Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

Abstract

The extent to which predatory journals can harm scientific practice increases as the numbers of such journals expand, in so far as they undermine scientific integrity, quality, and credibility, especially if those journals leak into prestigious databases. Journal Citation Reports (JCRs), a reference for the assessment of researchers and for grant-making decisions, is used as a standard whitelist, in so far as the selectivity of a JCR-indexed journal adds a legitimacy of sorts to the articles that the journal publishes. The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) once included on Beall’s list of potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers, had 53 journals ranked in the 2018 JCRs annual report. These journals are analysed, not only to contrast the formal criteria for the identification of predatory journals, but taking a step further, their background is also analysed with regard to self-citations and the source of those self-citations in 2018 and 2019. The results showed that the self-citation rates increased and was very much higher than those of the leading journals in the JCR category. Besides, an increasingly high rate of citations from other MDPI-journals was observed. The formal criteria together with the analysis of the citation patterns of the 53 journals under analysis all singled them out as predatory journals. Hence, specific recommendations are given to researchers, educational institutions and prestigious databases advising them to review their working relations with those sorts of journals.

An open letter on the “generalised tipping curve” of the SIM pulling tests, the “dynamic” SIM wind load analysis and VTA

“…A co-author of [42] cites his paper from 2017 [44] which publisher fitted the definition of predatory as alleged by [45]. That paper [44] reveals that crown architecture was seemingly not taken into account in the final results: "Trees were selected to cover a broad range of heights (h), widths (diameter at breast height, DBH), and wood densities (ρw)."…”

“…Furthermore, alleged predatory journals as flagged by e.g. [45,64,65] can seemingly spread false findings and perpetuate already refuted ones. For instance, a hilarious bogus paper was published in an alleged predatory journal, proving that peer-review was non-existent [65].…”

“…Researchers should beware of being perceived as examples of these quotes: "...ethically reprehensible academic misconduct that 'strikes at the heart of scientific research", "...false or misleading information...", "...dilution and distortion of evidence..." and "...citation cartels" (sic. [45]). Publishing in predatory journals could lead to establishing or sustaining risky or untenable claims.…”

The Rise of the Guest Editor—Discontinuities of Editorship in Scholarly Publishing

“…For publishers, such launches are primary paths of business development more generally. Indeed, for such platforms as MDPI , “the fact that the number of special issues in JCR-indexed MDPI -journals is so much higher than the number of ordinary issues per year coupled with their constant increase since 2018 inevitably awakens suspicions of a lucrative business aim” (Oviedo-García, 2021a , b , p. 9). These provide decreasing marginal costs: each journal on a publishing platform makes use of the same, once-developed technological means without further required production investment.…”

“…Siler et al, 2020 ), which involves changes in terms of publishing organizations (Wakeling et al, 2017a , b ), authorship practices (Wakeling et al, 2019 ), peer review (Björk and Catani, 2016 ), and others. Such phenomena are also visible in terms of the structuring or regularity of publishing as, for instance, the “number of special issues was over twice the number of ordinary issues in 92.45% of the MDPI -journals” assessed during an analysis (Oviedo-García, 2021a , b , p. 410). 1 On average, the explosion of special issues visible at MDPI ridicules the meaning of the word special since it grows on the exponential increase of that which is supposed to be special within the ordinary.…”