Category: Fact Check

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Why (and how) would somebody write more than a letter every day to scientific journals?

Image showing four letters to scientific journals and a screen shot from Scopus showing how many letters have been published.

Introduction

We have no evidence that there is anything wrong here, but just want to seek the view of others. Please take a look at the article below and see what you think.

Letters written

So far this year (16 Aug 2024, extracted from Scopus) Wiwanitkit, V. has published 379 ‘documents’. Of those, 345 of them are letters.

That is, in 2024, to date (as at 16 Aug) he has published 1.51 letters each day. By way of comparison, in 2023, he published 414 letters, which is 1.13 letters each day.

Example Letters

By way of an example, the header image shows four of the letters.

These were chosen at random (we just chose the first four that were returned from Scopus). This shows that two of the letters utilize an AI tool and two did not; at least there is no acknowledgement.

Our questions

  1. What is the benefit in writing so many letters?

    Okay, it boosts the number of publications you have but letters are not counted in my research returns. For example, we don’t think that QS     recognizes letters when it looks at how many articles have been published by a given institution.

  2. What is the workflow for publishing letters?

    Look at new articles published each day and write a letter about that article? To us, that is a lot of time/commitment, but we can’t think of another way.

  3. The letters appear to follow a similar format.

    We have not looked at all the letters, indeed, only a small sample, but they follow a similar format. They say, they are responding to the article. highlight one or two ‘flaws’ and suggest some other work that could be done.

  4. AI tools are used – sometimes.

    Two of the letters we looked at (see green highlight) say “The author use language editing computational tool in preparation of the article.“

    We are not quite sure what this means. Does it means that (something like) ChatGPT was used to correct a draft that was written? Or does it mean something else?

    We have previously suggested that an acknowledgement that an Large Language Model (LLM) has been used should be much more detailed (e.g. show the prompt and the generated text in a supplementary file). Moreover, there should be an explicit statement that an LLM was not used.

  5. There is an alternative workflow.

    i) Get a daily (or weekly) list of relevant articles published
    ii) Develop a set of LLM prompts that asks the model to analyze the article and write a letter that gives an introduction, suggests a few ‘flaws’ and suggests further work.
    iii) Wrap it all up in a letter, and send to the relevant journal. We still think that it would take at least an hour to do this, but with a team of people perhaps that is a good investment?

Your thoughts/views

Please let us know what you think about what we say above.

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The publication record of Sayed Mohamed Eldin

Bubble chart showing how many papers Sayed Mohamed Eldin published in 2022-2024

In a twitter post Nick Wise (aka @nickwizzo) posted about Sayed Mohamed Eldin of Future University in Egypt. We thought we would take a look ourselves.

  1. The author appears to go via several names. This may be a cultural thing and may not be trying to deceive. On the DSDimensions page that Nick refers to, the names given are Sayed Mohamed Eldin, El Sayed Tag Eldin, Elsayed Mohamed Tag-Eldin, Sayed M Eldin, Sayed M El Din, El Sayed M Tag El Din and El Sayed Mohamed Tag-Eldin.
  2. As noted by Nick Wise, Eldin has published quite a number of papers in 2022 and 2023. We looked on Scopus. Searching for his name, like point 1, a number of names were returned but we managed to get an author id (57925959400). The figures we report here are from a Scopus search (‘AU-ID(57925959400)‘).
  3. In 2022, Eldin published 61 papers and in 2023 (so far, our Twitter post was 26 Nov 2024 – updated figures are below) he has published 377 papers. He has not published any papers before that. Note, these are Scopus indexed papers.
  4. A personal comment is that we have never come across anybody who starts publishing in a given year and publishes more than 60 papers.

    In fact, he published a paper every 5.98 days.

    Is it really possible for somebody to publish a peer reviewed scientific paper every six days, whilst adhering to the usual/expected guidelines for authorship?

  5. In 2023, Eldin has published 377 papers. This year, we have had 329 days (up to 25 Nov 2023). This means that Eldin has published more than one paper every day (in fact 1.14 papers every day).

    We ask the same question – Is it really possible for somebody to publish more than one peer reviewed scientific paper every day, whilst adhering to the usual/expected guidelines for authorship?

  6. The top three publishers are Elsevier Ltd. (112), Elsevier B.V. (62) and MDPI (57).

    It would be really interesting if these publishers could show us the “author record” for all the papers where Eldin is an author. There may not be anything wrong, but it would be interesting to look at the data.

    We are in no doubt that the publishers will not give us access to this data.

  7. The top three journals that Eldin has published in are Case Studies in Thermal Engineering (74 papers), Scientific Reports (38 papers) and Journal of Materials Research and Technology (21 papers).
  8. Many (if not all of the papers) are published as #OpenAccess. It would be interesting to see how many of the papers are open access (we may do that analysis, but it is not as easy as, perhaps, it should be).

    But, let’s assume that they were all open access and the average article processing fee (#APC) was $USD 1,000 (this will be a large underestimate).

    This means that Eldin (and his co-authors) have spent $USD 438,000 on the 438 papers he has published.

    We have two questions:

    i) We wonder who actually paid the APCs? Did it come from a single source or were they spread across many different sources?
    ii) We also wonder whether APCs provide the funders a good return on their investment? Would the, approaching, half a million dollars be better spent funding actual research, rather than paying to publish the results of the research?


Updated Stats

Now that we are well into 2024, we thought we would run the same Scopus search again (i.e. ‘AU-ID(57925959400)‘.

 

This showed the following.

 

2024: 24 papers

2023: 378 papers

2022: 61 papers

 

Surprisingly (to us) the 2023 figure have only risen by one. We were expecting the 2023 figure to be much higher, possibly over 400.

For 2024, as of today (07 Apr 2024, at the time of writing), the 24 papers represents publishing a paper ever (98/24)=4.08 days, which is worse than 2023, when he published a paper every (365/378)=0.97 days, but it is early days yet and who knows how many papers are under review.

We plan to keep an eye on it, but you can see his 463 publications here.

Final Comments

We find it amazing that somebody can publish a paper every six days (in 2022), let alone one paper a day (in 2023).


We cannot think of a reason that this is ethically possible. Perhaps there is, but we are struggling. If you can think of a reason, that can be defended, please let us know.

 

The other thing we find amazing is that his publication record is from a standing start. Nothing published prior to 2022 and then published 61 papers in that year. If you think we are being a little harsh, than let us know.

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High number of citations to a journal, as well as to papers authored by the EiC of that journal

Partial image of a paper overlaid by some of the bibliography

Introduction

A tweet from Nick Wise grabbed our attention, so we decided to take a look.

 

The tweet said:

“In one generic sentence, this recent  @ElsevierConnect  paper adds 34 references. 35-41 are to the journal ET Nano, 24-34 and 42-57 all have Yarub Al-Douri as an author, the EiC of ET Nano. Would love to know who the reviewers were.“

Nick has made a comment on this article on PubPeer, in November 2023. At the time of writing no comments have been made to this PubPeer comment

The article

The article we are discussing is:

  • A. Harbi, S. Bouhmaidi, R.K. Pingak, L. Setti, M. Moutaabbid (2023) First-principles calculations to investigate optoelectronic, thermoelectric and elastic properties of novel lead-free halide perovskites CsRbPtX6 (X = Cl, Br and I) compounds for solar cells applications. Physica B: Condensed Matter vol 668, 415242. DOI: 10.1016/j.physb.2023.415242.

Figure 1 shows an image of this paper.

First page of an article titled First-principles calculations to investigate optoelectronic, thermoelectric and elastic properties of novel lead-free halide perovskites CsRbPtX6 (X = Cl, Br and I) compounds for solar cells applications
Figure 1: First page of the article under discussion in this article

Citations to Experimental and Theoretical NANOTECHNOLOGY

The journal

One of the observations made by Nick Wise was that the bibliography included seven citations to ET Nano (full name Experimental and Theoretical NANOTECHNOLOGY). See Figure 2.

This is a strange journal.

  • It’s URL is https://www.siats.co.uk/pdf/ETN-Journal_members.pdf. Well, actually its a link to a pdf about the journal. We have archived this page here (21 Jan 2024).
    We note that this is a United Kingdom domain.
  • Looking up its ISSN (2590-4132) on the ISSN portal, it has been registered in the United Arab Emirates.
  • Searching for the journal, it has a web presence in Malaysia (which is where the EiC is based).
  • We also looked on Google Scholar and found that the journal has an entry (archived here (21 Jan 2024)). This page has “Malaysian Institute of Science and Development” below the journal name, reinforcing the link to Malaysia. Yet, if you follow the homepage link you arrive at another journal, but if you follow the Wayback Machine home page link (going to an archived page from March 2023), you arrive at the right journal. This means that it has changed in the past year.

When looking at the various resources given above, it is quite difficult to find many details about the journal and those we did find are confusing, at best. For example, we struggled to find a table of contents so could not validate the citations given in the paper we are looking at.

We need to spend a lot more time looking at this journal, but hour or so we spent looking for it suggests that it will not be easy to piece together a coherent story.

We plan to return to this journal sometime in the future.

List of citations to ET NANO journal
Figure 2: Citations to ET NANO journal

Link to ET NANO paperss

The papers in figure 2 do not have DOIs, which is the most preferred way (in our view) to access a paper, as it is a permalink.

However, as mentioned below, the papers are actually links so you should be taken directly to the paper.

All of the links have the form : http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0921-4526(23)00609-9/srefnn, where nn is the citation number.

The problem we found is that the links do not really work. They often take you to a Google Scholar page, or a different paper that the one cited. For example, [35], which has the link http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0921-4526(23)00609-9/sref35, is not the same paper that is cited.

These (seemingly) incorrect links is not the focus of this article, but it is something that we plan to return to.

The EiC of ET NANO has many papers cited

As noted by Nick Wise, citations [24-35; 42-57] are all authored by the Editor-in-Chief of ET NANO. Actually, we don’t think he is an author on [28]. Nevertheless, having 28 papers cited does seem rather excessive.

This is especially true when you consider that all the papers mentioned here (the ones published in ET NANO and those authored by the EiC of ET NANO) are all cited in a single sentence, that is:

“A number of studies have also been carried out to investigate a wide range of perovskites [24–35] as well as various physical systems [36–57].“

Even if these papers are “on topic” (and we are not discipline experts, so not qualified to judge), it does seem to be a high number of papers to support the points being made?

Like many aspects of this paper, further investigation is needed, but all these papers being cited in one sentence is worry (anyway), especially given the relationships that have been pointed out.

Other observations

We noted that [28] was not authored by the EiC of ET NANO, but it is authored by many of the same authors as the paper we are looking at. That is:

  • S. Bouhmaidi, A. Harbi, R. K. Pingak, A. Azouaoui, M. Moutaabbid, L. Setti (2023) First-principles calculations to investigate lead-free double perovskites CsInSbAgX6 (X = Cl, Br and I) for optoelectronic and thermoelectric applications, Computational and Theoretical Chemistry, vol 1227, 114251. DOI: 10.1016/j.comptc.2023.114251.

We also note the similarity between the titles of the two papers.

Furthermore, the EiC of ET NANO is heavily cited in the above paper, in a similar way (i.e. en-bloc) to the paper that is the focus of this article. Again, this deserves a deeper investigation.

Our tweet

This article was motivated by the tweet from Nick Wise, to which we responded. These are the comments that we made in our tweet.

We took a look at the paper and these are comments we had:

  1. It’s interesting that all of those papers ([24-57) are fully “highlighted in blue” (on the PDF) – meaning that they are a hyperlink. This is normal, so that a reader can be taken directly to the paper that is being cited.

    But the other papers that are being cited (apart from a couple) only have the DOI highlighted.

    This suggests (to us anyway) that the 33 papers that are being discussed were edited in a different way to the others (added later?).

  2. As you say, it would be interesting to see the reviews. It would also be very interesting to see the paper that was submitted and the paper that was published and when these references appeared? Were they there in the original submission, or were they added later? And, if later, at what time during the peer review process?
  3. The journal in question (Physica B: Condensed Matter) has a (2022) @Scopus #CiteScore of 5.00 and has been indexed since 1998 (and also in 1994). Would Scopus investigate this potential citation stacking?
  4. The journal has a (2022) @Clarivate impact factor of 2.8. It has been indexed by #WebOfKnowldge since 1997. Same question as to Scopus – will you investigate this potential citation stacking?
  5. The journal (ISSN: 0921-4526) is a member of @C0PE (Committee on Publication Ethics). Do they have the “teeth” to investigate a paper from one of its members, or at least ask to to see the timeline, review reports etc?
  6. Can any of the editors help explain what happened with this paper and is everything as it should be?
  7. Finally, we assume that Elsevier will be interested in this paper and will investigate – again, knowing that it all might be okay?

Final Comments

When we first saw Nick Wise’s tweet, we were quite surprised, but we have got even more surprised as we have dug deeper.

Overall though, we are left with a frustrated feeling as we feel that we have opened up more questions than we have answered. We hope to return to these unanswered questions as soon as we can, but we know that they will take time to answer.

In the meantime, we can only hope that Elsevier take a look at this paper. Perhaps they will find nothing wrong but at least respond to the PubPeer comment, even if to say that they have investigated and found that all due processes were followed.

Posted on

Should it take three years to investigate a paper?

Header image for a blog post showing a tweet that says an issue has been outstanding for three years.

Background

“Publishers justify their margins by saying that they provide quality control and act as gatekeepers for science. They should act accordingly. Their role does not end at peer review + upload onto a website. This ought to be retracted. Three years ago.“

This quote is from a tweet from Paolo Crosetto, which refers back to a previous tweet which talked about an issue that has been raised for the past three years, and which has yet to be addressed.

The previous tweet said: “In November 2020, my students and I discovered a completely fake meta-analysis, now cited more than 100 times. I notified Hindawi but, as shown below, they have no intention to act. Each year, on the anniversary of the discovery, I re-post this thread…“

 
The image associated with the tweet can be seen in Figure 1.
Image showing a tweet, which raises an issue going back three years.
Figure 1: Tweet from 'Panteleimon ("Paddy") Ekkekakis'

Our Comments

In this article, we make some observations. We are not looking at the paper itself, and coming to a view whether the paper should be retracted or not. We are not discipline experts so it is not right that we offer this view. Rather, we give some observations after spending some time looking at the facts surrounding the paper.

  1. In November 2021 nine people sent a letter to Hindawi, raising a ‘publications ethics’ concern about a paper published in BioMed Research International. You can see the letter that was sent here (we also provide a copy here, in case you cannot access Twitter(X)).
  2. You can see the article here. We have archived the page here.

    The full citation is:

    Zhenzhen Qiu, Kai Zheng, Haoxiang Zhang, Ji Feng, Lizhi Wang, Hao Zhou, “Physical Exercise and Patients with Chronic Renal Failure: A Meta-Analysis”, BioMed Research International, vol. 2017, Article ID 7191826, 8 pages, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/7191826

  3. According to the home page of the article, the article has been viewed 10,670 times and downloaded 3,505 times (as at 20 Dec 2023).
  4. The journal is a member of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics). We wonder whether they can offer the journal, and its editors, any advice/guidance as to how they should progress this matter, and under what timescale they should operate?
  5. Searching by ISSN (2314-6133 and 2314-6141), the journal is a not a member of DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) (see Figure 2).

    In our tweet, that this article is based on, we did find the journal indexed by DOAJ, but there was some ambiguity.

    In response to our tweet, DOAJ said:

    “DOAJ removed BioMed Research International on 23rd March 2023. The journal you highlight is an older, discontinued version and not the same publication. It should have also been removed at the same time. This was an oversight on our part and has now been done.“

    We thank DOAJ for their quick action and for responding to our tweet.

  6. The journal is indexed by Scopus. It has a 2022 CiteScore of 5.3 It is listed in two categories – Q1 in one and Q2 in the other. See Figure 3.
  7. The journal is indexed by Clarivate. It has a 2021 impact factor of 3.246. It appears in four categories, all Q3. See Figure 4.
  8. On Google Scholar, this article has been cited 109 times (as at 20 Dec 2023). See Figure 5.
  9. On Scopus, the article has 51 citations (as at 20 Dec 2023).
  10. On Clarivate (Web of Science), the article has been cited 29 times (as at 20 Dec 2023).
  11. If this article (although this is a more general question) is retracted, what should happen to all the papers that cited it? Should they all be reviewed again?
  12. There is a letter to the editor about this paper, which is available via the Hindawi page which hosts the journal. The letter has some comments with respect to the procedures and results of the study. We have archived the page.
  13. A PubPeer comment has been made.
  14. The current APC for this journal is US$2,550 (page archived here).
  15. In 2016 (which is when the paper would have been submitted) the APC was US$2,000.

    We wonder what happens to the APC if the article is retracted. Presumably, the journal has done the work that it was ‘paid’ to do, so they would just keep it?

  16. Hindawi states their mission as:

    “By placing the research community at the heart of everything we do, we strive for a future where researchers are motivated to work together, empowered with the tools and services they need to do so, and freed from any barriers that stand in their way. We aim to maximize the impact of scientific research through openness and global collaboration as we truly believe that science works best when research is open.“

    Are they living up to this mission statement (especially about openness and collaboration) in the case we are looking at here?

    We have archived the page with Hindawi’s mission statement on.

  17. On the information for authors page for the journal it says:

    “High editorial standards, ensuring all published manuscripts undergo an in-depth peer review process.“

    Does that peer review stop once the paper is published or, if a concern is raised should it not be investigated in a timely manner?

    The information for authors page has been archived.

  18. On its publications ethics page it says:

    “Hindawi is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Read the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers for information on best practice in peer review.

    Reviewers should raise any concerns about publication ethics to the Research Integrity team.“

    We have archived this page.

  19. We believe that the issue discussed in this paper has been raised with the Research Integrity team but it appears that little (if any) action has been taken.

Finally

Surely, the publisher should have completed their investigation within three years and either retracted the paper or told the person who reported the case why that no action will be taken?

Figures

Screenshot from DOAJ web site showing that two ISSN's were not found in its database
Figure 2: Search on DOAJ showing that ISSN's 2314-6133 and 2314-6141 were not located in its database.
Showing the Scopus CiteScore (5.3) of BioMed Research International
Figure 3: The Scopus CiteScore (5.3) of BioMed Research International
Showing Web of Science's impact factor (3.246) for BioMed Research International
Figure 4: Web of Science's (Clarivate) Journal Impact Factor (3.246) for BioMed Research International
Google Scholar screenshot showing that 'Physical Exercise and Patients with Chronic Renal Failure: A Meta-Analysis' has been cited 109 times
Figure 5: Google Scholar screenshot showing that 'Physical Exercise and Patients with Chronic Renal Failure: A Meta-Analysis' has been cited 109 times
Posted on

An analysis of the number of special issues from MDPI

Header image showing three graphs from the post

On our Twitter account, we have been looking at MDPI. Not from the point of view of them being a predatory publisher. Indeed, we were keen to say that this was not the purpose of our tweets, it was more to provide some facts and figures that we may be able to arrive at a conclusion, or provide others with the information to arrive at their own conclusion.

Special issues

When we started tweeting about MDPI, one of the things that became apparent was the number of special issues that they published.

 

As an example, the Journal of Molecular Sciences has 4,216 special issues in 2023. That is, 11.50 special issues closing every day (or 13.47 if we exclude weekend). We made this point in this tweet.

 

In another tweet, we asked if an Editor-in-Chief has the capacity to oversee 3,328 special issues in a given year? This question was asked on the basis of the recent COPE (Committee on Publications Ethics) discussion document that is proposing that the Editor-in-Chief has ultimate responsibility for all special issues published by the journal.

 

We also tweeted about an article written by MA Oviedo-Garcia, which looked at 14 issues that had been found with MDPI special issues.

Previous analysis

The first analysis we did on MDPI special issues, was done by accessing the sections web page of a given journal, which provided details of all the sections in the journal and how many special issues each section has. For example, see the sections for MDPI’s journal Animals (archived here).

 

The problem with this analysis was that it was difficult to collect data for every journal and there might be (might not, we did not check this) special issues that are not part of a section, so it would be missed.

Latest analysis

As we wanted to do a complete analysis, we looked again at how we collected the special issues data.

 

In fact, each journal has a special issues page (see for example MDPI’s journal Animals – archived here), which enables us to more easily collect the special issue data from each of MDPI’s 427 journals.

The headline statistics

After collecting all the data, we can report that in 2023, MDPI have 65,191 special issues. That is 178.61 special issues with a closing date every day. You can see the tweet that we made about this by following the link.

 

The image that we presented in the tweet (Figure 1) shows the number of special issues closing each year, by year (as at 9 June 2023).

Figure 1: The number of MDPI special issues (as at 9 Jun 2023), by year

Special issues represent 681,495 articles, with 145,000 of those in 2022 and 193,427 in 2023 (and counting). We tweeted about this here. The graph we used can be seen in Figure 2.

 

It should be noted that this is the number of articles that were published when the closing date of the special issue was in that year and not, necessarily the year the article was published.

 

To further demonstrate this, 2024 already has 3,732 articles which would be published in 2023, for special issues that close in 2024. Even 2025 has 106 articles recorded.

The number of MDPI articles that appear in special issues (as at 9 Jun 2023), by year
Figure 2: The number of MDPI articles that appear in special issues (as at 9 Jun 2023), by year

The top ten

Below, we present 11 graphs. The first graph shows the top ten MDPI journals (ranked by the number of special issues in 2023). The next ten graphs show each of those journals, but showing how many special issues closed each year.

 

Without exception, the number of special issues closing in 2023 is significantly higher than previous years. This could be because MDPI are making an effort to publish more special issues. Or it might be that they advertise a lot, and many do not attract any papers so they drop off the radar at the end of the year.

 

Now that we have the data, we can carry out another data collection exercise sometime in 2024 and compare against the data we have just collected. That may provide more insights.

Previous
Next

If you click on one of the graphs above, you should be able to see it more clearly and also navigate through each one.

Final comments

In the opening remarks, we said that we are not accusing MDPI of being a predatory publisher. The aim of our current data collection exercise is just that, to collect data. If nothing else, it gives us a data, which comprises over 680,000 individual data points.

Our current thoughts are to carry out a similar data collection exercise in 2024, just to see if the rise of special issues in 2023 does pan out (or if many wither on the vine as they do not get any submissions).

We will also follow the COPE document with interest that suggests that an Editor-in-Chief should have oversight of all the special issues that are produced by a given journal. As we asked in a tweet, can an EiC really have oversight of 3,328 special issues?

MDPI may argue that each section in a journal has its own Editor-in-Chief. For example, see the Editorial Board page for the Journal of Molecular Sciences [archived here] (this is the journal that was the subject of the tweet we mentioned), and you can see that each section has a “Section Editor-in-Chief“. This raises two questions (at least to us):

  1. Given the large number of sections MDPI journals can have, is it right that each one has its own EiC? If so, what is the relationship between the section EiC’s and the journal EiC and who carries the overall responsibility?
  2. We questioned whether an EiC could oversee over 3,000 active special issues and that this may be the reason for section EiCs. Looking at the sections for the Journal of Molecular Sciences (archived here), some sections have a significant number of special issues. For example, the section “Molecular Pathology, Diagnostics, and Therapeutics” has 583 active special issues and the section “Molecular Biology” has 303 active special issues. We would raise the same question as before, can an Editor-in-Chief have oversight of this number of special issues?

So, our plan it to keep a watching brief on MDPI special issues, collect some more data at an appropriate time and we are considering writing our findings up into a paper that we will send out for peer review but that will depend on what any new data reveals.

Posted on

Frontiers Media: Editors, Reviewers and Articles: Revisited

Frontiers Media Articles and Editors revisited

In a recent article, we discussed the number of editors, reviewers and articles for Frontiers Media journals.

 

If you have not read that article, it would be worth taking a look at it first, as this article responds to some of the comments that were made in response to the article when we tweeted about it.

 

Before we start

In this article we focus on the comments made on Twitter but we would also point you to a couple of other resources, in case you want to dig a little deeper yourself.

  1. You may want to take a look at our Twitter feed, specifically those posts that have the hashtag #FrontiersMediaFacts. You can see these tweets here.
  2. We created a page that captured the number of articles and editors, and the ratio between the two, for each Frontiers Media journal, as we could not present every journal in the article itself. We also wanted to create a snapshot on a given date (4 February 2023) , if for nothing else, the historic record. You can see this page here.

The Tweet

It was this tweet (see Figure 1) that generated the discussion that we present in this article. You can see from the Twitter statistics that it has been viewed over 5,000 times (at the time of writing). This is high number of views for our Twitter feed.

Tweet from Predatory-Publishing.com
Figure 1: A tweet from Predatory-publishing.com

Figure 1 shows the number of articles that we calculated have been handled by each “Editor” over the life time of the journal. This is the bottom ten. We also reported the top ten in the article, and also every journal on a separate page.

 

We suggested that this is low, as every editor had handled (a lot) less than one paper, suggesting that some editors had not handled any papers.

 

We noted that Frontiers Media lists reviewers (which they call “Review Editors“) as part of the editorial board. This does skew the  statistics/calculations, which is a point made by a former Editor-in-Chief (see discussion #03).

Below, we present some of the discussion that took place on Twitter. We have divided the comments into separate discissions, in order to try and reflect the different strands, although the comments all part of the same thread. If you want to see the whole discussion, take a look at the tweet.

 

We have not identified any names (although we have marked our responses as PP, to identify our comments), as they may not want to be named here, but we have provided a link to the tweet, so you can see who it is, assuming that the tweet remains active.

 

We provide the full text of the discussion, as not everybody will have access to Twitter.

Discussion #01

#1-01: “I think that the problem here is because @FrontiersIn names its reviewers as Review Editors, providing the total number of reviewers in the pipeline they have. Other editorials don’t give this information. You cannot make that calculation, it’s wrong” (Link to tweet)

#1-02 (PP): “… but they are listed under the “Editorial Board”, which suggests that they are editors – which they are not. Surely, the journal/publisher should be more transparent?” (Link to tweet)

#1-03: “they are even more transparent than other journals, since they show the numbers of all scientists involved in the process: editing and reviewing” (Link to tweet)

#1-04 (PP): “… but list them under the editorial board. Agree that are calculations may be wrong but we don’t have access to the number of submitted papers and we only looked at the editorial board. I suppose it’s all about the lens you are looking through.” (Link to tweet)

Comments

The point we were trying to make, both in the article and in our responses in the above Twitter discussion, is that we accept that Frontiers Media lists their reviewers as part of their editorial team, but this is not the way that most journals do this. The editorial board are the people that handle the papers and the reviewers are not usually listed as part of the Editorial Board.

 

We have no problem with Frontiers Media doing this, but they might want to be a little more transparent? For example, splitting the tab on the journal web site into “Editors” and “Reviewers” or at least making that distinction when they show the number of editors. As an example, Figure 2, shows the number of editors for Frontiers in Aging, but a proportion of these 964 people will be reviewers and do not actually handle papers so we would not consider them editors. Is that wrong?

The number of editors for the Frontiers Media journal Frontiers in Aging
Figure 2: Number of editors for Frontiers Media journal Frontiers in Aging

Discussion #02

#2-01: “This is certainly interesting. But I have no context for whether this is normal. Are these tiny ratios just a trick of semantics? Always good to have a set of control and *comparable* publishers in analysis so it’s not just a focused bashing. Thus why poll had PLOS, BMC etc.” (Link to tweet)

Note: The poll refers to a recent poll that the author held. You can access the poll here.

#02-2 (PP): “The people we know (small sample size) handle a few (2-3 would be small, 5 average, 10 quite a lot) papers a year. Anything below zero (in a year) would be seen a a VERY light workload. Anything below zero, would be seen as a VERY, VERY light workload. All, just our perspective.” (Link to tweet)

#02-3: “Of course! But that’s not in the article (& it’s subjective) It’s great motivation to do an investigation like this. But without that info in the article (in an itemized/systematic fashion), I end the article in a black box, rather than emerging from one.” (Link to tweet)

#02-4 (PP): “We did think of that but the stats we presented are factual. If we compare those against what “we feel/believe” it could be criticized as an unfair comparison. What we’ll try and do is compare against other journals – but that is a whole chunk of work.” (Link to tweet)

#02-5: “Whole chunk of work, but worth it!” (Link to tweet)

Comments

This is a fair point (to have a comparison against some other journals). We were not kidding though when we said that it be a whole chunk of work, but we’ll work on this over the coming weeks.

 

Ideally, we’d like to publish the findings as a peer reviewed paper. This is for a couple of reasons.

 

Most importantly, it enables others (i.e. the peer reviewers and editors) to comment on the paper, it’s findings and the conclusions drawn. This gives the paper (some) validity.

 

Perhaps as important, we all need to publish papers and if we are addressing a question that seems to be relevant and which many people would care about, then why not write it a paper and subject the findings to peer review.

Discussion #03

#03-1: “I can give you the example of Frontiers in Marine Science, in which I was Specialty Chief Editor until past December, for 10 years. The Section is Marine Ecosystem Ecology. I have not the information of the whole journal (Frontiers in Marine Science). see the thread below:” (Link to tweet)

#03-2: “

  • 1 Specialty Chief Editor
  • 40 Associate Editors
  • 342 Review Editors (other journals named them reviewers), and these are those in the registered in the database, to be invited for review (also other external) Follow tread“

(Link to tweet)

#03-3: “

  • In 2022 we received 367 manuscripts
  • Divided by 40 editors, each of them handled 9.2 papers (this could change if there are guest editors)
  • Of course, not all Review Editors reviewed papers in 2022, but this is as in other journals

Hence, your calculations are wrong” (Link to tweet)

#03-5 (PP): “Thanks for the clarification” (Link to tweet)

#03-6 (PP): “We will update our article to reflect what you have said – thank you. We appreciate that you have provided the information you have.” (Link to tweet)

Comments

We appreciate this information. We agree that that our figures could be calculated differently, given the above information.

 

However, we still maintain that the information is not presented as transparently as it could be, in that editors and reviewers are all listed under the “Editorial Board” tab, suggesting that all those listed are editors. Moreover, the reviewers are listed as “Review Editors”, which could be interpreted as them having some editorial function, rather than being just reviewers.

 

With reference to our previous article, we also note one example, where a reviewer had not reviewed a paper for the past five years, yet are still listed an Review Editor. There is nothing particularly wrong with that, but somebody looking at the web site may assume that all those listed have an active role.

 

Finally, it is far from easy to ascertain the number of editors and (review) editors. The web pages are such that as you scroll down the page, more information is provided. If a journal has (say) 15,000 people listed (as some do) it is not easy – and certainly time consuming – to look at all those people, let alone find out how many are editors and how many are review editors.

Final comments and an invitation

We accept that the material we presented in our previous article was an interpretation which could be framed in different ways.

However, we would say:

  1. All of the people are listed under an “Editorial Board” tab on the web site, but they are not all editors as most scholars would understand the term.
  2. When you look at the home page of a journal  it says how many editors there are. The word “Editors” is used which a reader might assume that they are all editors and not reviewers.
  3. It is unusual for journals to list all the editors and reviewers on the same page. Frontiers Media also appears to list all of their reviewers, both current and historic. There is nothing wrong in doing this, but most journals don’t and it might be useful if Frontiers Media made this clearer than they currently do.

We accept that the way we have interpreted the data is open to debate but we hope this article explains why we interpreted the data as we did.

 

Moreover, if Frontiers Media are willing to provide a breakdown of the editorial types for each journal, we will happily redo the analysis and present those results. We would like to collect the data ourselves but as we note above, this is problematic due to the way the web site presents this information.

An invitation

If anybody from the publisher (either from Frontiers Media or one of its Editor-in-Chiefs) is reading this article, we would welcome an article from them, which explains how their system works. We would be happy to work with you to publish the article “as-submitted”, with just a few due diligence checks. You can reach us as admin@predatory-publishing.com.

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Frontiers Media: Editors, Reviewers and Articles

Man reviewing documents

When looking at Frontiers Media for a recent article we wrote on the outcome of a Twitter survey, something caught our eye. Compared to other journals/publishers, we were surprised by the number of editors that Frontiers Media have. They often have more editors than the number of papers that the journal has published, suggesting that each editor is handling less than one paper or, to put it another way, some editors are not handling any papers.

We thought we would investigate and just put some facts before you and also try and understand why a journal would have/need so many editors.

We are not concluding from this study that Frontiers Media, or its journals, are predatory. We have not done anywhere near enough research to arrive at a conclusion either way.

If you are interested in this discussion, you may want to read the Wikipedia entry (accessed 05 Feb 2023) which states that Frontiers Media is a member of organizations such as COPE, DOAJ and OASPA, as well as discussing some of the controversies that surround this publisher.

Therefore, this article should be viewed as an informational data point, along with a request for feedback/clarification from the publisher.

Note: We have revisited this article, following a conversation we had on Twitter. After reading this article, we suggest that you also the article where we revisit this topic.

Data Collection

The data for this article was collected on the 04 February 2023.

 

The Frontiers Media web site lists 192 journals.

Most of the journals (182) are called “Frontiers in …“, with the remaining 10 journals not being called Frontiers.

One journal, Frontiers for Young Minds, is edited by “kids and teens”. This journal does not provide the number of editors, in the same format that the other “Frontiers in …” journals do (noting it is called “Frontiers for …“). Some of the reviewers are as young as 8 years old (and perhaps there are some that are even younger). This journal is very interesting in its concept, but we will not dwell on it further in this article.

Figure 1: Number of journals published by Frontiers Media (4 Feb 2023)

Collecting editor and article counts

The data for each journal was collected by accessing its home page and collecting the journal name, the number of editors and the number of articles. This information is given by each journal (mostly, but see below), which made it relatively easy to collect the data and it meant (thankfully) that there was no need to collect each separate editor and article and then count the number of records collected.

Figure 2: Example of how the number of editors and articles are presented

As an  example, Frontiers in Aging says that it has 961 editors and has published 226 articles (see Figure 2).

Some of the journals, however, do not present this information. This is primarily those journals that are not called “Frontiers in …” and new journals, which (we assume) do not have a track record to report as yet.

For those journals where we could collect data, we have set up a separate page, where each journal is shown.

The journals where the editor/article data is not readily available is given below. These (28) journals are excluded from the analysis presented in the rest of this article.

  1. Dystonia
  2. Earth Science, Systems and Society
  3. Frontiers for Young Minds
  4. Frontiers in Amphibian and Reptile Science
  5. Frontiers in Antennas and Propagation
  6. Frontiers in Audiology and Otology
  7. Frontiers in Cell Death
  8. Frontiers in Energy Efficiency
  9. Frontiers in Environmental Health
  10. Frontiers in Ethology
  11. Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience
  12. Frontiers in High Performance Computing
  13. Frontiers in ICT
  14. Frontiers in Industrial Engineering
  15. Frontiers in Industrial Microbiology
  16. Frontiers in Lupus
  17. Frontiers in Malaria
  18. Frontiers in Mammal Science
  19. Frontiers in Neuroenergetics
  20. International Journal of Public Health
  21. Oncology Reviews
  22. Pathology and Oncology Research
  23. Public Health Reviews
  24. Spanish Journal of Soil Science
  25. Transplant International

Analysis

Top 10 journals, by number of articles

Figure 3 shows the top ten journals, with respect to the number of articles that they have published (as at 4 Feb 2023). The full set of data is available here.

Figure 3: Frontiers Media journals, top 10 by number of papers published (4 Feb 2023)

It is apparent that Frontiers Media have a number of journals that have good track records, and have published a large number of papers. For example, Frontiers in Psychology have published 36,109 articles (as at 4 Feb 2023) since it started in March 2010. It is now publishing Volume14, meaning that it has published over 2,500 papers each year.

Top 10 journals, by number of editors

Figure 4 shows the top ten journals, with respect to the number of editors for the given journal (as at 4 Feb 2023). The full set of data is available here.

Figure 4: Frontiers Media journals, top 10 by number of editors published (4 Feb 2023)

It was these figures that motivated us to write this article. We have not previously seen journals with so many editors. That is not to say that there are not any, we have just not seen them.

We again emphasize that this does not mean that these journals are predatory. There would have to be a much deeper investigation to arrive at a conclusion either way.

The ratio of editors to articles published

In some ways, just presenting the number of editors (or articles) in meaningless. It is the relationship between those two sets of figures that is more insightful.

 

In Figure 5, we show the ratio between the number of editors and the number of articles that the journal has published. We show the top ten journals with the highest ratios. The full set of data is available here.

 

The ratio is calculated by dividing the number of articles by the number of editors. This indicates how many papers each editor has handled. We are making the assumption that a single editor handles a paper, rather than the editorial members being reviewers, as well as editors. We say a little more about this below, as it a certainly not the case.

Top 10 journals of Frontiers Media and the ratio between editors and articles (top 10)
Figure 5: Frontiers Media journals, top 10 by number ratio of published papers to number of editors (4 Feb 2023)

Looking at Figure 5, the editors for Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, on average, has handled 3.21 papers. This is calculated by dividing the number of papers that the journal has published (924), by the number of editors (288). That is 924/288 = 3.21.

 

An editor handling just over three papers might seem reasonable, but this must be taken in the context that these figures represent the lifetime of the journal. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics started publishing in November 2007; that is about 15 years ago. This means that each editor has handled (3.21/15) = 0.21 papers. This means that the majority of editors have never handled a paper for this journal.

 

The next journal (Frontiers in Psychology) has published 36,019 articles and has 14,462 editors (so a ratio of 2.49 papers handled by each editor). This journal started published in Jan 2011 (so about 12 years ago), meaning that each editor has handled (2.49/12) = 0.21 papers.

 

We have not carried this analysis any further, but it would make an interesting study to develop this analysis into a full data set of all journals. However, from our limited analysis, we believe it shows that the editors of Frontiers Media journals do not handle many papers.

Figure 6 shows the other end of the spectrum. That is, those journals that have the lowest number of papers being handled by the editors. For example, Frontiers in Environmental Engineering has published three articles and has 434 editors (so a ratio of 0.0069). This journal has only been publishing since December 2022.

Bottom 10 journals of Frontiers Media and the ratio between editors and articles (bottom 10)
Figure 6: Frontiers Media journals, bottom 10 by number ratio of published papers to number of editors (4 Feb 2023

Editors and/or Reviewers

There are different categories of editorial activity, such as “Associate Editor” and “Review Editor“.  See, for example, the editorial board for this journal (accessed 4 Feb 2023).

 

Looking at the peer review page of Frontiers Media, it says:

 

“If a manuscript is sent for peer review, the handling editor is accountable for inviting and overseeing expert reviewers. Most article types require at least two reviewers to complete a review. These reviewers can either be invited from the board of review editors or appropriately recruited among experts in the field.“

 

That is, those people listed as editors, on a journal’s web site, actually comprise both editors and reviewers. This is concerning for a few reasons:

  1. You have to realize that this is the case.
  2. It is not how most journals operate. Most journals acknowledge their reviewers in other ways (for example, by listing them annually).
  3. Some reviewers may take the opportunity to list themselves as editorial board members of the Frontiers journal (for example on their CV), which can be verified by others by accessing the journal’s web site (and looking under the “Editorial Board” tab). At best, this is not representing actuality.

Case studies

No active role message
Figure 7: The message to show that the person has acted as a reviewer but has not formal editorial role

We checked a number of reviewers and looked them up on the Frontiers web site. This is not as easy as you might expect as the editors are listed on a scrolling web page and to ascertain whether an editor is listed is time consuming especially when the journal has thousands of editors.

 

We were able to carry out some Google searches to find the information we needed, but an easier interface would be welcomed.

 

When a given person has acted as a reviewer, but is not listed on any editorial board, the message shown in Figure 7 is shown.

Figure 8 shows an example of somebody who is an active editorial board member. We have anonymized the person, to protect their identity, but have shown relevant information.

 

Figure 8 shows that the person has reviewed three papers since 2014, with their last review being carried out over four years ago (in 2018).

 

We would question whether this person (and there may be many others) should i) be listed as an editorial board member (as they are a reviewer) and ii) whether they should be listed now as they last carried out a review in 2018.

Any views you have would be welcomed.

Figure 8: Example of an active editorail board member

Further comments

If we assume that each paper is reviewed by two people, drawn from the editorial board or from external sources, then the ratios given above can be doubled. We would argue that this still does not lead to editors that are overly busy?

 

We could be more explicit and look again at Frontiers in Environmental Engineering. They have published three papers (let’s say 6 reviews). Let’s also assume that they have another 50 articles in process (another 100 reviews). With 434 serving editors (and access to external reviewers), that leaves well over 300 members of the editorial board who have not handled, or reviewed, a paper.

 

It would make an interesting study to look at every journal in much more detail that we have here and it would also be useful (and right) to get feedback/views from the publishers/journals/editors, as our working assumptions, and thus conclusions, may be incorrect.

Final thoughts

The catalyst for this article was when we saw how many editors serve on “Frontiers in …” journals, often many thousands. This seemed high to us, even if we assume that some (many?) of these editors serves as reviewers. The full set of data is available here.

We still hold the view that Frontier Media’s journals have a high number of editors. Moreover, listed reviewers as editorial board members is confusing as it is not how the vast majority of this sector operates.

We note that Frontiers are transparent about the way they operate and also make a point of listing those that act as reviewers on the finally accepted paper but we feel that, as the majority of the sector operates differently, this make their practices a little opaque.

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Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care

Introduction

If you follow us on Twitter, you may be aware that one of the things we do is to feature quotes from EMAILs from (possibly) predatory journals. You can see these tweets here.

We ask people to forward EMAILs that might be suitable for this part of our Twitter feed, and we are very grateful to everybody who does.

One EMAIL we saw, did not really have anything in it that was unusual, or particularly funny, but we were drawn to it for another reason. It was asking for 20 more articles, as they had 10 in hand but required more. Moreover, they were offering a special price of $749 for submissions received before 22 December 2021.

We thought that it might be worth taking a look at that journal, just to dig into the facts behind the email..

The EMAIL

The EMAIL we saw is as follows:

Date: 18 December 2021
Title: Accelerate your research work

“Dear Professor,
Greetings from Lupine Publishers.

We are joyful to inform you that, as we are celebrating Christmas and on this occasion we are providing special waiver of $749 to authors for first 30 articles for submission before 22nd December 2021.

Moreover, we have 10 articles in our hand but, we lack 20 articles. Hence, we need your support to fulfill this event successfully.

Hope you will join us with your eminent work.

Await your participation.

Sandra Christopher
Nursing & Health care (LOJNHC) ISSN: 2638-5945 | ISI Impact Factor 0.695
Lupine Publishers LLC, 57 West 57th Street, 3rd floor, New York – NY 10019, USA”

 

Lupine Publishers

Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care is published by Lupine Publishers. They have a Twitter account, if you are interested.

Lupine Publishers have a portfolio of 45 journals. We have archived this page, which you can view here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

The Article Processing Fees (APCs) for all of Crimson Publishers’ journals is shown in Figure 1. We note that this is taken from a page at the level of the publisher. That is, the APCs appear to be the same across all of their journals. We have archived the APC page, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Figure 1: Article Processing Charges for Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care

The editorial board for the journal is comprised of 34 people. None of the entries provide an EMAIL address (we always find this frustrating). We have archived this page, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care

The journal’s web site can be seen by following the link. We have archived the journal’s home page, which you can see here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Published articles

At the time of writing (28 Nov 2022), Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care has published 65 articles. The first article was published on 8 February 2018 and the journals has published two articles dated 23 September 2022.

The journal has published 3 volumes, with volume 1and 2 publishing publishing five issues. Volume 3 has published 4 issues with, we suspect, one more to come this year.

Number of published articles by volume/issue

Figure 2 shows the number of papers published (as at 28 Nov 2022) by Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care. The figures splits the number of published papers by Volume and Issue. For example, Volume 1, Issue 5 published three papers.

Figure 2: Number of papers published in each Volume/Issue of Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care

The make up of the volumes

As we were analyzing the papers, we were struck by the structure of the volumes of Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care. Here are some stats and comments.

  1. Volume 1 published its first paper on 8 February 2018 and its last paper on 10 September 2018. That is a period of 215 days, all of which are in 2018.
  2. Volume 2 published its first paper on 17 October 2018 and its last paper on 11 May 2020. That is a period of 574 days.
  3. Volume 3 is (probably) not yet complete but its first paper was published on 19 April 2020 and its latest paper was published on 23 September 2022. That is a period of 889 days (and counting).

We are unsure of the rationale behind the way the volumes are organized. Generally, in our experience, Volumes are organized by calendar year but this journal has volumes which (to us) appear almost random. Even if that is not the case, we cannot understand why the volumes have lasted 215, 574 and 889 days respectively. Why would a journal do this?

We also noted that one paper in Volume 3(1) was published (19 Apr 2020) before a paper published (11 May 2020) in Volume 2(5). Not that this is a huge problem, but you assume that papers would be published in chronological order with respect to volumes/issues.

 

Frequency of publication

It is interesting to look at how often the journal publishes papers.

On average, the journal publishes a paper every 26 days. On seven occasions, they published two papers on the same day, giving a count of zero towards the average.

The largest time period in publishing a paper was 351 days (11 May 2020 to 27 April 2021). There were also periods of 136, 129, 108 days).

Long breaks in publishing papers is not necessarily an issue but it does make you wonder how many papers are received and why there are such long periods when no papers are published.

Did they need another 20 papers?

The catalyst for this article was that Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care said that they had 10 papers in hand but they were lacking 20 papers. Here’s what we believe, based on the data/evidence we have collected.

The EMAIL was sent on the 18 December 2021. The last paper they had published was on the 11 November 2021. It looks like they only had one paper under review that was received on 25 November 2021. This paper was eventually published on 12 January 2022.

According to the received dates on the papers that were published, they did not receive any papers before the deadline they gave in the EMAIL (22 December 2021), so nobody was able to take advantage of the reduced rate of $749.

Of course, they may have received papers that were subsequently rejected, but we have no way of knowing this. If the journal wishes to comment on this, would be be happy to update this article.

However, based on the data available to us, we find it difficult to believe that the journal had ten papers in hand.

Since sending the EMAIL above, they have published seven papers which were received on 8 Mar, 9 Mar, 4 Apr, 5 Apr, 5 Sep and two papers on the 11 Sep (all in 2022).

Based on this observation, it adds more weight to the argument that they did not have ten papers in hand. Moreover, they did not receive the 20 papers they said they wanted.

We conclude from the above observations that the email sent by the journal was purely marketing and the facts it presented in trying to persuade people to submit a paper were untrue.

If the journal believes that we are mistaken, we would be very happy to hear from them and have a conversation.

One other observation

We noticed that there are two articles that have the same title (“Nurses’ Knowledge Regarding Prevention of Ventilator Associated Pneumonia“). The first is listed in Volume 1, Issue 5 and has a DOI of 10.32474/LOJNHC.2018.01.000124. We have archived the page where this paper is listed, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).
The other version is in Volume 2, Issue 1. It has a DOI of 10.32474/LOJNHC.2018.02.000129. We have archived the page where this paper is listed, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).
The two papers are almost identical. The titles, abstracts and conclusions & recommendation certainly are, and much of the content is also identical, including graphs and figures. If you want to see the two papers, we have made them available here and here.

Final Comments

This is not a full review of Lupine Online Journal of Nursing & Health care, so we are not saying whether the journal is predatory or note.
We would say that there are some worrying signs, which deserve a deeper investigation, so we have added it to the list of publishers that we plan to take a closer look at.

How can you help?

Please consider supporting us as a patron. It would really help us to continue, and develop, the work that we do.

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Checking out Opast Publishing Group

We recently saw a tweet that peaked our interest. The tweet mentioned paper that had been published by the Opast Publishing Group. We were previously unaware of this publisher so we thought it was worth having a look at the publisher and posting a few findings on out Twitter feed.

You can access the posts we have made about Opast Publishing by using the hashtag #OpastFacts.

The background

A paper published in Opast Publishing Group‘s Archives of Epidemiology & Public Health Research journal was greeted as a good paper on Twitter but there were also warnings that the author had published in  predatory journal.

We had never heard of this publisher, so we thought we would take a look, just to see what we could find out.

An overview of Opast Publishing Group

Opast Publishing has a portfolio of 108 journals. In our tweet on this topic we stated the number as 107. For this article we checked our facts and it is actually 108. We have listed the journals at the end of this article, just to record the journals at this point in time. You can access their journal page here.

The publisher’s address is in the US) – OPAST GROUP LLC, 10807 W 145th TER, Overland Park, KS 66221, USA

The group started publishing in 2016, with the following journals:

  1. Advances in Nutrition & Food Science
  2. Cardiology: Open Access
  3. International Journal of Cancer Research & Therapy
  4. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Dermatology
  5. International Journal of Diabetes & Metabolic Disorders
  6. International Journal of Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine
  7. International Journal of Psychiatry
  8. International Journal of Women’s Health Care
  9. Journal of Anesthesia & Pain Medicine
  10. Journal of Clinical & Experimental Immunology
  11. Journal of Clinical Review & Case Reports
  12. Journal of Nursing & Healthcare
  13. Journal of Pediatrics & Neonatal Biology
  14. Journal of Pharmaceutical Research

As far as we can tell, of the 108 journals listed on their web site, 54 of them published papers in 2022. We have not checked whether there is a lot of new journals (so have not published yet), or whether journals that were established a few years ago have not published in 2022.

To give a complete record, here are the years and the number of journals that published papers in those years – 2016(14), 2017 (24), 2018 (36), 2019 (40), 2020 (50), 2021 (57), 2022 (54).

Our findings

Review times

One of the first things we looked at was typical review times, as this is what was mentioned on the initial tweet that we saw. This is the image we posted and you can see the tweet here.

Membership of COPE and DOAJ

Using all the ISSN’s that were available, we checked whether any of those journals were members of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) or DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). As shown in the tweet, we found that none of the journals were members of COPE or DOAJ.

Nonsensical article

One tweet we made was about an article we saw that did not make sense to us, admittedly, we are not discipline experts. We asked if the article did make sense. At the time of writing, nobody has expressed a view, but we’d still be interested in hearing any views anybody has.

We also posted another tweet about this paper.

Journals without ISSN's

We mentioned above that we had looked at journals to see if they were members of COPE and DOAJ. We can only do this (at least, automatically) if the journal has an ISSN.

Therefore, it is worth considering how many journals do not have ISSN’s. Of the 108 journals 42 of them do not have an ISSN. You can see the tweet here.

Final Remarks

We have only taken a brief look at Opast Publishing Group. We plan to return to this publisher at a later date to do a more in-depth investigation.

If you want to see all the tweets we have made, follow this link.

List of Opast Publishing Group journals

  1. Advance in Environmental Waste Management & Recycling
  2. Advancement in Dairy Science Research
  3. Advancement in Yoga and Physical Therapy
  4. Advancements in Journal of Urology and Nephrology
  5. Advances in Bioengineering and Biomedical Science Research
  6. Advances in Hematology and Oncology Research
  7. Advances in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence
  8. Advances in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
  9. Advances in Neurology and Neuroscience
  10. Advances in Nutrition & Food Science
  11. Advances in Sexual & Reproductive Health Research
  12. Advances in Theoretical & Computational Physics
  13. Advances in Urban Regional
  14. International Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Research
  15. Applied Optics and Laser Technology
  16. Archives of Clinical and Medical Microbiology
  17. Archives of Epidemiology & Public Health Research
  18. Archives of Infectious Diseases & Therapy
  19. Autism Spectrum Disorders: Open Access
  20. Biomedical Science and Clinical Research
  21. Journal of Biomusical Engineering Research
  22. Journal of Biopolymers and Theoretical Studies
  23. International Journal of Cancer Research & Therapy
  24. Cardiology: Open Access
  25. Chemical Glycobiology Journal
  26. Journal of Chemistry: Education Research and Practice
  27. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Dermatology
  28. Journal of Clinical & Experimental Immunology
  29. World Journal of Clinical & Medical Images
  30. International Journal of Clinical and Medical Education Research
  31. Journal of Clinical Pediatrics and Child Care Research
  32. Journal of Clinical Review & Case Reports
  33. Journal of Clinical Rheumatology Research
  34. Current Research in Statistics & Mathematics
  35. Current Research in Traffic Transportation Engineering
  36. Current Research in Vaccines Vaccination
  37. Current Trends in Business Management
  38. Journal of Current Trends in Computer Science Research
  39. Current Trends in Mass Communication
  40. Journal of Democracy Research
  41. Journal of Depression Anxiety Science
  42. Dermatology Journal of Cosmetic and Laser Therapy
  43. International Journal of Diabetes & Metabolic Disorders
  44. International Journal of Digital Journalism
  45. Earth & Environmental Science Research & Reviews
  46. Journal of Economic Research & Reviews
  47. Journal of Educational & Psychological Research
  48. Journal of Electrical Electronics Engineering
  49. International Journal of Endocrinology Research and Reviews
  50. Journal of ENT Surgery Research
  51. Finance Journal
  52. Journal of Fish and Fisheries
  53. International Journal of Forensic Research
  54. World Journal of Forest Research
  55. Frontiers in Pathology
  56. Journal of Gastroenterology & Digestive Systems
  57. General Surgery and Clinical Medicine
  58. Journal of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Research
  59. Journal of Genomics & Data Mining Research & Reviews
  60. Journal of Geology Mining
  61. Journal of Gynecology & Reproductive Medicine
  62. International Journal of Health Policy Planning
  63. Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences
  64. Insights of Cardiovascular Pharmacology Research
  65. Insights of Herbal Medicine
  66. Journal of Addiction Research
  67. Journal of Agriculture and Horticulture Research
  68. Journal of Anesthesia & Pain Medicine
  69. Journal of Applied Language Learning
  70. Journal of Applied Material Science & Engineering Research
  71. Journal of Applied Surface Science
  72. Journal of Future Medicine and Healthcare Innovation
  73. Journal of Marine Science Research and Oceanography
  74. Journal of Mathematical Techniques and Computational Mathematics
  75. International Journal of Media and Networks
  76. International Journal of Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine
  77. Journal of Neuro and Spine
  78. New Advances in Brain & Critical Care
  79. Journal of Novel Physiotherapies Research Reviews
  80. Journal of Nursing & Healthcare
  81. Journal of Oil and Gas Research Reviews
  82. Journal of Ophthalmology & Clinical Research
  83. Journal of Oral & Dental Health
  84. International Journal of Orthopaedics Research
  85. World Journal of Otolaryngology Research
  86. Journal of Pediatrics & Neonatal Biology
  87. International Journal of Petrochemistry & Natural Gas
  88. Petroleum and Chemical Industry International
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  90. Plant Biology Soil Health Journal
  91. Journal of Plasma Chemistry and Plasma Processing Research
  92. Political Science International
  93. International Journal of Probiotics and Dietetics
  94. International Journal of Psychiatry
  95. World Journal of Radiology and Imaging
  96. Journal of Robotics and Automation Research
  97. Journal of Sensor Networks and Data Communications
  98. Space Science Journal
  99. Stem Cell Research International
  100. Journal of Surgery Care
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  102. World Journal of Tourism Management
  103. Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology Insights
  104. Journal of Traditional Medicine & Applications
  105. Journal of Veterinary Health Science
  106. Video Journal of Medical and Clinical Research
  107. Journal of Water Research
  108. International Journal of Women’s Health Care