Predatory publishing represents a major challenge to scholarly communication. This paper maps the infiltration of journals suspected of predatory practices into the citation database Scopus and examines cross-country differences in the propensity of scholars to publish in such journals. Using the names of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory journals and publishers on Beall’s lists, we derived the ISSNs of 3,293 journals from Ulrichsweb and searched Scopus with them. 324 of journals that appear both in Beall’s lists and Scopus with 164 thousand articles published over 2015–2017 were identified. Analysis of data for 172 countries in 4 fields of research indicates that there is a remarkable heterogeneity. In the most affected countries, including Kazakhstan and Indonesia, around 17% of articles fall into the predatory category, while some other countries have no predatory articles whatsoever. Countries with large research sectors at the medium level of economic development, especially in Asia and North Africa, tend to be most susceptible to predatory publishing. Arab, oil-rich and/or eastern countries also appear to be particularly vulnerable. Policymakers and stakeholders in these and other developing countries need to pay more attention to the quality of research evaluation. Supplementary information The online version contains supplementary material available at (10.1007/s11192-020-03852-4).

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article (Macháček & Srholec, 2021) because some of the findings are unreliable. Post-publication peer review indicated the article includes statements about authors from some geographic regions which are unjustified in the generality of the conclusions. Findings are based on a regression analysis; however, this analysis did not include a control group. The regression analysis is, therefore, not complete and the results are unreliable.Results and findings are based on a so-called blacklist and are not supplemented by any results obtained using a positive control group. In this context, the Scopus database cannot be considered a control group, since it is a comprehensive bibliographic database. Similarly, the analysis was restricted to publications in four languages (English, Spanish, French, and Arabic). The results of the regression analysis are inconclusive for publications in languages not included in the analysis. The authors have been offered the opportunity to submit a new reworked manuscript for peer review. Vít Macháček and Martin Srholec disagree with this retraction.