Page 15 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

Cross-country comparisons

Out of more than two hundred countries from which at least one author of a “citable”
document in Scopus came, according to data from the Scimago Country Rank, we have
for the sake of clarity excluded dependent territories and countries with fewer than
300 thousand inhabitants. Among others, we have therefore excluded a number of small
island states in the Caribbean and Oceania, which are not the main focus of our analysis.
As a result, the sample consists of 171 states, including a large number of developing
countries, which together cover the overwhelming majority of the world's population and
research activity.

The analysis considers evidence from the period between 2013 and 2015. As already
discussed, using older data bears the risk that some of the journals currently featuring
on Beall's lists did not yet have predatory characteristics at that time. But we use data
from the last three years, rather than only the most recent year, in order to increase
the number of documents available and thus the robustness of our comparison. Each
of the countries included in the analysis has more than 30 documents in Scopus during
this period.

The comparative analysis is presented with the help of bar charts for various groups
of countries. On the vertical axis is shown the percentage of predatory documents in total
citable documents by authors from the given country. In other words the number
of documents published in predatory journals divided by the total publication output
of each country. This reveals to what extent each country is affected by the problem
of predatory publishing. First, we present evidence from OECD members, then look at
the most affected countries in the world, followed by the largest countries in terms
of population, and finally present the results for larger groups of countries with regards
to income levels and geographic areas.

OECD countries

Figure 2 shows that South Korea comes out by far the worst among OECD countries,
with 5% of its research outputs published in journals suspected of predatory practices.
Another "Asian tiger", Taiwan, which is not part of the OECD club due to political
reasons but belongs there in terms of the level of development, would take fourth place
in this comparison with a share of 1.5%. Although both these countries have recorded

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