Predatory journals and researcher needs

Smart, Pippa

doi:10.1002/leap.1101

Cited by 17 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Predatory journals have since become a hot topic in the scholarly publishing landscape. A substantial body of literature discussing the problems created by predatory journals, and potential solutions to stop the flow of manuscripts to these journals, has rapidly accumulated 2– 6 . Despite increased attention in the literature and related educational campaigns 7 , the number of predatory journals, and the number of articles these journals publish, continues to increase rapidly 8 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is a predatory journal? A scoping review

et al. 2018

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Background: There is no standardized definition of what a predatory journal is, nor have the characteristics of these journals been delineated or agreed upon. In order to study the phenomenon precisely a definition of predatory journals is needed. The objective of this scoping review is to summarize the literature on predatory journals, describe its epidemiological characteristics, and to extract empirical descriptions of potential characteristics of predatory journals. Methods: We searched five bibliographic databases: Ovid MEDLINE, Embase Classic + Embase, ERIC, and PsycINFO, and Web of Science on January 2 nd, 2018. A related grey literature search was conducted March 27 th, 2018. Eligible studies were those published in English after 2012 that discuss predatory journals. Titles and abstracts of records obtained were screened. We extracted epidemiological characteristics from all search records discussing predatory journals. Subsequently, we extracted statements from the empirical studies describing empirically derived characteristics of predatory journals. These characteristics were then categorized and thematically grouped. Results: 920 records were obtained from the search. 344 of these records met our inclusion criteria. The majority of these records took the form of commentaries, viewpoints, letters, or editorials (78.44%), and just 38 records were empirical studies that reported empirically derived characteristics of predatory journals. We extracted 109 unique characteristics from these 38 studies, which we subsequently thematically grouped into six categories: journal operations, article, editorial and peer review, communication, article processing charges, and dissemination, indexing and archiving, and five descriptors. Conclusions: This work identified a corpus of potential characteristics of predatory journals. Limitations of the work include our restriction to English language articles, and the fact that the methodological quality of articles included in our extraction was not assessed. These results will be provided to attendees at a stakeholder meeting seeking to develop a standardized definition for what constitutes a predatory journal.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is a predatory journal? A scoping review

et al. 2018

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“…Finally, the debate has also revealed an important point also noted by (Smart, 2017), that there is a large and prolific group of researchers who cannot be accommodated by the relatively small number of western-published journals. The reason for their exclusion may not be necessarily quality but relevance issues.…”

Section: Conclusion and Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The politics of Beall's list and criteria should now be put aside, and more energy devoted to strategies of improving quality as noted by Wager (2017). Such decisions should be made by collective academic councils, who would be responsible for scoring a journal or publisher's academic weaknesses, while recognizing academically sound literature, so that each case may be fairly compared, then judged using quantitative measures that can be independently measured, and validated (Smart, 2017).…”

Section: Conclusion and Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The storm around Beall’s List: a review of issues raised by Beall’s critics over his criteria of identifying predatory journals and publishers

Kimotho¹

2019

Afr. Res. Rev.

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The issue of substandard, or the predatory journals as they are popularly known, flooding the internet has been one of the biggest challenges to quality and ethical scholarship in modern world. One of the most renowned watchdogs of predatory publishers was Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado-Denver, who came up with a blacklist of predatory OA publishers and journals. For several years since the publishing of the Beall's list, there has been increasing concerns about the criteria that Beall used to develop his lists, with some scholars dismissing his lists as inaccurate, misleading and dangerous to academics. A review of literature of studies conducted concerning the predatory journals indicates that there is limited literature on systematic examination of the issues raised by Beall's critics over these lists of predatory journals and publishers. To address this gap, this study sets out to answer this question: What are the major concerns of the critics of Beall's list of predatory journals and publishers? Using a descriptive design that exploited qualitative approach, the researcher analysed 30 purposefully sampled publications. The findings indicate that four key issues are often raised by Beall's critics: methodological flaws; Beall's bias against OA; discrimination against developing economies; and Beall's lists of predatory publishers as an onslaught to academic freedom.

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“…Nicholas, Clark, & Herman, ). We have also published many articles on predatory publishing that range from accusing the gold OA model for encouraging fraudulent publishing (Beall, ), to criticizing the polarity of judging journals to be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (Eriksson & Helgesson, ; Smart, ), to asking why authors choose to publish in them (Kurt, ).…”

Section: Is Fraud and Piracy The New Norm?mentioning

confidence: 99%