Akademik Olmayan Bilim Adamlarının Hesaplarının Analizi Yoluyla Yıkıcı E-posta Yönetimi: Bilimsel Yayıncılıkta Uluslararası Zorluk

Abstract

Scientific distant education and learning have become fast and straightforward in the internet era for information dissemination and sharing through e-publishing. However, this breakthrough has a severe drawback as misinformation and inaccurate scientific pieces of literature might be delivered to the audience. One of the most significant sources of this kind of flaw is the fraudulent publishing that is progressively growing. We aimed in this study to analyze predatory behavior communication through investigation of the e-mail account of a non-academic researcher. The study involved a text analysis of the identified different spam mail types. First, we have transformed e-mails that were considered spam into an Excel database. Then, categorization was executed to identify types of scientific fraud and their rate of delivery in the account during a definite time frame. Common keywords and country names were analyzed to spot the predatory markers. The study showed five categories of scientific predatory e-mails with a remarkable alarming rate of occurrence for invitations received for contribution to journal publishing. More than half of the received e-mails from these types involved country names embracing India, USA and UK. Among the screened 50 words/keywords from suspicious e-mails, only six of them contributed by 60% in frequency of occurrence. The spotting of patterns using text analysis coupled with Pareto charting would be helpful in e-mail management for researchers and scientists, especially non-academicians who do not have a frame of reference in scientific publishing and any qualified mentors or librarian available who could guide the publication process.