When I was working in the US, I never got an email from a predatory/scam journal.
Then I went to work at a university in Southeast Asia, and I immediately started to get emails from such journals on a regular basis.
I got the above email because I tried to experiment with an AI product that reportedly can help write literature reviews. However, without paying, you really can’t get an accurate sense of what it can or cannot do. And in the end, I didn’t pay for the pro version, so I don’t have any sense about it.
Nonetheless, in subsequently receiving this email, I was reminded of all of the emails I got from scam/predatory journals while working at a university in Southeast Asia.
I’m certain that the same thing will happen with some of the AI products that are designed to accelerate research and writing. The people who are behind some of these products will likely target professors and graduate students at rankings-focused universities that have publication KPI’s (which means pretty much everywhere except the US).
So, in a lot of places, you will have a combination of scam/predatory journal targeting and AI paper-writing targeting. What a mix!!
In more romantic terms, it can be said that predatory journals and AI-generated papers are truly a match made in heaven. Or as they tend to say it in Vietnamese: Trời sinh một cặp!
This is certainly true!! I know that there are people out there who are thanking whichever god or spirit they worship for giving them this precious gift!!!