Page 3 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

Study 2 / 2017

Predatory journals in Scopus1

MARCH 2017

VÍT MACHÁČEK and MARTIN SRHOLEC

Summary

 The study maps the penetration of so-called “predatory” scholarly journals into
the citation database Scopus. Predatory journals exploit the author pays open access
model, and conduct only cursory or no peer review, despite claims to the contrary.
Some such journals will publish almost anything for money. In the Czech context
whether a journal is indexed in Scopus is crucial for determining the points that
publications in that journal are awarded in the national performance-based
evaluation of research organizations, which in turn is the basis for the allocation
of institutional funding. Hence, in this evaluation framework, publishing in predatory
journals that are indexed in Scopus has a clear “fiscal” advantage.

 Our analysis is based on a survey of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory
journals by Jeffrey Beall at the University of Colorado. He maintains a blog with two
regularly updated lists: i) a list of standalone journals, which contains individual
predatory journals; and ii) a list of publishers, which implicates questionable
publishing houses, usually with multiple journals. Beall’s lists suffer from their own
limitations but are – in our view – representative enough of the overall problem
of predatory publishing.

 Using the Ulrichsweb register we compiled a comprehensive database of the journals
that Jeffrey Beall considers predatory. The database covers both standalone journals,
the names of which are easily obtained directly from Beall’s first list, as well as the
journals issued by predatory publishers in Beall’s second list. We then searched
Scopus using the ISSN of each predatory journal in our database. To the best of our
knowledge, the resulting database provides the first ever overview of predatory
journals in Scopus.

1 This study received support from the research programme Strategy AV21 of the Czech Academy
of Sciences. We would like to thank Daniel Münich for his comments. Any ambiguities, omissions or errors
are the authors' responsibility.

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