The Extent of Academic Spam Within Academic Medicine

Abstract

Researchers and physicians often receive academic invitations that are unsolicited, from unknown senders, and do not relate to their field of study. This study aims to determine the prevalence and impact of academic spam amongst physicians in a Canadian academic center. Staff and residents were voluntarily recruited for this study through email invitation. The participants were asked daily to direct all emails considered to be academic spam to the research team for the duration of 1 week. The criteria for spam includes invitations for academic activities that are unsolicited; AND do not pertain to the recipient’s area of work/research; OR that are from illegitimate sources. These emails were accepted or rejected for the study based on this criteria. These submissions were then analyzed for type, congruence, cost, repetition, and suppressibility. A total of 549 emails not intercepted by the institutional spam filter from 15 participants were forwarded to the research team, accounting for 70 total days. The average number of spam emails received per week was 59, ranging from 1 to 30 emails per day with a daily mean of 7 to 8 emails. Out of 538 submissions deemed to be spam, 46.3% were notifications from journals, 21.8% were invitations to conferences, 7.8% were invitations to serve on an editorial board, 9.7% were newsletter alerts, 5.9% were invitations for webinars/courses, 5.4% were paid products/services, and 3.5% were other academic invitations or requests. The majority of academic spam originated from open access publications. A total of 12.8% of spam emails referenced a fee, largely related to processing costs for publications, ranging from “waived” to “GBP $650.” Only 13% of the spam collected remotely mirrored the participants’ academic interests. Data obtained from the institution’s information technology team indicated that 75% of all incoming emails are blocked, illustrating that the true burden of academic spam may be up to four-fold greater than study results show. Academic spam invitations are common and time consuming, often duplicates, and of little relevance to the recipient. The volume and regularity of academic spam may result in legitimate requests being ignored or missed.