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PRAY So You Don’t Become Prey

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Abstract

Cloned journals refer to deceptive or counterfeit scientific journals that imitate genuine scholarly publications with the intention of misleading scholars into submitting their works. As early career researchers fall prey to these hijacked/cloned journals, research in this direction is important. In this paper, we present “PRAY—Published Research Attestation sYstem”, to validate the research papers published in a journal. We develop a novel random number generator to generate a journal secret key (jsk) based on satellite beacon signals. HMAC of ISSN number with manuscript DOI using keyed jsk; attestation code (ACODE) is generated. This attestation code is used to verify and attest the validity of the genuine publication. The system is tested and validated through verification in Scopus database.

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Data Availability Statement

The data used in this research are available with the authors.

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Funding

The authors declare that no funding was received for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of ECE, Chandigarh University, Mohali, Punjab, India

    Eashwar Sivakumar & Kiran Jot Singh

  2. Department of ECE, Jain (Deemed-to-Be) University, Bengaluru, India

    Eashwar Sivakumar

  3. School of Engineering, Ajeenkya DY Patil University, Pune, India

    Paras Chawla

  4. Department of Computer Science, Swansea University, Bay Campus, Fabian Way, Swansea, UK

    Xiaochun Cheng

  5. iNurture Education Solutions Private Ltd, Bengaluru, India

    Paras Chawla

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  1. Eashwar Sivakumar
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  2. Kiran Jot Singh
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  4. Xiaochun Cheng
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All authors have contributed equally.

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Correspondence to Eashwar Sivakumar.

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This article is part of the topical collection “Intelligent Systems” guest edited by Geetha Ganesan, Lalit Garg, Renu Dhir, Vijay Kumar and Manik Sharma.

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Sivakumar, E., Singh, K.J., Chawla, P. et al. PRAY So You Don’t Become Prey. SN COMPUT. SCI. 5, 324 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-024-02644-4

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