Page 10 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

on the number of documents in the “article” and “review” categories for the years 2004-
2015, henceforth referred to as “documents” only, as well as more detailed data on
the number of these documents by author's country of origin in the period 2010-2015.4
405 individual journals were identified. This means that almost 13% of the journals
in our database had at least one entry indexed in Scopus. Evidently, Scopus is not
immune to their infiltration.

To avoid double-counting of documents in the journals with dual ISSNs for printed and
electronic versions, one of these had to be removed. 119 journals had entries in Scopus
under both ISSNs. Of these, 83 had exactly the same number of results for the same
period, which indicates that the entries were identical. For the remaining 36 journals we
retained data for the ISSN with a larger number of documents. A more detailed look at
the individual entries revealed that in the vast majority of cases the deleted entries
indeed contained only duplicate documents.

Box 1: The Data Generation Process
1) Obtaining the “predatory” ISSNs
a. Beall’s lists downloaded on the 1st April 2016.
b. The names on Beall’s lists were searched for using an automatic script
in Ulrichsweb on the same day.
c. The entries found in Ulrichsweb were manually verified with the help
of hypertext links in Beall's lists.
d. 4,580 ISSNs of 3,218 individual journals were confirmed to be
associated with Beall's lists.
2) Searching for ISSNs in Scopus
a. The “predatory” ISSNs were searched for using an automatic script in
Scopus in October 2016; the script downloaded the number of indexed
documents and their distribution by author's country of origin.
b. 524 ISSNs of 405 individual journals with at least one entry in Scopus
were identified.
c. To avoid double-counting of documents in journals with both printed
and electronic ISSNs, the duplicates had to be eliminated.

4 In addition to articles and reviews, the so-called “citable documents” in Scopus – which serve as a
denominator in the shares presented below – also include conference papers. Conference paper data was
not downloaded for practical reasons. Needless to say, this is a marginal category, which is in fact
irrelevant for most predatory journals. The vast majority, i.e. nearly 90%, of citable documents are articles,
therefore not covering conference papers entails a negligible bias.

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