Last month, doctoral student Mr. Dev Kumar Thapa and his advisor Prof. Anshu Pandey from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, claimed to have discovered evidence for superconductivity at a temperature much higher than ever before. The researchers have posted a preprint of their paper titled, “Evidence for Superconductivity at Ambient Temperature and Pressure in Nanostructures” to the arXiv, an online repository of pre-prints of journal papers. They have also submitted a paper outlining their findings to the journal Nature. In this particular instance, questions of various kinds have been raised about the research reported in the preprint in the public debate.

Earlier this month, we erred. Among the 1000+ articles published on Research Matters, it was the first for us. An alert reader expressed displeasure on Twitter with a hashtag #fakescience on one of our stories. Alarmed, we investigated to note that the story was based on a research paper published in a journal listed as ‘predatory’, and with that, found a lot more about the prevalence of ‘predatory’ journals that hound the world of science.