Page 4 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

 In total we found 3 218 predatory journals in Ulrichsweb, of which 281 came from
the list of standalone journals and 2 937 from the list of predatory publishers. Our
subsequent Scopus search yielded 405 journals with at least one indexed document.
Over the period 2004-2015, we identified 306 thousand documents in Scopus that
were published in journals nowadays considered by Jeffrey Beall to be predatory.
Scopus is therefore surely not resistant to penetration by predatory journals.

 The long term trend is clear. In 2004, these predatory journals produced less than
2 thousand documents indexed in Scopus, accounting for a negligible 0.1% share;
however, by 2015 this figure had increased to nearly 60 thousand, and accounted
for almost 3.0% of all indexed documents. Until 2011 the share of predatory
documents in Scopus grew exponentially; the expansion then stalled for a few years,
but soared once again in 2015.

 Predatory publishing undermines the credibility of science most seriously in middle-
income countries in Asia and North Africa that suffer from an underdeveloped
culture of research evaluation. The results also call for caution in the Czech Republic.
Nevertheless, fears that this phenomenon has the capacity to seriously damage Czech
science turn out to be unwarranted at this point. Czech authors publish a few
hundred articles annually in the predatory journals that are indexed in Scopus; this is
a tiny fraction of the total national scientific output. Moreover, these questionable
outputs are heavily concentrated in only a handful of predatory journals, hence the
practice would be relatively easy to track and possibly stop, if tackled head on.

 Finally, our analysis reveals that Beall’s lists need to be used with caution. Predatory
publishing is a real problem and no doubt there are indeed fake outlets dressed up as
scholarly journals, which are prepared to print anything for money. However, a very
brief look at more detailed data for the Czech Republic is sufficient to reveal that
Beall's list of publishers may implicate journals that are not necessarily “predatory”
in the true sense. This is corroborated by the fact that some journals in the list of
publishers publish have a large share of documents by authors from countries with
an advanced research evaluation culture, where truly fraudulent publications offer a
low payoff in terms of career progression or research funding.

2