How can emergency physicians protect their work in the era of pseudo publishing?

Abstract

Recently scientists have been targets of pseudo journals (fake, hijacked or predatory journals). These journals provide a low barrier to publication and quick publication times compared to high quality journals and exploit the pay-to-publish system in order to charge publication fees but they provide no formal peer-review. We aim to increase awareness among emergency physicians about pseudo journals.Trying to list all of fake, hijacked or predatory journals is not the solution because new journals are launched almost everyday and the fast proliferation of journals makes it difficult to identify and list all of them. Only an understanding of the practices and markers of legitimate and predatory publishers will allow the researcher to keep pace with danger because fraud is an ever-changing field.In this review we offer basic information (our top list of strategies and potential red flags) to recognize these journals to avoid submission and suggest some solutions if a paper has already been submitted or published in these journals.

Checklists to Detect Potential Predatory Biomedical Journals: A Systematic Review

“…In most studies (n = 55, 59%) there was no mention of data gathering for checklist development (low risk of bias); in 26 cases (28%), one or two citations were noted next to checklist items, with no other explanation of item development or relevance (high risk of bias) (17,18,21–23,29,31,32,34,35,39–41,44,52,81,82,84–86,89,91,93,95,99,102). Twelve records (13%) included a description of authors gathering data to develop a checklist for this criterion (low risk of bias) (13,14,25,30,36–38,42,49,92,96,103).…”

Checklists to detect potential predatory biomedical journals: a systematic review

“…We identified 53 checklists identified through our search of electronic databases. The numbers of checklists identified increased over time: one each in 2012 [10], 2013 [15], rising to 16 in 2017 [13,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] and 12 in 2018 [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. We identified 30 original checklists [1,] from university library websites.…”

“…Of the checklists published in academic journals, 10 (22%) were published in nursing journals [25,31,35,38,41,87,89,[91][92][93], eight (18%) were published in journals related to general medicine [13,16,20,22,23,34,94,95], four (9%) in emergency medicine journals [29,36,90,100], four (9%) in information science journals [19,30,40,82], four (9%) in psychiatry and behavioral science journals [18,24,83,86]. The remaining checklists were published in a variety of other discipline-specific journals, within the field of biomedicine, with three or fewer checklists per discipline (e.g.…”