Page 32 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

The other journals really look strange. The International Journal of Mathematical
Models and Methods in Applied Sciences and WSEAS Transactions on Business and
Economics have surprisingly high share of authors from the Czech Republic, which is
by far the most frequent country of origin. According to the journals' websites,
editorial boards of both include academics from Czech universities. Furthermore, it
is once again difficult to identify these journals' publisher, because on their websites
there is no reference. Ulrichsweb reports that both journals are based in Greece, but
this is difficult to believe. Greeks are not present in their editorial boards, nor are
Greeks frequent contributors. Both journals' have identical publication fees and their
websites use the very same templates. It well might be that these journals are more
linked with the Czech Republic than Greece.

Another intriguing case is the journal Actual Problems of Economics. It is a local
eastern European journal based in Ukraine, whence more than half of its
contributors come from. In addition to English, the articles are also published
in Russian and Ukrainian. Apart from Ukraine and the Czech Republic, its
contributors originate most frequently from Kazakhstan, Russia, Poland, Serbia and
Slovakia. Although Web of Science listed this journal only briefly in 2010 and 2011,
Scopus indexes it to this day. Similarly, the journal Advanced Science Letters only
managed to sneak into Web of Science in 2010, but apparently was then quickly
purged out again. By contrast, it remains to be indexed in Scopus.

Finally, the predatory nature of the journal Mediterranean Journal of Social
Sciences has been safely proven thanks to the provocation by Jan Švelch, Jaroslav
Švelch and Tereza Krobová of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University
(iDnes 2016). They submitted to this journal a fake article, which deliberately
contained numerous grammatical errors and was based on a non-existent scientific
method. What is more, the text of the article even included the following sentence:
“This article was produced as an experiment intended to verify suspected unethical
publishing practices of so-called predatory or junk journals”, which was one of a few
sentences that did not contain any grammatical errors. Before long the editor
confirmed that the article has been accepted for publication upon paying
the publication fee.

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