Congratulations! Your article ‘the effect of COVID-19 from the perspective of 5 medical students in Boxtan Medical School’ has been accepted for publication in the journal of Waq-al-waq.  

What an honor to have a paper published after the extensive work and effort. Dr. Junku, a non-US IMG from Boxtan Medical College, has never had any research experience. Attracted by the promises of a publication if he took part in Dr. Xumaro’s research course and overwhelmed by the Match® process, Dr. Junku decided to spare $800 in pursuit of an academic endeavor. Dr. Junku could not believe his eyes when he saw the acceptance letter from the journal. Finally, he had gotten a paper published!! WOW! What an amazing course! It was definitely worth the $800!

However, it was not too long before Dr. Junku realized that he was prey to what I would like to call, ‘predatory research courses’! Courses that follow unethical practices to take advantage of students who are unfamiliar with the research process.

I contemplated multiple times about providing you in this blog, with a blacklist of predatory courses exploiting poor medical students similar to Beall’s List of predatory journals. However, learning from the Beall’s list and to avoid the need of updating this list every few months with the ever-increasing number of such predatory courses, I decided to provide you with the factors that you need to pay attention to so you can make your own determination as to whether a course is predatory or not.

Publication guaranteed! No strings attached!

No matter how good or bad you are, you will get a paper!  This is the first sign of predatory courses. These courses take advantage of applicants (US applicants and IMGs) who lack research experience and publications and need the latter to apply to residency. These courses promise students a quick and guaranteed publication! Who would say no to that! Right?! Well, I wish life was that simple!

First, is the publication truly guaranteed? Me myself, after working 3 fully dedicated years in research and publishing over 100 papers, I cannot guarantee myself or my students that a paper will be 100% published. I always tell my students that there is a chance that the paper might not be published. That is why I am not sure how these brilliant scientists are promising you a paper!

Therefore, I find guaranteeing a publication as a result of the course is the first sign of a predatory course and is a way to convince students to pay not for the research experience but the promised paper.

The Holy Grail of Publications: The JOURNAL

But what if some students actually got a paper from the course. Dr. Junku actually got a publication! Why should he not be happy? Isn’t the journal of Waq-al-waq a respected and PubMed indexed journal?

Well, again, it is not that simple!

I am sorry to disappoint Dr. Junku. Probably Dr. Junku did not know that journal of Waq-al-waq is a predatory journal and will not be helpful to his application as no one knows of this journal.

I am not going to go into the details of predatory journals here, but I am going mention a few points that can help you differentiate journals easily!

First, open access vs. subscription-based. If the journal is open access (you pay to publish), this could be a sign of a predatory journal especially if this journal does not belong to a society (for example, the journal of the American Heart Association is unlikely to be predatory even if it was open access). If you are not experienced with research, I would recommend staying away from open-access journals until you get experienced with research and journals.

Second, is the impact factor. Although being PubMed-indexed is a good sign, you will find many predatory journals indexed in PubMed. I see the impact factor as a better tool to screen journals. The impact factor (IF) refers to “the total number of citations a journal received in a given year to articles published over the previous two years divided by the number of citable items published by that journal over the same time period. Citable items refer to research articles, technical notes, and reviews and exclude letters and editorials”. So simply, it reflects the impact of the journal and how many times the articles published in these journals got cited. So, if a journal has a high IF, that means it has a higher impact and the papers got cited a lot. You will find 99.9% of the articles published by these courses in journals that either do not have an IF or have a very low IF (<1). Additionally, some journals will say ‘Copernicus indexed’, and some other random indexing other than PubMed which no one knows about.

Here is what Dr. Junku was fooled. Journal of Waq-al-waq was an open-access journal with no impact factor relying on money from researchers like Dr. Junku to feed the greed of small groups of people that run this journal and these courses.