My mother’s further adventures with Academia.edu spam

Last week, I described my recent adventures trying to figure out why my mother, of all people, was getting frequent emails from Academia.edu, asking her to upgrade to premium. I found that she did indeed have an Academia.edu profile, but that of course, she has never created one. She was even said to have been mentioned in a paper uploaded by a top 3% Academia.edu author, a quite surprising statement.

As usual, she was invited to upgrade to a pay-plan to find out more. I’ve fired off an email to Academia.edu to find out if profiles are sometimes created automatically and without the author’s participation, but haven’t heard back. It is, after all, a long weekend in these parts.

She continues to receive those emails. In the most recent one, she is informed that “the name Thérèse Costopoulos is mentioned in a PDF uploaded to Academia by Emmanuel Gonzalez Ortega”. Ah, finally something slightly more verifiable than a vague “top 3% author”.

There is indeed an Emmanuel Gonzalez Ortega on Academia, who works in biotechnology, mainly in HIV research apparently. This is intriguing, since my mother is an educator who works with children with learning disabilities. I searched through the 4 PDFs uploaded to his profile. There is a Costpoulos listed as an author on a paper cited in a 2010 article on which Gonzalez is a co-author. But this is a Donna S. Costopoulos, rather than a Thérèse Costopoulos. DS Costopoulos is a cell biology researcher active in the 1980s and listed on ResearchGate as “affiliated with Tufts University and other places”.

At the very least, the email from Academia.edu to my mother contains an untruth. The most charitable explanation is that this is some sort of machine reading error. It could also be sloppy constraining of searches (ignoring first names and initials, for example). This would be easier to believe if the email had simply claimed that the name “Costopoulos” is mentioned. But they are very specific (and repeatedly so) that it is “Thérèse Costopoulos” that is mentioned. Perhaps they ignore the first name when searching for matches, but not when notifying recipients? Whatever the case, it doesn’t look good.

Had my mother decided to find out more about her mention by an academic researcher, by paying to upgrade to premium the account she didn’t create in the first place, she would have found… nothing whatsoever that is of interest to her. This is one anecdote, but I suspect the same fate awaits many who upgrade to find out more about a claim made in one of those emails. I am half tempted to pay for the upgrade myself, and find out more about that famous top 3% author. But only half tempted. Maybe I’ll do a kickstarter to cover the cost.