The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study of publishing behaviour among a group of Arab scholars in social science and humanities disciplines. The paper also investigated the number of Arab scholars who are publishing in predatory journals and the reasons that drive them to select these journals to share their scholarly findings. The study adopted a mixed methods approach. Eighteen journals that were categorized as predatory journals were scanned to find the number of Arab scholars who published in them. Then, a questionnaire was sent to Egyptian and Saudi scholars as they were found to be the top Arab contributors in these journals. The questionnaire was followed by semi‐structured interviews to gain an in‐depth understanding of the publishing behaviour. The data showed that many Arab scholars prefer publishing in predatory journals as these journals are easier and faster. The results also indicate that there is a need to raise the awareness of the harm that predatory journals can cause to the scholars and how they can avoid these journals. This study was conducted with social science and humanities scholars in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The publishing behaviour may differ in other scholarly disciplines and other Arabic countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the information seeking behaviour of scholars working at Shaqra University in both Arabic and English languages; to investigate if there are differences in the way scholars seek information while using different languages; to identify challenges while seeking information and to describe the approaches followed by the scholars to seek information. The study deployed a quasi-experimental approach. The sample of the study consisted of 20 participants who are affiliated to Shaqra University. Each participant was asked to solve five tasks, which were designed to capture participants’ information seeking behaviour. Think aloud protocol was also used to gather more data from the participants to enrich the collected data and to fully understand scholars’ behavior. The study found that the participants’ information seeking consists of four main stages: identifying the information needs, selecting the keywords, examining the results and filtering the results. The data revealed that there is no difference between information seeking in Arabic and English languages. However, participants who are from a non-Arabic background were more accustomed to searching information in the English language. There are few studies investigating information seeking behavior of Arabic language speakers. Additionally, fewer studies have tried to explore differences in information seeking behavior while using different languages. The value of the current study lies in being the first study that focuses on investigating information seeking behavior at Shaqra University. Additionally, it is one of a few studies that examine cross-language information seeking practices of Arabic language speakers and the obstacles that face them.

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