{"id":239690,"date":"2026-07-11T17:07:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T17:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/?p=239690"},"modified":"2026-07-11T17:07:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T17:07:11","slug":"how-universities-shape-power-silence-dissent-and-influence-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/how-universities-shape-power-silence-dissent-and-influence-society\/","title":{"rendered":"How Universities Shape Power, Silence Dissent and Influence Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

Predatory journals, fake conferences, and plagiarism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alongside the well-known problems of peer review and academic publishing incentives, another development over the past two decades has reshaped the research landscape: hundreds of predatory journals and fake academic conferences.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

These outlets mimic the appearance of legitimate scholarship while operating primarily as businesses whose revenue comes from publication fees rather than intellectual quality.<\/p>\n

Their growth has created new opportunities for academic fraud, plagiarism, and the large-scale dissemination of unreliable research.<\/p>\n

The business model of predatory publishing is simple. Researchers receive unsolicited emails inviting them to submit papers to journals with impressive titles or to present work at international conferences.<\/p>\n

They promise rapid publication and \u201crigorous peer review<\/em>\u201d. Once the author pays the publication fee, sometimes hundred or even thousands of pounds, the paper is accepted and published with minimal or no review.<\/p>\n

These journals usually deliberately adopt names that closely resemble those of reputable publications or conferences to create an impression of legitimacy.<\/p>\n

Examples include titles such as International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications<\/em>, which can easily be mistaken for the legitimate International Journal of Computer Science and Applications<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Conferences branded with titles like \u201cWorld Congress on Engineering and Computer Science<\/em>\u201d are organised by commercial conference companies but marketed in ways that resemble established academic meetings with similar titles.<\/p>\n

The differences are often subtle enough that even experienced researchers can be misled.<\/p>\n

The damage caused by these predatory outlets operates in two directions. First, they deceive legitimate researchers into paying publication fees under the impression that their work will appear in a credible peer-reviewed venue.<\/p>\n

Many early-career academics and researchers in institutions where publication pressure is intense are particularly vulnerable to such invitations.<\/p>\n

Second, these outlets provide a convenient vehicle for academic plagiarism. Because editorial scrutiny is minimal or non-existent, plagiarised work can easily be published under a different author\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

Once the paper appears online, it may be indexed by search engines and citation databases, giving the plagiarist apparent academic credit while obscuring the original source.<\/p>\n

Martin Neil and I discovered we were victims of plagiarism when colleagues started emailing us about papers they had found online that looked strangely familiar.<\/p>\n

One case we discovered was especially blatant. Our paper \u201cUsing Bayesian Networks to Predict Software Defects and Reliability<\/em>\u201d (published in the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part O: Journal of Risk and Reliability<\/em> in 2008) was reproduced almost word for word in another paper titled \u201cPredicting Software Reliability and Defects Using Bayesian Networks<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n

The supposed authors, from Rivers State University of Science and Technology in Nigeria, made the most superficial alterations to the text; they changed the order of a few words in the title and abstract while leaving the paper completely umodified.<\/p>\n

The plagiarised version appeared in the predatory European Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology<\/em>, which could be easily confused with the reputable European Journal of Information Systems<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case. Other papers of ours have been plagiarised in slightly more subtle ways such as by modifying the title completely, adding a small amount of new text relevant to the new title, but otherwise reproducing verbatim most sections.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The authors cite some related literature but omit any reference to our work, making the plagiarism unmistakable.<\/p>\n

The damage does not remain confined to obscure journals. Once published, many of these papers are indexed by widely used search tools such as Google Scholar<\/em>, which often harvests citations automatically with minimal filtering.<\/p>\n

As a result, poorly reviewed or fraudulent articles can appear alongside legitimate research in search results, accumulate citations, and even influence metrics used in hiring and promotion decisions.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the plagiarised version of our paper was discovered when a colleague encountered it during a Google<\/em> search on Bayesian-network approaches to defect prediction; it appeared among the top search results.<\/p>\n

For readers outside academia, the distinction between rigorous scholarship and predatory publishing can therefore become almost invisible.<\/p>\n

The scale of the problem can be seen in the case of OMICS International<\/em>, a publishing conglomerate that launched hundreds of journals while charging authors large publication fees and providing little meaningful peer review.<\/p>\n

In 2019, a U.S. federal court ruled that OMICS<\/em> had engaged in deceptive practices after misleading researchers about the legitimacy of its journals and editorial processes.<\/p>\n

Similar vulnerabilities were exposed through automated hoaxes using SCIgen<\/em>, a program created by MIT students that generates meaningless computer-science papers filled with technical jargon.<\/p>\n

Journalists and researchers discovered that dozens of SCIgen<\/em>-generated papers had been accepted by low-quality conferences and journals.<\/p>\n

Not all instances of plagiarism occur in obscure outlets. In one particularly disturbing case, large portions of work produced by myself and Martin Neil were reproduced without attribution in a book from one of the most reputable publishing houses.<\/p>\n

The book was written by a person who had briefly been registered as a PhD student with us before leaving without explanation. Much of the material in the book reproduced our work, including research that predated the author\u2019s time as a student, yet none of it was credited.<\/p>\n

When we notified the publisher and demonstrated that the author\u2019s listed qualifications and endorsements were themselves questionable, no corrective action was taken.<\/p>\n

In such an environment, the traditional signals of academic credibility, journal titles, conference proceedings, and even the appearance of peer review can no longer be taken at face value.<\/p>\n

The result is a research ecosystem in which the mechanisms intended to signal credibility increasingly fail to distinguish genuine scholarship from imitation.<\/p>\n

Author: Norman Fenton<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

yogaesoteric
\nJuly 11, 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Predatory journals, fake conferences, and plagiarism Alongside the well-known problems of peer review and academic publishing incentives, another development over the past two decades has reshaped the research landscape: hundreds of predatory journals and fake academic conferences. These outlets mimic the appearance of legitimate scholarship while operating primarily as businesses whose revenue comes from publication […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1093],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censored-news-social-5127-en-censored-sensational-news-3480-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239690"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239697,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239690\/revisions\/239697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}