Predatory conferences in biomedical streams: An invitation for academic upliftment or predator's looking for prey

Abstract

Scientific conferences, once deemed essential in scholars' lives, are now converting into a high-profit business. These predatory conferences are often organized by some profit-making predatory publishers or manufacturing companies for marketing their product or luring young researchers and scientists to submit their research manuscripts to these so-called predatory journals. Various tactics are used by these conferences to extract money from the researchers and students such as organizing conferences at attractive tourist places with multidisciplinary scope, invitation to submit a research paper to be published at the earliest or to become part of an editorial board/editor-in-chief. It should be realized that these predatory conferences do not provide any benefit to registering individuals for the development of science. The only remedy to expose and stop the business of all such predatory conference organizers is by creating awareness among young scholars and researchers, regarding these predatory conferences and the demerits of attending them, through the established medical and dental institutions, along with specialized associations and societies. A zero-tolerance policy should be created to ban such conferences with a refusal to provide promotion or funding to scholars or researchers attending these conferences. Hence, this narrative review aims to create awareness regarding these predatory conferences, the tactics used by them to trap researchers and ways which young researchers and academic scholars can use to delineate them from legitimate ones.