RETRACTED ARTICLE: Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences (original) (raw)

Abstract

Predatory publishing represents a major challenge to scholarly communication. This paper maps the infiltration of journals suspected of predatory practices into the citation database Scopus and examines cross-country differences in the propensity of scholars to publish in such journals. Using the names of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory journals and publishers on Beall’s lists, we derived the ISSNs of 3,293 journals from Ulrichsweb and searched Scopus with them. 324 of journals that appear both in Beall’s lists and Scopus with 164 thousand articles published over 2015–2017 were identified. Analysis of data for 172 countries in 4 fields of research indicates that there is a remarkable heterogeneity. In the most affected countries, including Kazakhstan and Indonesia, around 17% of articles fall into the predatory category, while some other countries have no predatory articles whatsoever. Countries with large research sectors at the medium level of economic development, especially in Asia and North Africa, tend to be most susceptible to predatory publishing. Arab, oil-rich and/or eastern countries also appear to be particularly vulnerable. Policymakers and stakeholders in these and other developing countries need to pay more attention to the quality of research evaluation.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1

Source: Scopus (2018a), author’s calculations

Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Discover the latest articles and news from researchers in related subjects, suggested using machine learning.

Change history

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04149-w

Notes

  1. Anonymous authors continue with Beall’s work and regularly update his list on this website: https://beallslist.weebly.com.
  2. The Ulrichsweb search engine uses a ‘fuzzy’ search which does not require perfect matching of strings. For example, when we searched for Academe Research Journals, journals of Academic Research Journals were also found. This is beneficial because the search is robust to typos, interpunction signs, and small errors written in the search terms. However, it also requires careful manual verification of search results.
  3. For example, Perlin et al. (2018) found only 1100 ISSNs from both the list of publishers and the list of standalone journals using an automatic website crawler and Demir (2018) analyzed only the list of standalone journals.
  4. Unfortunately, the Scopus database does not directly provide harmonized data on the number of authors by country that published in a journal. However, we can count the number of countries, to which at least one author of an article is affiliated, by journal. Based on data for 324 predatory journals and 23,387 other Scopus journals, the average number of country-affiliations turns out to be 1.20 and 1.23, respectively, hence there is not a significant difference and the bias is likely to be rather small. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out this potential shortcoming.
  5. Only 1,069 predatory journal articles had an ‘undefined’ country of origin. Hence, the overwhelming majority of the articles found are included in our analysis.
  6. We use Scopus rather than the Web of Science because it covers substantially more journals (Mongeon and Paul-Hus 2016) and is more susceptible to predators (Demir 2020; Somoza-Fernández 2016).
  7. More detailed stratification, such as dividing Asia into South, East, Central and West, or Africa into North and Sub-Saharan, is not advisable, because there are few countries in some subgroups, which would make averages unreliable.
  8. For example, there are four countries in which both English and French are spoken by at least 20% of the population (Canada, Cameroon, Israel and Lebanon). Nevertheless, the vast majority of countries are assigned to a single language zone.
  9. The high income group includes Persian Gulf countries, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, which are rich primarily thanks to oil drilling in the region and in which, except only of Qatar, the propensity to predatory publishing is significantly above the world average. If these countries are excluded, the average propensity to predatory publishing in the high income group drops further down to 1.74%.
  10. Approximately two-thirds of predatory journal articles from advanced countries are published by Frontiers. South Korea is a major outlier among advanced countries, not only because of its high overall penetration of predatory publishing, but also in the fact that the vast majority of these articles are not in Frontiers journals. Taiwan and Slovakia are similar but to a lesser degree.
  11. Nevertheless, one must not forget the caveat repeatedly mentioned above that the data predominantly includes journals published in English. China not only has a different language but also its own writing system; thus local problems with the predatory model of publication may largely escape our attention.
  12. In general, there are far more former socialist countries, especially former members of the Soviet Union, on the top 20 list in Social Sciences than in other fields. Social Sciences were particularly isolated, indoctrinated and devastated during the communist era, so it is not surprising that this is the case.
  13. Note that most of the patterns by country groups identified in the total data also apply by field of research, as also vindicated by the regression results below.
  14. Cuba, Eritrea, North Korea, Somalia and Syria are excluded due to missing data on GDP per capita. Comoros, Djibouti, Timor-Leste and Turkmenistan are eliminated because they did not generate more than 30 total articles in any of the fields of research.
  15. If the squared terms are excluded from the model, both coefficients come out highly statistically significant, but GDP per capita has a negative sign while the size of research sector has a positive sign.
  16. It needs to be emphasized that the authors of this article have never had any connection to the Frontiers Research Foundation or any of their journals in any capacity.

References

Download references

Acknowledgements

Financial support from the Czech Academy of Sciences for the R&D&I Analytical Centre (RaDIAC) and from the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) project 17-09265S is gratefully acknowledged. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the IDEA think-tank seminar Predatory Journals in Scopus, Prague, November 16, 2016, the Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board Meeting, Prague, November 3, 2017 and the 17th International Conference on Scientometrics and Infometrics, Rome, September 2 – 9, 2019. We thank the participants at these events for their useful comments and suggestions. Martin Srholec also thanks his beloved wife Joanna for her support of the preparation of a revised version of the manuscript during the heat of the COVID-19 crisis. All the usual caveats apply.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Vít Macháček and Martin Srholec contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CERGE-EI, a joint workplace of Charles University and the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Politických vězňů 7, Prague 1, 111 21, Czech Republic
    Vít Macháček & Martin Srholec
  2. Faculty of Social Sciences, Czech Republic and Institute of Economic Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
    Vít Macháček

Authors

  1. Vít Macháček
  2. Martin Srholec

Corresponding author

Correspondence toVít Macháček.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This article has been retracted. Please see the retraction notice for more detail:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04149-w

Supplementary information

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables

Table 6 Descriptive statistics of the variables, 2015–2017

Full size table

6,

Table 7 Definition and sources of the variables

Full size table

7

About this article

Cite this article

Macháček, V., Srholec, M. RETRACTED ARTICLE: Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences.Scientometrics 126, 1897–1921 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03852-4

Download citation

Keywords