Today I was searching for a scientific article ("Entity Linking with a Knowledge Base: Issues, Techniques, and Solutions") on Google scholar and the results caught me by surprise. There were only two results. The article I was searching for has been published in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, which is a reputed journal. This one was the first hit, and the right one.
However the second hit was an article with the same title but published in a predatory journal. This bogus article is rife with grammatical errors. From a cursory scan of the paper, the content seems to be ruthlessly lifted from the original TKDE paper. The rogue authors did not even bother to 'copy-paste' the footnotes correctly. This is outright plagiarism --- unethical and punishable. I am ashamed of the fact that the authors of this paper are also from India. It is well-known that low-tier and middle-tier colleges in India publish in such journals either due to ignorance or to cheat, a quick and dirty way to increase your publication count. That the second author is himself a PhD indicates that the the act was not one out of ignorance but a deliberate act of fraud.
The predatory journal is called International Journal of Advanced Technology and Innovative Research. The name of any reputed journal or conference is very specific about the targeted special interest group, e.g. Association of Computational Linguistics or Knowledge Capture. Predatory journals are too vague about their areas of interest. So this is a simple heuristic to identify predatory journals. Reputed journals always publish articles after thorough peer-review process. In addition, reputed journals do not solicit any fees to publish articles.
This behavior also demonstrates the pathetic state of scientific research in the country. A majority of academics are unaware of the value of ethics in scientific research. Since only a certain elite can even comprehend or question the nuances of the research conducted on a topic, it is very easy to keep everyone in the dark on the details of a research project. Predatory journals can thrive in such an atmosphere. This practice penalizes honest academics and incentivizes rogue academics.
To the ignorant academic: you may use these two websites to decide for yourself before you decide to send your manuscript to a journal for 'peer-review':
1. https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/
Stay clear of predatory journals. Uphold the virtues of science, research methodology and communication.
