As any academic researcher will tell you, one of the banes of their professional existence is the constant, annoying stream of solicitations they receive by email purporting to praise their research and prior output before soliciting their next article submission from them. Sometimes these emails are so obvious they can be deleted; sometimes they are so funny then can give rise to a small chuckle; but other times they simply make you despair.
Receiving these missives is, sadly, part and parcel of being a published academic. But do we know where these emails come from, and how do they target the right people? The obvious and funny ones are clearly not that targeted, and hence cause relatively few problems. But the more sinister ones are those that hit the spot more accurately, and even if few people respond to them, it is always unsettling to endure that feeling, no matter how fleeting, that someone is watching.
Predatory playground
One space that is patrolled by predatory publishers is the preprint server. Subject repositories, with their large scale and deep subject coverage, are particularly rich areas for publishers of all types to spot articles by authors who might be worth targeting with solicitation emails. The problem is that this is the case for both legitimate and illegitimate ones, and as such it would be worth knowing which repositories see the most activity of this nature.
A recent article entitled ‘Hunting grounds for predatory publishers’ by Matti Keloharju and Roope Keloharju highlighted this issue by looking at two specific preprint servers – the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and Research Square. The authors asked: are some preprint platforms more attractive to predatory publishers than others?
Following the breadcrumbs
Examining over 200 unsolicited messages received between September 2022 and October 2024 concerning one paper which appeared on both platforms about PhD students’ mental health, the findings suggested that Research Square was the principal hunting ground for publishers targeting this particular paper.
Furthermore, the disciplinary pattern was striking. Of 187 journal invitations, 56% came from clinical medicine journals and 37% from psychiatry or psychology, and just 3% came from social sciences journals, despite the paper’s relevance to that field.
Familiar bait
The messages contained the usual tropes to appear credible, with almost three quarters including an ISSN, while 58% advertised an impact factor (which was most likely false in all cases). One journal sent a total of 56 messages using 18 different email addresses, and only 10% of the messages were caught by the institution’s spam filter. Obviously, pressing “block sender” has its limitations.
The authors suggested that publish or pressure culture, commercial opportunities in health sciences and Research Square’s integration with journal submissions could help explain the targeting. It is important to note that while these are all possible explanations, the study was small in scale compared to the number of articles published in the 20,000+ journals listed in Cabells’ Predatory Reports database.
Research your research
For authors, the lesson is clear: anticipate that greater visibility may attract unwanted attention alongside useful feedback. Preprints still offer valuable opportunities to share research, however unsolicited invitations still require careful scrutiny. As we have often advised on this blog, research your research. Always check a journal’s identity, editorial practices and indexing claims, and use trusted evaluation resources such as Cabells’ Predatory Reports to inform your decisions regarding publication outlets.
An email quoting your paper’s exact title may feel personal, but as this study reminds us, recognizing one’s work and valuing it are two very different things.
