Page 29 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

Figure 7: Share of predatory documents in Scopus
by authors from the Czech Republic

1.5%

standalone journals 264 263
publishers 270
% of predatory documents in the country's total
1.0% 177
155

113

0.5%

0.0%

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Note: The absolute number of indexed predatory documents is reported above each column.
Source: Scopus (on 27th October 2016), Beall's lists (on 1st April 2016), authors' calculations.

Table 1 shows that these documents are strongly concentrated in only a handful
of journals. More specifically, over 2013-2015 nine predatory journals
with the largest number of documents by authors originating from the Czech
Republic accounted for a half, and the two most popular of them alone for a quarter,
of the country's total. Indeed, this overview provides an insightful snapshot of how
diverse the journals suspected of predatory practices look like. Five of them are,
for various reasons, suspect at first sight. Nevertheless, branding four of these
journals as predatory appears to be at the very least questionable.8

First of all, there are the journals Frontiers in Plant Science, Frontiers
in Microbiology and Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience published by the open-
access publisher Frontiers. Besides Scopus, these journals are also indexed in Web

8 Our list differs from that provided by Komm (2016, p. 18) largely because we only look at documents
from the years 2013-2015. For example, during this period only 5 results from Czech authors were
recorded in Scopus for the journal Interdisciplinary Toxicology, while in the previous three years
2010-2012 there were 22 such results. It is “safer” to use data from the most recent period, since
journals' predator” status may change over time, as already discussed above.

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