What is Academic Spam?

Yes, academia is not immune to spam! and here I’m not talking about ’the usual’ kind of spam, but the one that is targeted to academic. This often comes with emails addressed to Dear colleague, Respected Sir, or in the more sophisticated cases they actually parse your name (usually from bibliographic references, so that it spells surname first or with odd shortening), and offers invitation to submit your work to (fictional) conferences or (scamy and irrelevant) journals with low-quality. The aim is to cause irrelevant submissions, get money for you to publish it, or gather intelligence about your (unpublished) progress.

Lately I consider spam also journals that create an account and password for you and assign you papers to review that you didn’t agree upon. I am simply ignoring all such emails. Academic peer review is a very delicate and important task, so make sure you always agree to what you review and don’t do reviews you did not agreed upon. During your PhD it will be only seniors that know you to ask you to (sub)review one or two papers at the time. Later on, you might be approached to be a PC member (program committee) for an event, which means you agree to take on the review of 10-30 papers (depending on the venue).

How to Recognize it?

Typical signs are:

• poor written quality
• unusual addressing format
• topic irrelevant to your research field
• some Latin letter are replaced with similar-looking letters from another alphabet
• google the venue and see if it existed a few years before
• double-check the email sender (find the complete email address)

In general, someone you do not know will not invite you to publish or present something, especially not until you are done with your PhD or “made your name” in the community (with influential publications at top venues).

Spam email are becoming sneaky and sophisticated, so sometimes spam emails even pick the title of a paper of yours. From what I have seen, academic spam is actually not targeting real individual, but rather academic profiles. So these people aren’t persecuting you per se, they simply follow an agenda or scheme that they believe it benefits them somehow. While spam in general is an annoying and intrusive nuisance, academic spam in particular can have serious consequences for the credibility and reputation of the research community.

What should you do?

1- Read the first two lines of the email: if you recognize any of the signs listed below, then 🗑️

2- If the email looks legit, double-check the venue / title, not using the link provided if the email (if available) but doing a standard google search: if you do not get some official looking websites within the first 5 results, then 🗑️

3- If you found a website and only the home page works, then 🗑️

4- If it still looks legit, and you are interested in what the email content says, ask a Senior for guidance.

Examples

Dear Professor,
With great pleasure, we invite you to join our prestigious event “World Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science” […]

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Dear. Author,
I hope this message finds you well. I am reaching out to you because I have been impressed by your expertise and contributions in the field of food nutrition and health.