Hype or Real Threat: The Extent of Predatory Journals in Student Bibliographies

Abstract

Predatory publishing has risen with the development of open access publishing. This study examines how many potential predatory journals were used by Brandon University students by analyzing their bibliographies. In total, 245 bibliographies including 2,359 citations were analyzed. Of the 1,485 citations to journals in these citations, five were found to cite journals on Beall's List of Predatory Journals and Publishers. The probable sources of these journals in the students' bibliographies were examined.

Predator Effect

“…This small but significant activity backs up other recent research (Schira and Hurst, 2019;Collom et al, 2020), and begs the question as to whether authors can do more to prevent falling into the traps being laid for them by predatory publishers. The IAP survey also asked academics what they thought would happen if predatory publishing practices were left unchallenged, and 82 percent said it would fuel misinformation in public policy, with 58 percent thinking it would widen the research gap between high income and low-income countries-another unintended consequence of predatory journals.…”

La prédation dans le champ de la publication scientifique : un objet de recherche révélateur des mutations de la communication scientifique ouverte

“…Pour autant, alors que le ton employé pour aborder les risques du phénomène de la prédation est souvent alarmiste (Camacho et Reckley, 2018 ;Anderson, 2019), des voix s'élèvent pour mettre un bémol sur ces risques , les qualifiant même de « tempête dans un verre d'eau » (Leininger, 2018). L'approche bibliométrique de mesure de la citation a été une des voies explorées pour mesurer, observer l'infiltration des revues prédatrices dans l'environnement de lecture des chercheurs (Frandsen, 2017) et des étudiants (Schira et Hurst, 2019). Fondées sur l'hypothèse qu'un article cité est un article lu, de nombreuses études ont étudié la question suivante : est-ce que les articles des revues prédatrices sont cités, par qui et dans quelle proportion ?…”

Scholarly communications, predatory publishers and publish or perish culture in the 2020s

“…While librarians generally recognize Jeffery Beall’s description of predatory publishers (Schira and Hurst, 2019) and many of the articles reviewed for the purpose of writing this column credit Beall with first defining and applying the term “predatory publishers” (Shen and Bjork, 2015), the Nature article stated that there is a “lack of an agreed definition”. Perhaps, the reality is that Beall’s work was essentially a very good first try at addressing a new and complex topic.…”