print version of the article (think of a version from a few years earlier that has a different date). If it’s not an exact match, you may need to fill out the form to find one.
• Clear all the metadata out from the entries: It’s uncommon for all the fields to auto-fill. Usually, the title of the PDF is the only information that populates, but this can often be the wrong name. Unresolved PDFs take the file name and not the article title, so you want to be sure you are starting off with clear fields.
• Use the PDF preview pane: The preview pane will make it easy to copy over the metadata, such as the title and DOI, so you don’t waste time manually typing in the information.

What you should not do with the matcher

• Don’t use every field in the matcher: The Papers matcher is very powerful. You only need to enter one or two fields. Usually, if you can find the DOI of the article, that’s all you need to find the correct match. If the DOI is not present, try only using the title and first author.
• Don’t use the whole title: With the matcher, less is more. If the article has a long title, try using only the first few words and let the matcher do the rest!

We are adding articles to our database each day, which means our matcher will continue to only get better. If you are still struggling to find the correct metadata you can either enter it manually or send our support team an email to walk you through any issues.

Still need help?

If you’re still struggling to find the correct metadata, you can either enter it manually or send our support team an email and we’ll walk you through any issues.

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We’ve made it simple. Our new SmartList Sharing allows you to add common SmartLists to your library without having to type in the query yourself.

Take a look at our Top 5 SmartLists for organizing your articles. To add these to your library, simply click on the one and the link will automatically create the list into your Personal Library.

Recently Read

Similar to the Recently Added set, the Recently Read query gathers articles you’ve read within the set date range. The default Recently Read folder only retains your articles from the last 7 days, so if you need to expand the range click on one of the links below:

Recently Read (Last 14 Days)

Recently Read (Last 30 Days)

Unread

The Unread query comes from our group of users who want to organize their library by what’s been read and unread. Articles in your library that are bold are designated as unread, but it can take time to pull those all by hand. Instead, let our SmartList query for unread import them all into a list for you.

Here is general list of all your Unread papers in your Personal library.

For a more detailed list of papers that have been added to your library, but you have not read yet, click on the range that best fits you to add to your library.

Unread within papers added in last 7 days

Unread within papers added in last 14 days

Unread within papers added in last 30 days

Unmatched

The Unmatched SmartList is best for those of you who do bulk imports. We try and resolve all your articles during the import, so you don’t have to edit the metadata yourself. However, for any scanned PDFs or articles not matched, you can create a SmartList to find them easily. It can be cumbersome to go through your extensive library, so our Unmatched SmartList will pull together a list of articles missing a DOI or PMID.

You can also organize your unmatched library by filtering for references with our without PDFs.

References with PDF

References missing PDF

All Annotated

The All Annotated query will pull all the articles from your library that have notes or highlights on the PDFs.

Once the articles are pulled into the Annotated SmartList you can search through them to find specific notes you’ve made.

Take a deeper dive into the different types of SmartLists you can create with our Feature Spotlight post. If there are any other SmartLists you need help generating chat with one of our support specialists!

The post 5 Types of Organized SmartLists appeared first on Papers.

To create a Smart List start by typing in a search term. Once the results look right click the arrow at the right hand part of the search bar.

You can then give a name to your Smart List to help you find it easily.

Click Create and your Smart List will show up next to all of your other lists.
To Edit a Smart List you just need to click on the gear next to your Smart List and click edit where you can change your query or name.

You Smart List query can be anything you can search for in your library and be as complex as you need to narrow down results. See some examples below:

Find Papers with author “Byrappa” and text search for shark and in the year 2007 in the journal Nature.

author:Byrappa AND Shark AND year:2007 AND journal:Nature

Find Papers in the journal Nature or Science.

journal:Nature OR journal:Science

Find text about genes in the abstract and papers without notes.

abstract:genes AND NOT(_exists_:note)

Find tags with different words. Remember that multi word keywords need “”.

tag:Elephant OR tag:Shark OR tag:”Elephant Shark”

Find articles that aren’t in the Journal PLoS One have a title containing in the word CRISPR and papers with a tag of CRISPR Research.

NOT(journal:”PLoS One”) AND title:CRISPR AND tag:”CRISPR Research”

Find any papers from the year 2015 – 2019.

year:[2015 TO 2019]

Find any papers with the author of Stark in year 2015 or 2016. Using the parenthesis makes sure the year query doesn’t affect your author search.

author:Stark (year:2015 OR Year:2016)

Find your read and purchased content.

unread:false AND purchased:true

Find all of your references with files attached.

_exists_:files

Alternatively find all your references without files attached

NOT(_exists_:files)

Search a note or a highlight, strikethrough, or underlined piece of text

note:Shark OR highlighted_text:Shark

Find a highly rated paper that has been read more than 10 times. This works best in a shared library

times_opened:[10 TO *] AND rating:[4 TO 5]

Find all unrated articles that have been read.

NOT(_exists_:rating) AND unread:true

We are still working on converting all Papers 3 Smart Folders to the new Smart Lists.

We are working on adding better date filters, color search so keep your eyes out. If you need help building your query or about Smart Lists go ahead and email ReadCube Papers Support!

The post Getting Started: Smart Lists appeared first on Papers.

General Use

Our standard search will search all the fields for you. For example, if you want to search for “Shark” – just type shark into the search box and we will return results back to you that match the term in any field. This includes article abstracts, annotations, highlighted text, journal name, etc.

Searches are also not case sensitive so typing shark or Shark will get you the same search results.

If you are searching for data in a specific field, just start your query with that fields name. For instance I love the journal “Shark Diaries”. To run that search do journal:shark

If you want to search for a journal or field with multiple words you will need to use quotes. journal:”Shark Diaries”

If you don’t use quotes you may get back more results as the second word is considered a search of all the fields like our first example.

Combining Search Terms

Combining search terms is easy too. Just type all of your search terms with a space in between. If you are searching for all papers for Elephants and Sharks you just need a space but you can also use the AND query. Elephant Shark is the same as elephant AND shark. Don’t forget to capitalize AND.

So in the query above… all of the above papers must include elephant and shark somewhere in the fields. If you want references about elephants or sharks you would use the OR query. elephant OR shark. Remember that OR needs to be capitalized to work

Ranges

If you are looking for date queries you can search the year field. year:2015 would search all the papers in year 2015. The year field also supports date ranges. For instance I want all the papers in my library from year 1990 to 1993. year:[1990 TO 1993]

You can also use a wildcard (*) for one end of your range query. So say you want to see all papers before 1993. year:[* TO 1993]

Of course you can reverse this to see all articles after a certain time period. year:[2019 TO *]

Ranges can be used for year, ratings, added, and times_opened

Parenthetical Grouping

We also support parenthetical grouping. So say you have a couple paper’s author in mind and you know they publish in certain journals. author:john gives you to many results so try author:john (journal:nature OR journal:Shark)

Boolean Fields

We have a variety of boolean fields that you can choose from. The field is either true or false for statuses such as unread, favorite, and purchased. So if you want to see all your favorite content simply search for favorite:true

Exists searches

The exists search query works slightly differently. You can use it to see all of your papers with files _exists_:files

You can also use it to search and see all of your papers with a rating attached to them. _exists_:rating

NOT Searches

Our NOT search query will search for everything but what you put. So if you are tired of seeing your shark references you can use NOT(shark)

You can also pair it with _exists_ to find references missing attachments NOT(_exists_:files)

Or make a query to see if any of your references are making articles. NOT(_exists_:author)

All supported fields

Look below for a complete list of all searchable fields.

Future requests / features

We are working on expanding our search functionality to have a finer tuned date searching as well as fuzzy searches based on current date (i.e. added:Last 30 days). We have some more features planned and this article will be updated with them, but if you think of something or need support, please send us an email at ReadCube Papers Support.

The post Getting Started: Advanced Search in Papers appeared first on Papers.

Now you can seamlessly import articles directly from your web browser into your synced ReadCube Papers library. Find papers as you normally would on PubMed, Google Scholar, and journal websites – the extension allows you to add those references, along with optional notes, to any of your lists and will even attempt to automatically download PDFs.

Open any of your ReadCube Papers apps – web or mobile (iOS/Android) – and your imported articles will be immediately synced and available for reading.

Extensions are available for Chrome, Firefox and Edge currently.

The post What is the ReadCube Papers Browser Extension? appeared first on Papers.