Page 19 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

The most affected countries

Figure 3 gives the most affected countries worldwide. Developing countries generally
suffer far more from predatory publishing than the advanced ones, but the problem
plagues the whole world, across continents, cultures and political systems.
Interestingly, the worst affected countries do not tend to be the poorest ones. Many
of them actually invest in research infrastructure, in particular universities, even
though in terms of equipment and financing they lag behind the technology frontier.
Researchers in these countries therefore often have limited opportunities to do
cutting edge research. Still, they must report publications, which coupled with weak
research evaluation culture makes a fertile ground for the expansion of predatory
publishing.

Albania looks dreadful with roughly every third paper of more than a thousand
in total being published in a predatory journal. Kazakhstan ranks second with almost
every fourth paper flagged as predatory. Another five countries, namely Indonesia,
Nigeria, Iraq, Syria and India, come out with more than ten percent. Apart from Syria
and Iraq, there are a number of other conflict-ridden countries including Libya,
Yemen, Sudan and Eritrea. Several countries that have become rich as a result of oil
exports, such as Brunei, Oman and Saudi Arabia, also appear among the worst
affected.

Latin America is the only major area without any country on this list. Jamaica,
the most affected country in this region, ranks only in 59th place with a 2.2% share
of predatory documents. In the top half of the worldwide ranking there are only three
other countries in Latin America, namely Mexico, Chile and Trinidad and Tobago.
More than anything else, however this may reflect that Beall's lists contain almost
exclusively journals in English. Likewise, Scopus primarily indexes documents
in English. It well might be that in Latin America predatory journals are
predominantly published in Spanish.

Some of the most affected countries have only a few hundred or even a few dozen
indexed documents per year, either because they are very small or because they have
a small research sector. These include Eritrea, Togo, Brunei and Yemen. At this level
of output, the country's share of predatory documents can be easily driven by a few
rogue individuals; it is therefore not advisable to make too much from that.

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