My former adviser published an article from my master thesis in a predatory journal without my consent, what should I do now?
I don't want to make my CV dirty by putting an article in it, which is published in a predatory journal
All you need to do is just to forget about it. You don't have to waste time on contacting your advisor or Google.
- Nobody read predatory journals. The amount of papers in good venues are already too much.
- Nobody will remember your name until you have a strong publication record with different sets of authors. (Otherwise people only remember the most well-known authors)
- When you are somebody to be searched for, you probably have other publications that appear in the first search results. Researchers are busy, nobody have time for an old paper that has not been cited, in an unknown journal.
You could try having it removed. Predatory journals may not comply with your request or have anyone respond to you. This will also probably destroy your relationship with your former advisor, which you may need at some time if you need a recommendation etc. If you think your relationship is already destroyed completely, this may not matter.
If you never list this article in your CV, webpage, google scholar profile etc., and never cite it, it may not do any damage to your academic reputation. You say you're a PhD student in the US, so this is probably from your masters or undergraduate work. If you do well and publish a few good first author papers during your PhD and some good shared authorship papers, I don't think an early paper in a predatory journal you don't record yourself is going to matter a lot. People would just assume you were young and inexperienced then and you've grown as a researcher since.
I would be more concerned with the content of the matter. Does it contain any false results, embarrassingly bad language, un-cited work or plagiarism? Something like this is definitely more damaging and you should try to have this removed. Would you have been fine with the exact same paper in a good journal?