Who reviews for predatory journals? A study on reviewer characteristics

Severin, Anna; Strinzel, Michaela; Egger, Matthias; Domingo, Marc; Barros, Tiago

doi:10.1101/2020.03.09.983155

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(42 reference statements)

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“…For that reason, we agree with Wang and Waltman's (2016) result that Web of Science performs better than Scopus in terms of accuracy. 26 Furthermore, this research has also revealed that predatory behavior conducts may occur also for journals included in Directory of Open Access Journals (1 case); journals which belong to Committee on Publication Ethics (7 cases) and for publishers that are not included in the Beall's List (6 journals).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

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A “Trojan Horse” in the peer-review process of fee-charging economic journals

Dell’Anno

Caferra

Morone

2020

Journal of Informetrics

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This paper aims to unmask the inadequacy of the review process of a sample of feecharging journals in economics. We submitted a bait-manuscript to 104 academic economic journals to test whether there is a difference in the peer-review process between Article Processing Charges (APC) journals and Traditional journals which do not require a publication fee. The submitted bait-article was based on completely made-up data, with evident errors in terms of methodology, literature, reporting of results, and quality of language. Nevertheless, about half of the APC journals fell in the trap. Their editors accepted the article in the journals and required to pay the publication fee. We conclude that the Traditional model has a more effective incentivemechanism in selecting articles, based on quality standards. Otherwise, we confirm that the so-called "Predatory Journals" -i.e. academic journals which accept papers without a quality check -exploit the APC scheme to increase their profits. They are also able to enter whitelists (e.g. Scopus, COPE). Accordingly, poor-quality articles published on APC journals shed the light on the weakness of methodologies based on a mechanical inclusion of academic journals in scientific database indexes, succeeding in being considered for bibliometric evaluations of research institutions or scholars' productivity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“… See Gans and Shepherd (1994),Seidl et al (2005), Smith (2016), Ross-Hellauer (2017) for concerns in the peer-review process 26. Indeed the peer review process is one of the required conditions to be included in the Scopus and ISI -Web of Science databases.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A “Trojan Horse” in the peer-review process of fee-charging economic journals

Dell’Anno

Caferra

Morone

2020

Journal of Informetrics

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“…For an additional 6%, at least one respondent reported noticing something else that seemed odd. These results suggest that a fair number of questionable journals do organize some form of peer review (see also Severin et al, 2020), but the reviews are not necessarily actively used.…”

Section: Questionable Journals and Related Aspectsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Journal lists in social sciences and the spectrum of quality standards

Guns¹,

Hołowiecki²

2021

Preprint

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The social sciences involve multiple literatures, including journals with a more international and those with a more local orientation. Quality standards in research assessment have largely been borrowed from STEM fields and generally favour internationally oriented journals with high international visibility and scientific impact, to the detriment of other quality dimensions, such as relevance to local communities and researchers or openness of research.In journal lists, this complex spectrum of quality standards is simplified into a one-dimensional arrangement. We provide a typology to characterize journal lists and discuss the usage of journal lists in research assessment, arguing that their values and criteria deserve careful scrutiny and can be studied through systematic comparison.

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“…These concerns became more tangible, as was highlighted by a study that identified over 6,000, from a total sample of 183,743, ‘predatory’ reviews (i.e., reviews of Cabell-blacklisted ‘predatory’ journals) on Publons. 16 …”

Section: How Has Peer Review Evolved Since the Acquisition?mentioning

confidence: 99%