ESPE Yearbook of Paediatric Endocrinology

To read the full abstract: Publications 2020;8:17

Predatory journals, sometimes called write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, follow an exploitive academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy and without providing the other editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. Their numbers keep increasing - 10,332 predatory journals were included on Cabell’s blacklist in November 2018. The current study found that 6 of every 10 articles published in a random sample of predatory journals attracted not one single citation over a 5-year period.

Much attention has been focused on the deceitful behavior of such publishers, and on a couple of experiments with flawed or nonsensical manuscripts easily passing a non-existent peer review process in many such journals. Here, the authors measured the actual impact of the articles published in such journals. A random sample of articles published in the ˜25,000 peer-reviewed journals had an average of 18.1 citations, with only 9% receiving no citations. The authors studied citation statistics over a 5-year period in Google Scholar for a random selection of 250 articles published in predatory journals in 2014 and found an average of only 2.6 citations per article, and 56% of articles had no citations at all.

They conclude that predatory journals use aggressive marketing tactics and pretend to use peer review but mostly they collect author payments. The authors of this article claim that if they are not read, they cause no harm, but that low-quality or deceptive studies published in these journals are getting undue attention. The harm that such journals cause has mostly to do with the prestige and value of academic publishing in general and your own university in particular. If they are not read, why write them? Such articles are often covered by tax-payers money in the poorest countries – many of such articles come from Africa and South Asia. Only some of the articles in predatory journals contain flawed or directly harmful results, while many describe unexceptional and poorly reported studies. The authors admit it is not straightforward to correctly classify which journals are ‘predatory’. Scopus, Web of Science and other widely used citation databases perform some quality control checks on journals, but Google Scholar does not.

One particularly negative aspect of predatory publishing is that it has cast a shadow on the development of more responsible Open Access publishing and has possible slowed down its uptake. Many academic authors have wrongly equated open access and article processing charges with a lack of peer review and assessment quality.