Pop psychology and predatory journals

Abstract

I 've been considering hinting to my kids that for the upcoming holidays, it would most welcome if they were to take wholesale control of my external electronic memory systems (email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) in order to revamp, reorganize, create rules, and de-clutter a part of my life that is becoming increasingly frustrating and obstructive to productivity. I know I'm not likely alone in this fantasy. Several of my colleagues have apparently initiated a friendly competition to see how many "unread" messages they can collect in their inbox: a somewhat perverse act of rebellion against the never-ending whims of the instant-communication gods? Last I checked, the number of the front-runner was north of 2500. Truth be told, this thought came about after re-skimming an interesting book entitled, "The Organized Mind," by a cognitive psychologist from McGill named Daniel Levitin. 1 The book serves up some self-help to all of us struggling with today's information deluge brought on both at work and play, and throws in enough neuroscience to satisfy those of us who carry a decent amount of suspicion for any pop psychology offerings. Whatever you think of the genre-and no disrespect to the author for the "pop" reference-the book makes several obvious but sobering points, including his estimate that today, we take in nearly five times the amount of information every day than we did 20 years ago (more than 34 gigabytes) and our brain can only process about 120 bits per second. We just don't have the necessary RAM! After first reading the book a few years ago, I've tried to implement a few of the proffered strategies: daydreaming more and off-loading my schedule-making to others (both to the consternation of my wife and administrative assistants). It turns out my kids are probably the least capable of contributing to this recent burst of organizational housekeeping: efficiently categorizing all electronic input for easier later access and action. They seem to be pleasantly egosyntonic with this attention-stealing information infestation and unwilling to consider that there is any problem. So, stuck with the job myself, the first step was to revisit those filter setups for my Outlook inbox to optimize the cull of the unrelenting junk mail that lands there every morning. It was during this recent attempt at purging that it hit home that the most indefatigable culprits were those from medical journals with the just slightly nonsensical names, such as the Journal of Clinical Andrology and Advanced Robotics. (I made this up after a brief check to make sure it hadn't been founded yet.) If readers of CUAJ have recently published any article or comment in a reputable journal, or even just accessed a manuscript from an online source, you likely have been similarly inundated with requests to visit a predatory journal's website and consider submitting an original paper or review article on a subject matter "around your honourable scientific expertise." As an aside, I've wondered why most of these predatory journals have sli...