Category: Fact Check

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Novel Practices in Medical Study from Crimson Publishers

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. That is, it was asking for submissions to Volume 1, Issue 1 of Novel Practices in Medical Study. We thought that it might be worth taking a look at that journal, just to see how it has performed, given that it has been a year since that EMAIL was sent.

The EMAIL

The EMAIL we saw is as follows:

Date: 13 November 2021
Title: Mark the email Dear Professor

“Dear Professor,
Hope you are doing well.

We are in shortfall of one article for successful release of Volume 1 Issue 1. Is it possible for you to support us with your 2page opinion or mini review for this issue?

We are confident that you are always will be there to support us.

Await your positive response.

Lucy Clements
Crimson Publishers | Novel Practices in Medical Study“

Crimson Publishers

Novel Practices in Medical Study is published by Crimson Publishers (which has a Twitter account if you are interested).

Crimson Publishers have a portfolio of 70 journals and states that it is indexed by a variety of agencies (see Figure 1). We have archived the list of journals published by Crimson Publishers, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Obvious omissions from their indexing are the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Web of Science and Scopus. We have archived the indexing page, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Figure 1: The agencies that index Crimson Publishers

The Article Processing Fees (APCs) for all of Crimson Publishers’ journals is shown in Figure 2. 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 2: Article Processing Charges for Crimson Publiishers' journals

The editorial board for the journal is shown in Figure 3. We note that none of the entries provide an EMAIL address, which is always a frustration of ours. We have archived this page, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Figure 3: Editorial board of Novel Practices in Medical Study

Novel Practices in Medical Study

Looking at the journal’s web site, both the Current Issue link (archived here, 28 Nov 2022) and the Archive link (archived here, 28 Nov 2022) lead to pages that says that the information is coming soon (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: Novel Practices in Medical Study, showing the Current Issue and Archive are not yet available

Articles in Press

The articles listed as being in press are shown in Figure 5. The red numbers have been added, so that we can more easily refer to the articles later. We have archived this page here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Figure 5: Articles in Press in Novel Medical Practices in Medical Study

We note the following:

  1. Although these articles are listed as “Article [sic] in Press“, it also shows them as being in Volume 1, Issue 1.
  2. The articles were all published in 2021 (October, January, April and November). It does not look like the journal has published any articles in 2022 (but see the below).
  3. If you click on the article, it does not take you to the article but to to publisher’s home page. Similarly, clicking on any of the Abstract, Full-Text or e-Pub links also takes you to the publisher’s home page. Hopefully, the publisher will correct that, as other journals do not have this issue.
  4. Clicking on the author names just takes you back to the articles in press page. Although we have not looked at every journal, the few checks we carried it, they also did the same.

Comments on articles

  1. We make general comments about the four articles that have been published by Novel Practices in Medical Study. These are only brief comments as we are not carrying out a full review of the articles. The list numbers are in reference to the red numbers in Figure 5.
    1.  This article (you can download a version we archived from here), says it was submitted on 24 September 2021 and was published on 21 October 2021. This aligns with the date given on the web page (see Figure 5).
    2. This article (you can download a version we archived from here), says it was submitted on 7 December 2021 and was published on 26 January 2022. This does not agree with the web page that says it was published in January 2021 (see Figure 5). We suspect this is just an error in the year on either the paper or the web site.
    3. This article (you can download a version we archived from here), says it was submitted on 20 December 2021 and was published on 22 April 2022. This does not agree with the web page that says it was published in April 2021 (see Figure 5). We suspect this is just an error in the year on either the paper or the web site.
    4. This article (you can download a version we archived from here), says it was submitted on 11 October 2021 and was published on 10 November 2022. This does not agree with the web page that says it was published in November 2021 (see Figure 5). We suspect this is just an error in the year on either the paper or the web site.

Of the four papers it appears that three of them have metadata errors, either on the web page, or the paper itself, with regard to the date the paper was published.

Final Comments

This is not a full review of Novel Practices in Medical Study, so we are not saying whether the journal is predatory or note.
We would say that there are some worrying signs about the journal (such as no EMAIL addresses for the editors, no association with agencies such as DOAJ and COPE and inconsistencies in the metadata) that makes us feel that this journal, and the publisher, is worthy of further investigation.
To this end, it is on the list of publishers that we plan to take a closer look at.

How else can you help?

We would welcome comments on this article (in fact any article) via our Twitter accounts.

You may have noticed that we do not enable comments on our blog posts. This is due to the spam that this attracts and also the fact that we would have to moderate those comments and this takes a lot of time and, we know from personal experience, that the author of those comments would like them to appear instantly and, when they do not, it can cause frustration.

You can email us as admin@predatory-publishing.com. We don’t monitor that account on a daily basis, but we do read everything that is sent, even if we do not respond.

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

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What data should we collect for a publisher?

In a previous article, we reflected on some of the publishers we have looked at, predominantly through our Twitter account.

We noted that when we focused on a particular publisher it was done without really thinking about being consistent between different publishers. We simply drew out some points/observations that we felt were important.

This, we feel, was a fault on our part and is something we plan to put right in the future.

Basic details for a publisher and its journals

There is certain information that is common across all publishers, and its journals. This includes (but is not limited to):

  1. Where is the publisher based?
  2. How many journals does the publisher publish?
  3. Is information presented at a publisher level, or does each journal have its own dedicated web pages?
  4. Are there common emails that appear to service more than one journal?
  5. What is the aim/scope of each journal? Is to broad?
  6. Do the journals publish regularly?
  7. What is the time from submission to acceptance and publication?
  8. Are the journals members of organizations such as COPE, DOAJ and OASPA?
  9. Do the journals have a statement about their peer review process?
  10. What indexing does each journal claim to have?
  11. How can they (both publisher and journals) be contacted?
  12. What are their Article Processing Charges are (if any)? Are they easy to find on the web site?
  13. Does the quality of the articles published look sufficient for a peer reviewed journal? We note that we would not look at the technical aspects of the paper(s), as we are not qualified in most of the disciplines, but there are things that we can look at, such as grammar, quality of citations etc.
  14. Is there any plagiarism in the articles that are published?
  15. Do the journals have an ethics policy?
  16. Have we received reports of the journals/publisher sending spam emails?
  17. Do the journals have a verifiable ISSN?
  18. Is the web site well written, well presented and provides easy access to important information?
  19. Are the instructions for authors clear and easy to find?
  20. Who holds the copyright of articles that are published?
  21. The make up of the editorial board
  22. … and, we suspect, that there will be many other information points that would be useful to collect for any publisher that we analyze.

So, there is a core set of information that we could collect for any publisher we look at so that there is some consistency in our analysis.

Data Collection

Not all of the information will be available for a given publisher and its journal(s). Even if it is available, it may be too time consuming to collect, but we will collect as much as we can.

We do have some tools that enable us to automate this data collection but even that can be time consuming and is not fool proof. We hope though, that the tools we have at our disposal, will help, rather than relying on a fully manual process.

What we do not have, unfortunately, is a large team that are able to dedicate significant amounts of their time and energy to manually collecting this data. 

The output

We plan to disseminate our findings in three ways (perhaps more in the future)

  1. Our Twitter account will share information as we collect the data.
  2. We will use our blog to share more extensive information.
  3. We will compile all the information we find about a given publisher into a single document and make this available to our long standing patrons, and perhaps to other stakeholders who have an interest.

So, what next?

We will revisit the publishers that we have already looked at. These are listed in our previous post. We may take a break from those we have looked at, and start to look at some others first, before returning to them with a more methodical approach.

We have some thoughts on the publishers that we will look at next. We are just completing that list and will share it soon, as well as asking for your suggestions.

How can you help?

We would welcome comments on this article (in fact any article) via our Twitter account.

You may have noticed that we do not enable comments on our blog posts. This is due to the spam that this attracts and also the fact that we would have to moderate those comments and this takes a lot of time and, we know from personal experience, that the author of those comments would like them to appear instantly and, when they do not, it can cause frustration.

You can email us as admin@predatory-publishing.com. We don’t monitor that account on a daily basis, but we do read everything that is sent, even if we do not respond.

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

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Reflecting on the publishers we have featured

On our Twitter feed, we have a number of themes, such as EMAIL Snippets and Soundbites from articles.

We have also started to look at various publishers, with the emphasis on publishers, as there are too many journals and, it is probably the case that if a publisher is publishing a predatory journal, then all the journals they publish are all likely to be predatory. No guarantee that this is the case, but it is not a bad working assumption.

Publishers (and others) we have looked at

This is a list of publishers, and one journal, we have looked so far. We note that one of them is not a publisher or a journal, but a bibliographic database.

  1. Scope Database: You can see the tweets here.
  2. Walsh Medical Media: You can see the tweets here.
  3. Remedy Publications: You can see the tweets here.
  4. Allied Academies: You can see the tweets here.
  5. ECronicon: You can see the tweets here.
  6. Scientific Reports: You can see the tweets here.
  7. Mega Journal of Oncology: You can see the tweets here.
  8. International Journal of Engineering Research and Development: You can see the tweets here.

Self-reflection

We have been tweeting about publishers, and others, for a while now. We believe that it does give insight into how the publishers, and their journals, operate.

If we were critical of ourselves, and self-reflection is always good, we have adopted an approach where we have tweeted about anything we have found that is interesting. That is not, necessarily, a bad thing but we do not have a coherent set of information about each publisher that enables a comparison to be made between different publishers.

Going forward

Looking at the publishers that we listed above, we have (we believe) drawn out some insights, but it is not easy to look at our Twitter feed and to compare one publisher against another, or even to get an overview of that individual publisher.

To address this, we plan to be a lot more methodical in the future. By that, we mean that we will try and collect similar information about a given publisher before looking at some of the more unique elements of that publisher.

Once we have collated all the data for a given publisher we will collate it into a single document. We will make that document available to our patrons and also try and publish the document so that it is available to a wider audience.

At some point, we will revisit some, perhaps all, of the publishers listed about. We have also started to identify some other publishers that we will take a look at. We will share these in a later post and we will also be asking for suggestions from the community.

If you would like to support our work as a patron, please take a look at this article, which will give provide you with all the information you need. It will not only give you access to the reports that we will produce, ahead of anybody else receiving them, but there are other benefits which are outlined in the article referred to above.

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Fact Check: Walsh Medical Media – CiteScore

We have recently been tweeting about Walsh Medical Media. One of the things we have been asking questions about is their CiteScore claims. Rather than look at each journal on Twitter, we thought we take the opportunity to look at all their journals so that everything is in one, easily accessible place.

What is CiteScore?

CiteScore is Elsevier’s way of measuring the impact of a journal. It looks at the number of citations received by a journal in the last four years, divided by the number of papers published in the last four years. For example, if a journal had published 82 papers between 2018 and 2021 and had recorded 2,522 citations in the same time period, the journal would have a CiteScore of 82/2,522 = 30.8.

CiteScore is Elsevier’s way of being able to compare one journal with another with regard to the impact the journal is having.

The video below explains more about CiteScore, if you are interested.

Walsh Medical Media on Scopus

One of this things you can do on Scopus is to look up a given journal and find out (among other things) its CiteScore.

You can also look up a publisher. If you look up “Walsh Medical Media“, which we did on 30 July 2022, only one journal was returned, see Figure 1.

Search for Walsh Medical Media on Scopus
Figure 1: Search for Walsh Medical Media on Scopus

Checking the claims made by Walsh Medical Media

Figure 1 shows that only one journal is indexed by Scopus, and thus only one journal can have a Scopus CiteScore.

The table at the end of this article records the claims made by Walsh Medical Media, for all of its 77 journals. We have noted the impact factor (not relevant to this article) and the CiteScore.

Of the 77 journals, 13 of them do not list a CiteScore. The other 64 journals all list a CiteScore value.

Given that Figure 1 shows only one journal, it would appear that Walsh Medical Media is claiming CiteScores for journals, which is actually not the case.

Some journals used to have a CiteScore

When we were tweeting about Walsh Medical Media’s CiteScores, somebody mentioned that one of their journal’s used to have a CiteScore. You can see the tweet here (make sure you look at the comments).

On the journal’s web site (see Figure 2), the journal says that it has a CiteScore of 16.46.

The response to our tweet was saying that the journal Biology and Medicine used to have a CiteScore but its coverage has now been discontinued from Scopus.

Walsh Medical Media: Biology and Medicine
Figure 2: Walsh Medical Media: Biology and Medicine

If we dig around in Scopus, we can find where Biology and Medicine was indexed by Scopus (see Figure 3).  You can see that it was indexed between 2009 to 2016, but coverage has now been discontinued.

When it was being indexed, the journal had a CiteScore of 0.3, which is a long way from the 16.46 that is currently being claimed. So, not only is the journal is claiming a CiteScore which is not valid, but the claimed value (16.46) is way higher than the CiteScore they had in 2015 (0.3).

Figure 3: Biology and Medicine, when it was indexed on Scopus

Clinical Schizophrenia and Related Psychoses

The one journal of Walsh Medical Media that is indexed by Scopus is Clinical Schizophrenia and Related Psychoses. Scopus reports that it has a 2021 CiteScore of 0.9. We find it a little strange that they do not mention this on the page that lists all of their journals, although the CiteScore is mentioned on the journal’s home page.

Final Comments

Unless we are missing something, it appears that Walsh Medical Media is claiming that 64 of its journals have a Scopus CiteScore when, in fact, only one of their journals is currently indexed by Scopus.

We hope that Walsh Medical Media will see this article and either correct/clarify the statements they making about CiteScores, or let us know that we have got it wrong and we would be happy to update this article and apologise.

It would also be interesting to know what Scopus/Elsevier have to say about this and whether they can take any action.

Archived Resources

Just so that you can look at the same information that we viewed, we have saved a copy of the list of journal’s published by Walsh Medical Media on Wayback Machine. You can view this page here (saved on 30 July 2022).

Walsh Medical Media: Journals

# Journal Impact Factor CiteScore
1Journal of Advanced Chemical Engineering8.945.62
2Advances in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety8.717.24
3Journal of Aging Science3.914.70
4Agrotechnology3.830.96
5Journal of Allergy & Therapy5.157.57
6Journal of Anthropology ReportsNo Impact FactorNo CiteScore
7Journal of Applied Mechanical Engineering3.184.02
8Journal of Aquaculture Research & DevelopmentNo Impact Factor21.11
9Journal of Astrobiology & Outreach10.004.38
10Journal of Bacteriology & Parasitology9.8911.83
11Biochemistry & Analytical Biochemistry12.0218.91
12Bioenergetics: Open Access16.674.70
13Journal of Bioequivalence & Bioavailability11.8513.64
14Biology and Medicine11.4816.46
15Journal of Biomolecular Research & Therapeutics0.680.95
16Journal of Blood Disorders & TransfusionNo Impact Factor9.08
17Brain Disorders & TherapyNo Impact FactorNo CiteScore
18Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis3.0212.43
19Cardiovascular Pharmacology: Open Access0.841.49
20Journal of Clinical & Experimental PharmacologyNo Impact Factor4.81
21Clinical & Medical Biochemistry1.582.64
22Journal of Clinical and Medical Sciences0.290.27
23Clinical Microbiology: Open Access5.257.24
24Journal of Clinical Research & Bioethics6.966.59
25Clinical Schizophrenia & Related PsychosesNo Impact FactorNo CiteScore
26Clinics in Mother and Child Health2.182.51
27Journal of Coastal Zone ManagementNo Impact FactorNo CiteScore
28Journal of Data Mining in Genomics & Proteomics21.8313.03
29Dentistry2.964.16
30Journal of Dermatitis1.100.80
31Diabetes Case Reports3.451.69
32Journal of Eye Diseases and Disorders0.520.60
33Fermentation TechnologyNo Impact FactorNo CiteScore
34Journal of Food Processing & TechnologyNo Impact Factor24.38
35Journal of Forensic Biomechanics4.204.30
36Journal of Forensic Psychology1.001.24
37Gene Technology3.601.68
38Gerontology & Geriatric Research5.625.14
39Global Journal of Biology, Agriculture & Health Sciences4.046.71
40Global Journal of Interdisciplinary Social SciencesNo Impact FactorNo CiteScore
41Health Care : Current Reviews2.862.85
42Hereditary Genetics: Current Research4.884.50
43Journal of Infectious Diseases and Diagnosis2.671.01
44Intellectual Property Rights: Open AccessNo Impact FactorNo CiteScore
45International Journal of Accounting Research4.124.02
46International Journal of Swarm Intelligence and Evolutionary Computation7.693.60
47International Journal of Waste Resources8.909.38
48Journal of Liver3.00No CiteScore
49Journal of Membrane Science & Technology7.339.58
50Journal of Microbial & Biochemical Technology5.8932.11
51Modern Chemistry & Applications4.244.84
52Journal of Nanomedicine & Nanotechnology14.5919.39
53Journal of Neonatal Biology10.626.66
54Journal of Nutrition & Weight Loss0.750.40
55Journal of Nutritional Disorders & TherapyNo Impact FactorNo CiteScore
56Journal of Ocular Infection and InflammationNo Impact FactorNo CiteScore
57Oral Health and Dental Management8.8615.70
58Journal of Pain Management & Medicine2.802.62
59Journal of Patient Care0.731.26
60Journal of Petroleum & Environmental Biotechnology11.1318.26
61Pharmaceutica Analytica ActaNo Impact Factor1.67
62Journal of Pharmacogenomics & Pharmacoproteomics9.7010.46
63Journal of Pharmacovigilance7.8714.26
64Journal of Plant Pathology & Microbiology12.8516.94
65Journal of PsychiatryNo Impact FactorNo CiteScore
66Journal of Remote Sensing & GIS4.073.17
67Review of Public Administration and Management9.399.89
68Single Cell Biology2.572.03
69Journal of Socialomics8.644.03
70Journal of Stem Cell Research & Therapy7.8212.88
71Journal of Surgery and Anesthesia1.200.45
72Journal of Thrombosis and Circulation: Open Access0.47No CiteScore
73Journal of Tropical Diseases & Public Health5.00No CiteScore
74Tropical Medicine & Surgery5.9010.32
75Journal of Tumour Research & Reports0.421.25
76Journal of Vaccines & Vaccination6.605.77
77Journal of Vascular Medicine & Surgery2.032.08
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Questions about the Journal of Positive School Psychology: Update

In a recent article about the Journal of Positive School Psychology (if you have not read this article, please do), we said that we would take another look at the journal, to see if they had responded to any of the questions we posed.
We had sent them an email, and they said that they would respond to us. They never did. That is, of course, their prerogative and we have no issue with them not responding, but we thought we would see if they had made any changes based on the questions we had posed.
 
Here are the 10 questions we asked and an update from our side.

Question 1

1) Why do you have an Editorial Team that incorporates three types of people?, see https://bit.ly/3atJ6b3.

Looking at the Editorial Team now (see Figure 1), the journal has made some changes. There is no longer the concept of “Editorial Board, Advisories and Promoters” and email addresses are now given.

We do note though that most of the email addresses are not related to an affiliation (e.g. they are gmail, mail.ru etc.). Whilst not an issue for a few people, it does raise concerns when the vast majority of editors have these generic email addresses.

We plan to contact the editors in due course just to check that they know that they are listed.

Just so that we have a record, we have captured the current editorial team on Wayback Machine. You can view the captured page here.

Journal of Positive School Psychology - Editors
Figure 1: Journal of Positive School Psychology: Editors
Tweet image from Fake Journals
Figure 2: Number of papers published by JPSP (30 May 2022)

Question 2

2) Your editorial team appear to handle a large number of papers. How do they manage this workload?, see https://bit.ly/3wYZOqt.

If you look at Figure 2, this shows the number of papers published by the journal, by issue, when we reported this number on our last article, which we published on 30 May 2022. 

Papers published by JPSP (7 Jul 2022)
Figure 3: Papers published by JPSP (7 Jul 2022)

You can see that there was a significant increase in the number of papers published 2022 (i.e. from Volume 6), when compared to previous years.

We have taken another look at the data (see Figure 3), and the number of papers is still significantly more than in previous years. Volume 6-4 has increased from 316 (see Figure 2) to 1,202 (see Figure 3). Issues 6-5 and 6-6 has not published over 1,000 papers yet. We say “yet” as we would not be surprised if the numbers have increased the next time we check.

When we looked at the number of papers in our previous article, one of the observations we made was that the 18 people who made up their editorial team had a high workload.

The editorial team now only comprises 10 members so their workload has significantly increased. Given that the team has almost halved, and the number of papers has increased, their workload has more than doubled.

In fact, if you take issue 6-4 (1,202 papers), with an editorial team of 10 people each member of the team would handle about 120 papers for the papers published in that month.

Question 3

3) We found significant plagiarism in one of the papers you have published (we have not checked any others). Given the plagiarism checks that you carry out, how could this happen?, see https://bit.ly/3z3FLtk and https://bit.ly/3wUaR5o.

We have checked on the papers that we previously highlighted and they are still available on the journal’s web site.

Question 4

4) You have recently significantly increased the number of papers that you have published. What was the reason for this?, see https://bit.ly/3GIWpAB and https://bit.ly/3aulBi6.

This is related to question 2 and we have nothing to add here.

Question 5

5) We cannot correlate your claimed Scopus SJR rating on the Scopus web site. Could you justify where you got this information from?, https://bit.ly/3LVer3d.

 

Scopus rating for JPSP
Figure 4: Scopus rating for JPSP

In our previous article, we could not validate the journal’s claim that it was indexed by Scopus. We have checked again and it is now indexed (see Figure 4).

Indeed, its SJR is 0.639 (for 2021), whereas the SJR shown on the journal’s web site is 0.54 (for 2020).

All credit to the journal for being indexed by Scopus. We would raise some concerns with regard to some of the issues we have raised, but it is not for us to say if Scopus are right, or not, to index this journal.

We would also refer you to question 6, which has something to add to this discussion.

Question 6

6) Do Jolanta Burke and Dr Gokmen Arslan write your editorials? Would you be able to provide their contact details?, see https://bit.ly/38yoIVG.

We never received a response from the journal with regard to this question.

But, we were contacted by one of the editors (in a private message, so we will not name). They said:

“Hoping everything is going well. The publisher of the Journal of Positive School Psychology has been changed for two years ago. I don’t know anything about the new publisher or the editorial members. However, I received many emails. I think it is currently a predator. I informed Scopus about that.“

Question 7

7) We believe you claim that all of your articles are Open Access, yet this does not seem to be the case. Can you explain the rationale behind your Open Access policy?, see https://bit.ly/3sYrURp.

We tried to access some of the articles that were previously “locked” and we still received a message say that a subscription was required to access the article.

Question 8

8) Can you explain the relationship between yourselves and the copyeditors that you insist authors use? The companies appear to be co-located, see https://bit.ly/3sZcmNa.

The previous statement that there were no submission fees, but you had to use a copyedited (which has the same address as the publisher) has not changed.

Question 9

9) Does the journal have an Editor-in-Chief? If so, can we have their name and contact details?, see https://bit.ly/3z5NgQD.

See question 1. There is still no named Editor-in-Chief.

Question 10

10) You do not appear to allocate a DOI to every article, as you claim to do. Is this a fair assessment?, see https://bit.ly/3M2koeJ.

We looked at the same paper that we highlighted in our the above tweet, and it still does not have a DOI.

Remarks

Despite their promise, the journal never did get back to us.

It is good to see that the status of the editorial board has been clarified, and that the editors now have email addresses (albeit generic ones).

It is also good to see that the Scopus indexing has been verified.

However, there does remain many aspects of this journal that raises concerns and we will return to it at a later date.

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We have some questions about the Journal of Positive School Psychology

Featured Image

We have recently been taking a look at the Journal of Positive School Psychology and tweeting our findings.

You can see the tweets we have done by using this link (which essentially tracks the hashtag #Jnl_PSP), https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Jnl_PSP&src=typed_query&f=live.

We wanted to record some of our findings in an article but, before we did that we invited the journal to comment on the tweets, correct any factual inaccuracies and make any other comments they felt necessary.

In this article, we present the email we sent to the journal and the response we received.

EMAIL to the publisher

EMAIL Date: 07 May 2022

Sent to: submissionjpsp@gmail.com

Subject Line:  Questions about Journal of Positive School Psychology

Dear Principal Contact

I hope that we have the right email address. It is the only one we could find on your web site.

We have recently been tweeting about your journal (see https://bit.ly/3wU9Ysm).

We are planning to develop this set of tweets into an article for our blog (see https://predatory-publishing.com/).

We would like to give you the opportunity to respond to some of our tweets, so that we can correct any factual inaccuracies and/or explain the circumstances around the information we have presented.

For example:

Twitter image
Figure 1: Tweet image

1) Why do you have an Editorial Team that incorporates three types of people?, see https://bit.ly/3atJ6b3.

2) Your editorial team appear to handle a large number of papers. How do they manage this workload?, see https://bit.ly/3wYZOqt.

Tweet image from Fake Journals
Figure 2: Tweet Image
Figure 3: Tweet image

3) We found significant plagiarism in one of the papers you have published (we have not checked any others). Given the plagiarism checks that you carry out, how could this happen?, see https://bit.ly/3z3FLtk and https://bit.ly/3wUaR5o.

4) You have recently significantly increased the number of papers that you have published. What was the reason for this?, see https://bit.ly/3GIWpAB and https://bit.ly/3aulBi6.

Twitter Image
Figure 4: Tweet image
Twitter Image
Figure 5: Tweet image

5) We cannot correlate your claimed Scopus SJR rating on the Scopus web site. Could you justify where you got this information from?, https://bit.ly/3LVer3d.

6) Do Jolanta Burke and Dr Gokmen Arslan write your editorials? Would you be able to provide their contact details?, see https://bit.ly/38yoIVG.

Figure 6: Tweet image
Twitter Image
Figure 7: Tweet image

7) We believe you claim that all of your articles are Open Access, yet this does not seem to be the case. Can you explain the rationale behind your Open Access policy?, see https://bit.ly/3sYrURp.

8) Can you explain the relationship between yourselves and the copyeditors that you insist authors use? The companies appear to be co-located, see https://bit.ly/3sZcmNa.

Twitter Image
Figure 8: Tweet image
Twitter Image
Figure 9: Tweet image

9) Does the journal have an Editor-in-Chief? If so, can we have their name and contact details?, see https://bit.ly/3z5NgQD.

10) You do not appear to allocate a DOI to every article, as you claim to do. Is this a fair assessment?, see https://bit.ly/3M2koeJ.

Figure 10: Tweet image

Response from Journal

We sent the email to the publishers on 07 May 2022. We received an email 30 minutes later, which said. 

“We have gone through your comments and asked the editors to reply within a week. Regarding publication policy you can read on website.“

We responded, by saying:

“Many thanks, we appreciate your prompt response.

We will take a look at your publication policy, which we assume is this page:

https://www.journalppw.com/index.php/jpsp/publication_ethics

Thank you again and we look forward to hearing from the editors in due course.“

At the time of writing (30 May 2022), no response has been received.

Conclusion

  • We were very pleased that we received a response within 30 minutes of emailing the journal. The fact that they did not respond, as promised, is disappointing.
  • We note that the email comes from a generic email account, that is “JPSP Editorial Board <submissionjpsp@gmail.com>“. That is, we don’t have a person’s name and it is not from a the journal’s domain but rather from a gmail account.
  • We still would like to hear from the journal and, until we do, we have to assume that they cannot adequately respond to the questions that we posed.
  • We will continue to monitor this journal just to see if anything changes and/or we see anything else of interest.
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Is Fiverr being used to promote Predatory Publishing?

Type with Investigation

We recently received an email that came from a fiverr account. It suggests that publishers are using freelancers to promote their, possibly, predatory journals. In this article we look at the evidence and let you decide whether we should be worried about this?

The email we received

Figure 1shows the email that we received. We would draw your attention to who the email is from (highlighted in green).

It is from ‘fiverr.com’. If you are unaware of this web site, it is a respectable web site that provides freelancers the opportunity to advertise their skills and services to those that are seeking to engage them.

The worrying thing is that (we assume) a freelancer from fiverr is sending emails, asking for researchers to submit to a WSEAS journal. Why would a reputable publisher engage freelancers to email scholars to submit to their journals. Most high quality journals either attract papers via their reputation or from emails from themselves, typically through the editors.

We have to assume that WSEAS is aware of this, else what does the freelancer have to gain?

EMAIL received from WSEAS
Figure 1: EMAIL received to submit to WSEAS journals

If you want to submit a paper

Where does the submission URL go to?

The link provided to submit a paper is https://wseas.com/journals-without-fees.php. If you look at this URL, it does contain the WSEAS domain, which is what you would expect.

However, if you click on this URL you are actually redirected to https://cdn.jotfor.ms/maria.managing.editor/invited-papers. (see figure 2, highlighted in red). Just for the record, we have captured this form on Wayback Machine. You can access this archive here. 

Figure 2: Submission form for WSEAS journal

Looking at the redirected URL, and just accessing the domain (that is https://cdn.jotfor.ms/), you get taken to Jotform.com, which is a reputable way to create forms for various purposes (see Figure 3).

The question we would pose is why would a reputable journal use this method as a way for authors to submit papers? Surely they have their own system for authors to submit papers, whether this is by email or some other manuscript management system?

Jotform home page
Figure 3: Jotform Home Page

What does the tail of the URL mean?

We looked at the last part of the URL, that part that says ‘maria.managing.editor/invited-papers’. We are particularly interested in ‘maria.managing.editor’.

Is Maria actually a managing editor of WSEAS?

We searched the WSEAS web site and did find an email address of maria.managing.editor@gmail.com, which suggests that there is somebody called Maria. It is a little concerning that this is a gmail email address, rather than a WSEAS email, which is used for some other email contacts (see Figure 4), which have been taken from WSEAS.com.

We tried to archive the WSEAS web site on Wayback Machine, but that did not work. If you try and look at the web site on Wayback Machine, you get the message “This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.” This means that the site does not allow itself to be archived, which can be verified here, which is a list of websites excluded from the Wayback Machine.

Figure 4: Some of the email contacts for WSEAS

Final Remarks

We find it very strange that a publisher appears to be using freelancers to email potential authors to ask them to submit to their journals.

We find it equally strange that you are directed to a Jot Form page, rather than some page, form or submission system that is managed by the publisher.

Perhaps there is some reasonable explanation for all of the above and we hope that WSEAS can contact us and explain.

We plan to look at little more closely at WSEAS in the future, as this article is really about whether fiverr are (inadvertently) promoting predatory publishing.

For now, we will note that WSEAS have previously been accused of being a predatory publisher, but have vehemently denied it as can be seen from their 44 point response, which was signed by 29 Professors. You can see that response here, but we have also downloaded it and you can access it here.

Update

Tweet: Response from Fiverr
Figure 5: Response from Fiverr

In response to our tweets, which formed informed this article, we received a response from Fiverr. It said “Hi there! We completely understand your concern. Please be assured that this is a spoofed email address and this message was not sent from a Fiverr email or user account. Please feel free to reach out to us at support@fiverr.com if you have any other questions.“

We responded, by saying “Thank you – we really appreciate you responding. Similar services are advertised on fiverr though?“

Fiverr responded by saying:

“Hi there, you are welcome. If you notice anything that is not in line with our guidelines you can always use our Flag feature to report it. Once again, thank you.“

We are very grateful that Fiverr have responded in such a positive way. We may take them up ontheir suggestion to flag Fiverr’s content which seems inappropriate.

Finally, we have reported one account, which says “I am now available to write research papers in the field of finance and economics. Moreover, I will help you improve your existing papers and suggest target journals for publication.“

We will monitor if any changes are made and we may raise other flags in the future.

We have suggested that this sounds like that this person will write a paper for you, rather than just help getting it published.

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How many editors does a journal need? The case of SCIREA

SCIREA is a scientific publisher that has a portfolio of 39 journals. These 39 journals have 13,288 editors, meaning that each journal has an average of 341 editors. Each of these editors has handled less than one paper each, over the last five years.

The aim of these articles is to gain an insight into a specific journal or publisher and get a view of their practices and how they operate. We are particularly keen to provide an evidence based analysis, rather than being (too) subjective.

We occasionally give a view as to whether we believe a journal, or publisher, is predatory but we would rather present our findings and let others be the judge.

In this article, we present the data we have collected for SCIREA, with regard to the number of editors they have.

Who are SCIREA?

SCIREA is an open access publisher that publishes 39 journals (as at July 2021). Its Article Processing Charges (APC) are about USD 230. Each journal has its own APC page, but the ones we looked at were all USD 230.

None of the SCIREA journals appear to have an ISSN and they do not seem to be members of either COPE or DOAJ.

Looking at their web site, the majority of the journals started publishing in 2016. They generally publish each year, but there are some notable exceptions. For example, the SCIREA Journal of Hydraulic Engineering has published four articles, one in October 2016, one in October 2019, one in February 2019 and one in February 2021.

SCIREA is listed on the Stop Predatory Publisher web site.

SCIREA is listed on the Stop Predatory Publisher web site

Data collected for SCIREA journals?

To carry out our analysis we collected the following data:

  1. The journal names
  2. The journal URLs
  3. How many editors each journal has
  4. How many papers each journal has published

The data for each of the journals was collected manually, which was an easy task as there are only 39 journals. We also captured the URL of the journal as this would be useful later.

The editors are listed at one URL (as well as being listed on each journal’s pages). Nineteen editors are listed on each page and there are 700 pages (the final page has less then 19 editors listed). Each editor has their name, country, institution and the journal they serve. It was an easy matter to write a script to scrape the data from the web site. We had to scrape the web site, as manually collecting all the editor data was not possible.

Each individual journal lists all of the articles that it has published on a single page. It was easy just to collect the total number of papers each journal had published, by inspection. Note, we did not collect information about each article, just the number of articles that had been published.

This data collection showed that SCIREA publishes 39 journals, they have 13,288 editors and have published 654 papers (as at July 2021).

SCIREA: Number of Editors by Journal

Figure 2: The number of editors for each of SCIREA's journals (click to see larger image)

Figure 2 graphically shows the number of editors for each of SCIREA’s journal. There is a lot of data on the image, and if you click on it, you’ll see a larger version. We have also presented this data in Table 1, as this may be preferable for some people.

In total, SCIREA has 13,288 editors across its portfolio of 39 journals. That is an average of 341 editors serving each journal.

The number of editors ranges from 1,054 (SCIREA Journal of Physics) to 25 (SCIREA Journal of Surveying and Mapping). The number of editors, alone, is not really relevant unless you make a relative comparison, with the number of papers that the journal has published, which we do below.

[table id=072_001 /]

SCIREA: Number of Articles by Journal

Figure 3: The number of articles for each of SCIREA's journals (click to see larger image)

Figure 3 shows the number of articles that have been published by each journal in the SCIREA portfolio. SCIREA has published a total of 654 articles.

The number of papers published ranges from 85 (SCIREA Journal of Clinical Medicine) to one article for three journals. Two journals have yet to publish.

It should be noted that this is the number of articles since each journal started publishing which, is typically in late 2016. As we mention above, some of the journals publish regularly, but others are a little more erratic. We assume that the publication schedule is dictated by the submissions (and acceptances) that the journals receive.

We realize that Figure 3 is quite detailed. You can see a larger image by clicking on it, but we have also provided the data in Table 2 for those readers that find it easier to access the data in that format.

[table id=072_002 /]

How many papers does an editor handle?

Table 2 also shows (final column) the average number of articles that each editor has handled. This is calculated by taking the number of editors (see Table 1) and dividing it by the number of articles that have been published (see Table 2). In looking at this figure, the following should be noted:

  • The total number of articles is the total that have been published since the journal was started. That is, it is NOT the number of articles in (say) a twelve month period.
  • The number of papers we have calculated that has been handled by each editor is measured over the lifetime of the journal, NOT how many articles have been handled (say) every year.
  • Most of the journals started in 2016 so, if you want to calculate how many articles are handled each year by the editors you would need to divide the number by about 5.

The journal that has the highest “Articles per Editor” figure is the SCIREA Journal of Astronomy. On average, each of the 26 editors has handled 0.23 papers. This journal has only published six articles, one in 2017, two in 2018 and three in 2019. They are still inviting submissions, so we assume that the journal is still active.

This figure of 0.23 assumes that the number of papers published was the same number as were submitted. This is not a good assumption as any journal will have rejected a number of papers, but these still have to be handled by one of the editors.

If we assume that the rejection rate is 50%, then the number of papers handled by each editor would be 0.46.

You might feel that a 50% rejection rate is unrealistic. Let’s say that the SCIREA Journal of Astronomy rejects 75% of the papers it receives. This would mean that, on average, each editor would handle 0.92 papers.

To be absolutely clear, even if the journal rejected 75% of the papers it received, the 26 editors of SCIREA Journal of Astronomy, would have handled less than one paper each. And this is over the lifetime of the journal (four years), so that would be less then 0.25 papers each year, for each editor.

Every other journal in SCIREA’s portfolio has an average less than the SCIREA Journal of Astronomy, meaning that, on average, none of their 13,228 has handled more than one paper since the publisher started in (typically) 2016.

Final Remarks

Given how many papers SCIREA has published, they appear to have a lot of editors. So many in fact, that on average each editor would handle less than one paper every five years, and possibly a lot less.

In our experience, a typical editor would be expected to handle 5-6 papers a year. Of course, disciplines differ and that number could be a lot less and we know of editors that have handled many more.

Perhaps our analysis is in this article is wrong and that we have not fully understood how the journal works. Perhaps the editors carry out more work than we are suggesting?

We would be delighted to hear from an SCIREA editor who we would give the opportunity to relate their experiences in a blog post. We would also be delighted to hear from the the journal itself and we offer them the same opportunity to respond to this article, which we would be delighted to publish.

Finally, we have been tweeting about SCIREA and if you want to see these tweets, please follow this link.

 

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Google Scholar and the International Journal of Management (IAEME Publication)

The International Journal of Management (ISSN: 0976-6502), which is published by IAEME Publication has two Google Scholar entries. Each one shows a different number of publications, citations, h-index etc. In this article, we take a closer look as well as comparing against the journal’s own records, from its web site.

About IAEME Publication

IAEME claims to be one of the largest open access publishers, publishing more than 120 journals. It says that its journals are indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, Scope Database and jifactor. See figure 1 for further details (click to see a larger image).

Figure 1: About IAEME Publication (accessed 16 Jul 2021)

IAEME Publication is based in India. Figure 2 shows a map (click to see a larger image), along with their contact details. 

Figure2: Location of IAEME Publication (accessed 16 Jul 2021)

Concerns with IAEME

We admit to having some concerns with IAEME Publication and we are currently carrying out a deeper study, which goes beyond this Google Scholar analysis. Just to give you some idea of our other concerns, we mention three things.

The first is their review times. When we access their web page a pop up appears (see Figure 3). It states that the average review time is 3 days. This seems very short for a scientific journal?

Figure 3: Call for Paper Pup Up (accessed 16 Jul 2021)
Figure 4: The International Journal of Management is not longer indexed by Scopus (from this tweet)

Our second concern is that the publisher claims that some of their journals are indexed by Scopus. One of the journals we checked, and which is the the focus of this article (International Journal of Management), states that it is indexed by Scopus. We recently tweeted that the journal was making this claim, but it is not true, which can be verified by looking at the Scopus web site.

Our third concern is that IAEME Publication has blocked us on Twitter (see Figure 5). We are not really concerned about being blocked (it goes with the territory) but it shows us that they have taken some notice of what we have done (or doing) and the worry is, why are they worried.

We have offered them the right of reply but, at the time of writing, they have not responded to us.

Figure 5: IAEME has blocked us on Twitter (accesses 16 Jul 2021)

As we mentioned above, we have been tweeting about IAEME Publication. We hope that these have been fair, in that we present facts, rather than subjective observations, but feel free to judge that for yourself. Some of our tweets can be seen here.

We are currently carrying out a more in depth investigation of IAEME Publication and will present our findings in a future blog post.

International Journal of Management (IJM)

The focus of this article is the International Journal of Management (IJM), which is published by IAEME Publication. We will specifically look at their Google Scholar records, but there are other concerns about this journal, as we have mentioned on Twitter. For example:

  • A query about the calculation of the Google Scholar impact factor (see here)
  • Where do the other impact factors they mention come from? (see here)
  • The number of citations they are reporting, as opposed to the number given by Google Scholar (see here)
  • The fact they mention that they are indexed by Scopus when they are not (see here)

Journal of International Management Google Scholar Records​

While looking at IAEME Publication and the Journal of International Management it came to our attention that the journal has two different Google Scholar entries. We reported this in this tweet.

The two entries can be seen here (Google Scholar ID: FO7xZmsAAAAJ) and here (Google Scholar ID: G8kfJ-MAAAAJ).

At the time of writing, one of these profiles (FO7xZmsAAAAJ) had 3,468 citations and an h-index of 21 (see Figure 6) and the other (G8kfJ-MAAAAJ) had 4,737 citations and an h-index of 21 (see Figure 7).

Figures 6 and 7 showing the Google Scholar profile for FO7xZmsAAAAJ and G8kfJ-MAAAAJ, both of which are for the Journal of International Management (accessed 16 Jul 2021)

FO7xZmsAAAAJ

This was the first Google Scholar account we found for the International Journal of Management (see Figure 6). We took a closer look at the publications that were indexed (we did this by downloading the entries into a spreadsheet and analyzed them from there). Figure 8 shows the number of publications indexed by Google Scholar, split by year.

It is interesting to note the significant increase in published papers in the last two years, bearing in mind, at the time of writing, we are only just over half way through 2021.

Figure 8: Number of papers indexed on the Google Scholar account FO7xZmsAAAAJ

Figure 9 shows the number of citations, recorded by Google Scholar, for account FO7xZmsAAAAJ. The profile is a little surprising. You would expect to see citations increase year-on-year, as more papers are published that can be cited from. We have not done a detailed analysis of this but we wonder why the journal only attracted 22 (resp. 34) citations in 2018 (resp. 2019).

Figure 9: Number of citations to Journal of Management papers as indexed by Google Scholar account FO7xZmsAAAAJ

If we take the number of papers as 1,916 and the number of citations as 3,470, this would give an impact factor of (3470/1916)=1.81. This is higher than the 1.2 impact factor that the journal was reporting, or even the 0.98 that we previously calculated.

G8kfJ-MAAAAJ

This was the second Google Scholar account we found for the International Journal of Management (see Figure 7). We took a closer look at the publications that were indexed (again, by downloading the entries and analyzing using a spreadsheet). Figure 10 shows the number of publications indexed by Google Scholar, split by year.

We should note that we deleted 836 records from the papers listed in Google Scholar as they were duplicates (identified by the title). These are typically indicated on Google Scholar by the use of an asterix.

Figure 10: Number of citations to the Internatioanl Journal of Management as indexed by account papers indexed on the Google Scholar account

It is interesting to note that this account indexes more papers (2,140 vs 1,916), yet it does not (yet) index 2021 papers. It is reasonable to suppose that this would be around 500, taking the total to around 2,600

Figure 11: Number of citations to Journal of Management papers as indexed by Google Scholar account G8kfJ-MAAAAJ

Figure 11 shows the number of citations that the journal has attracted, as indexed by account G8kfJ-MAAAAJ. Similar to the other account, there is a dip in 2018 and 2019, but it is picking up in 2020.

If we take the number of papers as 2,140 and the number of citations as 5,319, this would give an impact factor of (5319/2140)=2.53. This is higher than the 1.2 impact factor that the journal was reporting, or even the 0.98 that we previously calculated.

Comparison with the journal's data

It is useful to also compare the Google Scholar data with the data as recorded by the journal, on their own web site.

We extracted the number of papers they had published each year and present this analysis in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Number of papers published by the International Journal of Management (Source: IJM web site, 17 Jul 2021)

We make the following observations on the data presented in Figure 12:

  • The number of published papers increased significantly in 2020. This year represents more than 50% of the papers they have published since the journal started in 2010.
  • What made 2020 such a high year was the large number of papers the journal published in issues 11 and 12, although there appeared to be a significant rise since issue 5. Figure 13, shows the breakdown, by issue, for 2020 (click image to enlarge it).
Figure 13: Number of papers published by the International Journal of Management in 2020
Figure 14: Number of papers published by the International Journal of Management in 2021
  • 2021 is already ahead of all the other years, with the exception of 2020. So far, volume 12 (i.e. 2021) has published 493 papers (see Figure 14). This is up to issue 7. Assuming they publish 12 issues, this could mean that they will publish about 850 papers this year. It is noticeable that the number of papers published in 2021 is decreasing, recognizing that issue 7 may not yet be complete.

Final Remarks

The purpose of this article was to raise the issue that a journal had two different Google Scholar accounts, which report different data. Moreover, neither Google Scholar account aligns with the data on the journal’s own web site. In our view, it would be useful if the journal editors consolidated their two Google Scholar accounts and also aligned that (single) account with the data held on the journal’s web site. If the editors could do this, it might actually benefit them as both Google Scholar accounts appear to under report what is shown on the journal’s web site.

Aside from the Google Scholar concerns, our recent tweets have asked other questions. As an example, some of the publisher’s journals were indexed by Scopus but this indexing was discontinued in 2020, apart from one journal as far as we could tell. We also asked, via Twitter, about areas such as impact factor calculations and, indeed, what impact factors are being used.

The journal has blocked us on Twitter. Rather than doing that, we would much rather enter into a dialogue and we have made the offer for them to write a blog post, to enable them to present their views. We hope that they take up this offer.