The Strange Case of the McGill Journal for Duck Studies

by Wade Radmore

I. Introduction

Every week, the inboxes of tens of thousands of McGill students are flooded with listservs featuring all of the events, opportunities, and information important to each McGill department. Now, a question that none of us have pondered is: just how easy is it to get featured on one of these? While the Faucet creates satire, our investigative journalism skills are just as prominent as other McGill papers, just with the immunity to being criticized for misreporting!

Asking some friends who run communications accounts, I discovered that the verification process to be featured on a departmental listserv and reaching thousands of students was surprisingly lenient. With this in mind, my goal was clear. God-willing, I was to get something really stupid into as many departmental listservs as possible.

II. The Background

First, I needed subject matter for my journal. As the title suggests, I went with ducks. See, our aquatic friends who poison themselves with our breadcrumbs made perfect representatives for the journal. For one, they are adorable. Take a look at our logo in figure 1 for a perfect example. For two, they seem like a perfectly plausible subject of scholarly research! Maybe not at the undergraduate level… but they’re ducks dammit! Who would say no to a journal about ducks?!

I decided to email departments in the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, Engineering, and Management. My hypothesis was that Arts students would be the most likely to believe that the journal is real given their fascination with studying useless majors. Although,

I worried that Environment students might flood the submissions page with genuine duckthemed essays about how climate change has transformed the migration patterns of the North American mallard. While I might be able to trick Science and Engineering departments since they have less rigorous research and fact-checking experience when it comes to useless subject matter, they posed a different threat. For instance, I believe the Mining Department, among others, would be a bit wary of as to why duck-themed articles would apply to those studying their program. Now, Management, I believed would be my best shot. They lack both research abilities to fact-check my email and would find my fake AI-generated duck essays to be better than anything they had seen in their whole academic career.

I sent emails to 34 departments. This was done through a mass-blocked carbon copy which likely looked very, very suspicious. Of course, this also likely went to spam inboxes, so I did the painful work of resending a unique email to each account after a day. Alas, after my escapade, I was able to guarantee with some communication leads that the email was not sent to all spam inboxes.

III. The Email

Would it be possible for you to share the call for submissions for our 7th edition of McGill’s Journal for Duck Studies? We’re an interdisciplinary academic journal publishing out of SSMU that focuses on the study of ducks and their place in society. The journal has received recognition from the Canadian Institute for the Study of Marine Animals and the International Journal of Duck Research. Feel free to check out our previous edition here: *Link*

Could you please include the following call for submissions on your listserv:

“Want to get published in an academic journal at McGill? Founded in 2016 and ran out of SSMU, the McGill Journal for Duck Studies has been the foremost pioneer of bringing the contemporary field of Duck Studies to the university scene. Students from all disciplines are invited to share their work to join the growing field. Please submit submissions through the following Google Forms: *Link*”

Please let me know if you have any questions or clarifications about our journal. Also, could you please let me know whether the call for submissions will be featured in the coming week’s listserv or the following week (as I recognize that my request may be coming too late into the week)?

For those interested, one can find the McGill Journal for Duck Studies’ sixth volume up on Issuu right now if you search for it or scan the QR code below (it isn’t a rickroll this time). Also, this was the cover art used:

IV. The Results

To begin, on the Sunday evening in which the email was released, I received no responses in the first hours. That was, of course, until my first victim was duck’d. “Duck’d” became the terminology I used amongst my friends whenever a department formally agreed to share my journal. Imagine the gif of a duck as it wobbles back and forth excited, for that was I when the notification of acceptance reached my silly eyes.

Now, don’t get me wrong, as of my reporting this, two out of thirty-four departments had successfully been duck’d. In particular, we received confirmation emails from Math & Statistics, as well as Neuroscience. I can only imagine the type of submissions we should have received. “Calculating the Best Proportion of Duck to Wing-size to Maximize Aerodynamic Efficiency” or “The Duck Brain: How Much Thought Goes into a Quack?”

A week after this, I managed to pull off my largest trick yet. I got the journal onto the AUS (Arts Undergraduate Society) listserv. Not just that, but the entire email itself became duck-themed. Duck emojis were ever present, a swan-shaped duck graced the cover, and the VP Communications made both their profile picture a duck and a comic specifically about my duckliness. I had convinced her to become a fellow anasaphiliac. While that word sounds incredibly suggestive, I assure you it is merely just a lover of ducks. I have even included the anasaphiliac’s comic of our fateful encounter at the end of this article.

For those in these departments, I hope you enjoyed reading our scholarly paper. Alas, even as this article is published, I imagine more associations may act upon my call for action, so stay on the lookout! I even infiltrated an exclusive event only for AUS Executives, hoping to remind some VP Communications to check their spam inbox. Still, they were all too bureaucratic and intimidating, so I panicked and hung out with a photographer the whole time. Darn.

For specific results, Duck Studies’s first publication has now over 300 impressions, 130 reads, and an average read time of two and a half minutes. To put that into shameful perspective, that is much greater success than the Faucet ever accomplishes.

V. Conclusion

This experiment went pretty well. For a fake journal about ducks, I’m happy that some people were hopeful enough to believe, just for a moment, that such a creation was real.

I recommend that students conduct further research on whether listservs can be hacked at individual departmental levels. Given the mass scale of my approach, mcgilljournalforduckstudies@ gmail.com was marked as a phishing email address that was definitely up to no good. Even Google knew I succeeded. Anyway, here’s the comic inspired by my duckventures.