Questionable conferences and presenters from top-ranked universities

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the structures of 935 conferences organised by OMICS and 296 conferences organised by WASET from 2015 through 2017. These conferences are characterised in existing literature as so-called predatory or questionable conferences that provide low-quality academic meetings. We analyse 40,224 presenters, focusing on top-ranked institutions according to three global university ranking systems (Academic Ranking of World Universities, Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and QS World University Rankings). Our analysis shows that participants in OMICS events were primarily researchers from the United States, India, the United Kingdom, and China. WASET attracted more researchers from Turkey, India, and South Korea. We found that 11.0% of OMICS and 5.7% of WASET presenters were affiliated with institutions ranked in the top 100 in one of the three aforementioned rankings. We also found that both companies mostly organised conferences in cities that were top tourist destinations.

Reverse adoption of information and communication technology among organisers of academic conferences

“…Conferences advertised in languages other than English are exempt (# 35) as well as are the four postponed conferences. Several studies mention so-called “questionable conferences” that offer academic meetings of low quality (Kulczycki et al, 2022 ; Lang et al, 2019 ). There are 15 announced conferences in the database that either do not provide details of their academic committees or lack a link to an academic institution.…”

Exploring authors engagement in journals with questionable practices: a case study of OMICS

“…Nevertheless, these stages are crucial for understanding the mechanisms of predation and the reasons why researchers decide to submit a paper. For this purpose, we have chosen a clear example, the predatory publisher OMICS, where the 'diagnosis' of predation has been legally confirmed in the following literature (Kolata 2019;Siler et al 2021;Kulczycki et al 2022;Downes 2023).…”

“…OMICS was first identified in Beall's list (Beall 2012). Since 2008, OMICS included thousands of journals and conferences on its website, presented them as indexed titles in international databases, and sent invitations to authors to submit papers or join editorial boards (Masic 2017;Downes 2021;Kulczycki et al 2022). The cumulative number of articles published to date is estimated to be around 69,000 (Siler et al 2021), leading to its characterization as a predatory "mega-publisher" (Manley 2019a).…”

How Metric-Based Performance Evaluation Systems Fuel the Growth of Questionable Publications?

“…Such journals, commonly referred to as predatory in the literature and posing a significant threat to the academic community (Beall, 2016), exhibit main characteristics defined as providing false or misleading information, deviation from the best editorial and publication practices, lack of transparency, and aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation (Grudniewicz et al, 2019). Predatory practices extend beyond journals and encompass predatory conferences and congresses (Kulczycki, Hołowiecki, et al, 2022), as well as predatory awards (Pal et al, 2022). However, in this study, we choose not to employ the term predatory but rather refer to them as questionable.…”