{"id":721,"date":"2017-10-25T11:16:10","date_gmt":"2017-10-25T11:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/how-to-identify-predatory-conferences-the-think-check-attend-checklist\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T06:38:42","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T06:38:42","slug":"how-to-identify-predatory-conferences-the-thinkcheckattend-checklist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/how-to-identify-predatory-conferences-the-thinkcheckattend-checklist","title":{"rendered":"How to identify predatory conferences: The Think.Check.Attend checklist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Members of the scholarly community are well-acquainted with the increasing menace of predatory publishers and journals. The more recent entry in the league of predators in academic publishing are predatory conferences. In recent times, many academics from various fields have been receiving an increasing number of invitations to present at or attend conferences. Most of these appear to be scholarly conferences, but are in reality an exploitative means used by predatory publishers and conference organizers to make money in the form of registration fees. These fake conferences mostly target unsuspecting early-career researchers. Sometimes, the speakers or attendees are subsequently informed that the conference had been cancelled due to some reason, but the registration fees were never returned.\u00a0 At other times, the meetings do happen, but they are far from the high profile international events they were expected to be: sparsely attended and without any of the prominent speakers displayed on the conference website.\u00a0 Stories about these dubious meetings and events have been reported in Science Magazine<\/a>, NYTimes<\/a>, and HUFFPOST<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thus, in addition to predatory journals and publishers, researchers now need to be wary of predatory conferences as well. But how can one judge whether a conference is legitimate or a fake one?\u00a0 Think. Check. Attend.<\/a> is an initiative by Knowledge E<\/a> – an organization that supports innovation and development in research and publishing – that aims to guide and assist researchers and scholars to judge the legitimacy and academic credentials of conferences in order to help them decide whether to attend.<\/p>\n

Following a methodology related to Think. Check. Submit.<\/a>, \u00a0a campaign to help researchers identify trusted journals for their research, Think. Check. Attend. provides guidelines that help researchers differentiate between an authentic conference and one they should avoid. It is based on a simple checklist that researchers can follow to choose the right conference to attend and\/or present their research.<\/p>\n

Here are the questions in the checklist<\/a> that a researcher must answer to check the reliability of a conference:<\/p>\n

Organizers & Sponsors<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n