60 days of spam: academic conferences

Presented here is an analysis of 176 unsolicited English-language invitations to attend conferences received over a 60 day period at two personal email accounts (Google and QUT). For each unsolicited email the name of the conference, location and ordinal. The 176 invitations were sent by a total of 120 unique conferences. This was equivalent to an average of 2.9 invitations per day, with 1.47 invitations per journal. A summary of conference hosting nations is listed in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Invitations tallied according to nation of origin.

A summary of conference hosting cities is presented in Figure 2. Three of the most common conference invitations were for conferences in Phuket: “2nd International Conference on Applied Mathematics, Simulation and Modelling”, “2nd Materials Engineering and Industrial Applications”, and “3rd International Conference on Applied Mechanics and Mechanical Automation”.

FIgure 2. Invitations tallied according to city of origin.

A histogram of conference ordinals is presented in Figure 3 below. The most common ordinal was 2, while the median was 3.

Figure 3. Historgram of ordinals for unique conferences.