Page 8 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

Predatory publishing has recently attracted growing attention, including in the Czech
Republic, in particular thanks to the Antipredátor project run by the Věda žije! forum,
which provides a list or records in the Czech Register of Research Outputs, i.e. Rejstřík
informací o výsledcích (RIV), that are published in journals on Beall's list. On the base
of outputs recorded in the RIV are awarded points in the Czech government's research
evaluation system (known as the “coffee grinder”), which in turn determine
the allocation of institutional funding for research (for more details see Good, et al.
2015). However, the Antipredátor project did not uncover everything. Although they
used Beall's first list in full, their only partly covered the journals under publishing
houses that appear on Beall's second list.

The aim of this study is to map the penetration of predatory journals in the Scopus
citation database. Scopus is less selective and covers substantially more journals than
the Web of Science (Mongeon a Paul-Hus 2016), thus could be more susceptible to
the infiltration by predators. Yet journals indexed in Scopus should fulfil certain
minimum quality criteria, which include a thorough peer review process (Scopus 2016).
Scopus-listed journals are therefore generally considered to be trustworthy. From
the Czech perspective, a journal's inclusion in Scopus is decisive for obtaining points
in the “coffee grinder”. While there are various reasons why scholars might pay to
publish papers in predatory journals that are not listed in Scopus, if such a journal
appears in the Scopus database the motivation to publish in it gets a clear “fiscal” spin.

Database

Using the two lists published on Jeffrey Beall's blog and the Ulrichsweb database, which
is the most comprehensive list of periodicals, we built a comprehensive overview
of journals suspected of predatory practices. The overview includes not only
the standalone journals, whose names are available on Beall's first list, but also journals
that fall under the umbrella of the publishing houses listed on Beall's second list.
We then searched for these journals using their ISSNs in the Scopus citation database.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that an overview of predatory journals
listed on Scopus has been ever compiled. Not even Jeffrey Beall has yet made this
investigation.

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