Citation patterns between impact-factor and questionable journals

Abstract

One of the most fundamental issues in academia today is understanding the differences between legitimate and questionable publishing. While decision-makers and managers consider journals indexed in popular citation indexes such as Web of Science or Scopus as legitimate, they use two lists of questionable journals (Beall’s and Cabell’s), one of which has not been updated for a few years, to identify the so-called predatory journals. The main aim of our study is to reveal the contribution of the journals accepted as legitimate by the authorities to the visibility of questionable journals. For this purpose, 65 questionable journals from social sciences and 2338 Web-of-Science-indexed journals that cited these questionable journals were examined in-depth in terms of index coverages, subject categories, impact factors and self-citation patterns. We have analysed 3234 unique cited papers from questionable journals and 5964 unique citing papers (6750 citations of cited papers) from Web of Science journals. We found that 13% of the questionable papers were cited by WoS journals and 37% of the citations were from impact-factor journals. The findings show that neither the impact factor of citing journals nor the size of cited journals is a good predictor of the number of citations to the questionable journals.

Are papers published in predatory journals worthless? A geopolitical dimension revealed by content-based analysis of citations

“…Accordingly, impact factor journal articles have been considered "quality" and "legitimate" articles, while articles published in predatory journals were deemed worthless. Interestingly, however, in a pioneering study (Kulczycki, Hołowiecki, Taşkın and Krawczyk, 2021b), we found a strong citation relationship between these "valuable" and "worthless" journals. Although the number of citations is accepted as an indicator of quality by decision-makers, the citations made in journals deemed to be of good quality to journals whose poor quality is accepted by the majority deserve a detailed examination.…”

“…The main dataset was created using the data of two of our previous papers, "Do impact factor journals make blacklisted journals visible? A systematic citation study" (Kulczycki, Holowiecki, Taşkın & Krawczyk, 2021a) and "Citation patterns between impact factor and questionable journals" (Kulczycki, Hołowiecki, Taşkın & Krawczyk, 2021b). We collected data on 65 questionable social sciences journals and their article metadata.…”

“…This paper is a follow-up study based on our conceptual work on mislocated centers of scholarly communication ) and a previous study (Kulczycki, Hołowiecki, Taşkın & Krawczyk, 2021b) that examined how many articles in questionable journals are cited in WoS-indexed journals. We coined the term mislocated center of scholarly communication to describe and criticize the role some publication channels play in peripheral or semi-peripheral countries without condemning scholars who publish in them or accusing publishers of bad intentions.…”

A psychological perspective towards understanding the objective and subjective gray zones in predatory publishing

“…Unfortunately, a definitive solution to "predatory" publishing has not been found, in part because academia has not been able to clearly differentiate predatory from non-predatory entities, i.e., it has been unable to parse the gray zone, in some cases preferring to employ the term "questionable" to encompass both "bad-faith outlets from low-quality ones" (Kulczycki et al 2021). In part, this has been due to the creation of blacklists with insufficiently clear criteria, or the blacklisting or whitelisting of journals or publishers based on insufficiently robust criteria, or due to the failure to appreciate, and acknowledge, the existence of the wide gray zone of quality in academic standards and scholarly behavior in journals or publishers.…”

Factors, components and dynamics: investigation of journal self-citation and citation by equal opportunity model

“…With the same level of JSC, the journals which got higher JIFs will have lower JSC rates in terms of total citations ( Gorski et al., 2021 ). Recent emerging studies indicated the relations between citation and self-citation were usually diversified dependent on what disciplines and/or journals were concerned ( Krauss, 2007 ; Gazni and Didegah, 2021 ; Jain et al., 2021 ; Jamalnia and Shokrpour, 2021 ; Kulczycki et al., 2021 ; Urlings et al., 2021 ; Sanfilippo et al., 2021 ). In addition, longitudinal studies in medical literature showed a decline in the JSC rate in terms of total citations ( Delli and Livas, 2018 ; Delli et al., 2020 ), the accustomed indicator of JSC at present.…”