That it was an interesting and informative read, she wrote me about my latest paper. Happy that I took the time publishing it. And if I wanted to consider writing a follow-up for them. They even had been in contact with other scientists in the field that were working on similar things, and discussed some promising future collaborations with them.

Oh yeah, and she was Editor at the ‘Internal Medicine Review’.

Science spam is a peculiar thing, and I always read such e-mails with a lot of interest. I know it is inevitable to get countless e-mails like this if you publish your address with your paper (which we have to do), but the creativity with which some of these e-mails are written makes you realise how big of a business this actually is.

Of course, my research would never ever fit into the Internal Medicine Review, nor would I  ever dare to consider going to the International Conference on Science and Engineering in India or whatever fancy looking title they gave it now; but I can imagine that they will find a few people interested, as long as they try hard enough.

Journal spam is like dandelion seeds: many trials with a low input, hoping one somewhere somehow reaches the right person/soil to succeed

I like to compare this strategy with what we see in a lot of plants: producing thousands of seeds, blindly launching them into the air, and hoping that at least somewhere, sometime, one becomes successful. It is a strategy that works – low input, many trials – but it lives from the power of the numbers. So we will have to forgive them for not checking what my paper was actually about, as that would become so time-consuming in large numbers that their strategy would be doomed to fail.