Page 26 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

Broad country groups

Figures 5 and 6 summarize the results by broad income levels and geographical
areas. The OECD countries are presented separately on the left hand side, so that
they do not distort averages of the other four and nine groups based on income and
geography, respectively, on the right hand side. The division by income level follows
the classification of the World Bank (2016), which divides countries according to
gross national income per capita into “high income”, “upper middle income”, “lower
middle income” and “low income”. The division by geographical area is based
on large (sub)continental groupings.

The OECD countries are confirmed to be the least affected. Other high income
countries that are not members of OECD fall prey to predators roughly twice as
much. The average for this rather diverse group is driven up by oil-rich countries like
Brunei, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Equatorial Guinea and
the United Arab Emirates. By far the worst situation, though, is in middle income
countries, many of which recognize the role of research for development but lag
behind the technology frontier. Despite this, academics in these countries are
expected to publish in journals. The pressure to publish combined with weak
evaluation culture provides breeding ground for predators.

The comparison by geography underlines the general patterns that could have been
noticed previously. The most affected are the predominantly Arab countries in West
Asia and North Africa. Predatory publishing also thrives in the developing countries
of Central, South and East Asia. Meanwhile, the peripheral areas of South and East
Europe appear strongly affected, although it is important to note that this group
includes Albania, which is a major outlier and without which the group average is
halved. Unlike these areas, Latin America and Oceania (without OECD members
there are just three countries in this group) seems even less prone to publishing
in predatory journals than the OECD countries. Latin America and the OECD
countries also share similar proportions between documents associated with the list
of standalone journals and the list of publishers.

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