Page 12 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

of when the journal or publisher became predatory. From this follows that when looking
back in time we may run into the problem of including in the predatory category records
that actually do not deserve that label, because the journal switched to the predatory
regime only recently. In other words, it well might be that older articles in journals that
are currently considered to be predatory may in fact have gone through a standard peer
review. Hence, historical data must be taken only as indicative of general trends.

Trends over time

Shen and Björk (2015) is to the best of our knowledge the only study that has attempted
to estimate the growth of predatory journals worldwide so far. Based on Beall's lists
(on 1st September 2014) the authors manually went through the relevant web sites. They
identified 11,873 journals in total, from which they selected a stratified sample of 613
titles. Analysis of detailed data for this sample suggests that after inferring from these
figures to the total population between 2010 and 2014 the number of “active” predatory
journals (with at least one article) and the number of articles published by them
quadrupled from approximately 2 thousand to 8 thousand and from 53 thousand to 420
thousand, respectively. As they themselves point out, however, these are only rough
estimates.

Crawford (2014a) did not track trends over time, but analysed the content of every single
web link on Beall's lists (in late March and early April 2014). He found 9,219 journals
in total, of which 320 were from the list of standalone journals and 8,899 from the list
of publishers. His most interesting finding, from our perspective, was that between 2012
and 2014 almost 40 % of those journals published fewer than four articles or none at all,
in other words were empty shells, and that a further 20 % published only a handful
of articles. Another 4 % consisted of dying or dormant journals with a quick drop to few
articles in 2014, and 6 % were unreachable (the web link was broken, for instance).
Hence only approximately one third of the identified journals publish articles
on a regular basis.

Figure 1 reveals that the number of documents in predatory journals that have managed
to make their way into the respected citation database Scopus has also grown sharply.
The vertical axis indicates the share of these predatory documents in the overall number
of so-called “citable” documents indexed in the Scopus database. Put simply, this shows

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