Page 37 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

in journals found via the list of publishers are concentrated documents by authors
from countries with the most advanced research systems, where fraudulent
publications have little chance of fooling anybody.
Without further, more detailed analysis, we can only speculate as to what exactly
explains the differences we have observed in the propensity to predatory publishing
across countries. However, it should not come as a surprise if this is strongly
associated with the way in which research is evaluated in each country, both
on a national level in terms of the evaluation of research institutions and project
proposals, and on an individual level when deciding on career progression, and
consequently indeed the way in which public money for research is allocated. It is
likely that the more primitive a system a given country has for evaluating research,
and the more it relies only on counting publications, the better the conditions it
provides for predatory journals. To pin down these factors is major challenge
for further analytical work on this topic.

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