The most highly cited paper, on predatory publishing, in the journal Scientometrics is a retracted paper.
The search criteria
Using Scopus and searching for “Predatory Publish*” in titles, abstracts and keywords and then looking at all the articles published by Scientometrics (a Springer journal), shows that this journal has published 14 papers on this topic. This puts it equal first with another journal (as at 21 Aug 2023).
The search results
The purpose of this article is to note that, of those 14 papers, the most highly cited paper is a paper that has been retracted (see Figure 1).
It has to be said that the retraction was controversial, and some of the citations relate to that discussion, but there are papers that cite the retracted paper in the “normal” way.
Figure 1: Top five papers in Scientometrics (on Predatory Publishing)
Questions
If a paper cites a retracted paper, should:
The authors issue an erratum to remove this citation?
The paper be retracted if it relies on the findings of the paper that it cites that has since been retracted?
A further question
If the two papers (the retracted paper and the one that cites it) are published in the same journal, should the editors/reviewers not have picked this up?
Perhaps it should have been picked up anyway, but when it is published in the same journal does it make it even more important that it was highlighted during the peer review process that a retracted papers was being cited?
In a previous article we have looked at “Sting operations in predatory publishing“, where we described several sting operations that had targeted predatory journals and conferences. In this article we look at the case where a journal published a spoof Covid-19 paper.
“Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” is a spoof paper that was accepted and published in a peer reviewed journal. The paper even contained the sentence “Epidemiologists believe it highly likely that a journal publishing this paper does not practice peer review and must therefore be predatory”.
It is apparent that there was no peer review, even though the correspondence from the journal suggested that there had been.
The article that was accepted in a predatory journal
The paper, titled “Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” was published in the “American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research“. The paper is a spoof paper and the journal, by extension, is predatory.
The full citation of the paper is:
Utsugi Elm, Nasu Joy, Gregory House and Mattan Schlomi (2020) Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption. American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research 8(2). AJBSR.MS.ID.001256. DOI: 10.34297/AJBSR.2020.08.001256
The timescale, from submission to publication
The paper was was received on 14 March 2020 and published on the 18 March 2020.
The fact that the paper was published within four days is a worrying sign. You have to ask yourself how any paper can be received, be peer reviewed and then published within four days? We assume that no corrections were required.
The acceptance email
The author makes the email trail available here, and we show the actual acceptance in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Acceptance email, see the full correspondence here
We note that the email says that the paper “has received positive comments.” We wonder whether these were ever passed to the author and what they actually said?
Cited papers
“Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” cites 42 papers. Some of these are are genuine papers, in that they exist, but many are fictional, which are humorous in the titles/authors. Many of the genuine cited papers are drawn from the predatory publishing literature, which have nothing to do with the subject of the paper.
Figure 2: A Pika, Leonardo da Vinci and a Pokemon
One of the papers that is cited is:
Wayne B (2016) Phobia of Bats and Its Applications in Criminal Justice. Gotham Forensics Quarterly 26(8): 807-81
If you only have a passing knowledge of Batman, you will know that Bruce Wayne is the secret identify of Batman. Moreover, Gotham Forensics Quarterly is a fictitious journal, noting that Gotham is where Batman and Bruce Wayne live.
Beall J (2016) Dangerous predatory publishers threaten medical research. Journal of Korean Medical Science 31(10): 1511-1513. DOI: 10.3346/jkms.2016.31.10.1511.
This paper is a genuine paper, but it is referenced in connection to “pikas”, which is a small, mountain-dwelling mammal found in Asia and North America. The Beall paper certainly has nothing to do with pikas but rather, as the title suggests, the paper is about predatory publishers.
Strielkowski W (2017) Predatory journals: Beall’s List is missed. Nature 544(7651): 416: DOI: 10.1038/544416b
This paper is a genuine paper but it is referenced in connection with “sentrets”, which is a small Pokémon character covered in brown fur. Strielkowski’s paper does not mention Pokémon, but is purely focused on predatory journals.
Beall J (2016) Essential information about predatory publishers and journals. International Higher Education 86: 2-3. DOI: 10.6017/ihe.2016.86.9358
This is a genuine paper, but is referenced after the following sentence “To this literature we add a report from Cyllage City in the Kalos region, France, where an outbreak of the densely populated metropolis has to date produced 420 confirmed infections with seven deaths, all in the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions“. Beall’s article certainly has nothing to say on this topic.
There are another three papers that cite work on predatory publishers/journals:
Winnfield J, Vega V (1994) What do they call a predatory journal in France? Pulp Nonfiction 521: 154
This is not a genuine paper. The Pulp Nonfiction and the authors are references to characters in the film Pulp Fiction (Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega).
Stromberg J (2014) ‘Get Me Off Your F*^@ing Mailing List’ is an Actual Science Paper Accepted by a Journal. Vox 21: 10-11
This blog post tells the story of another sting operation, where a conference accepted a paper with the title “Get Me Off Your F*^@ing Mailing List“, and just repeats that phrase over and over again.
Laine C, Winker MA (2017) Identifying predatory or pseudo-journals. Biochemia medica: Biochemia Medica 27(2): 285-291 DOI: 10.11613/BM.2017.031
This is a genuine paper, that looks at how to identify predatory journals. In the paper it is cited in the context of “Most outbreaks of COVID-19 outside China have been traced to travellers from Wuhan or those who came in contact with them.” If you search through the paper, there is no mention of COVID or Wuhan. Indeed, as the paper was published in 2017, this was long before the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
There are many other papers, which bring a smile to your face, such as papers written by Winne the Pooh and A.A Milne, a paper written by George Orwell in 1984 and a paper co-authored by Leonardo de Vinci with the title “Effects of exposure to sewage on martial arts skills in turtles.“
Please take a look at the references, as there are many that are not genuine papers, but they are comic genius.
Statements that the journal is predatory
“Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” has a statement within the paper that explicitly says any journal that publishes this paper does not carry out per review and that the journal must, therefore, be predatory.
In the paper, the following statement is made:
“Epidemiologists believe it highly likely that a journal publishing this paper does not practice peer review and must therefore be predatory.“
Publication Ethics
The American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research has a web page that defines its publication Ethics. On that page it mentions COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) five times, yet the journal is not a member of COPE.
If you check the COPE web site, you’ll find that the journal is not a member of COPE. Not that the journal claims to be a member, but mentioning COPE five times might suggest to the unwary reader that the journal is a member.
Papers that cite this paper
If we accept that the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research is predatory and that the article “Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” should never have been published, it might be worrying that the paper gets cited. Yet it has been cited.
This article we are focusing on in this article was published in March 2020, and it was cited in May 2020 in the following article:
Marzouk Lajili (2020) The COVID-19 Outbreak’s Multiple Effects. International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) 9(5): 358-361. [link to article]
We had a brief look at the International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology. It deserves a closer look but we are concerned that this is also a predatory journal. To give just one example why we suspect this, on their Publications Ethics Policy page (see Figure 4) it displays the COPE logo, but if you check on the COPE web site, this journal is not a member of COPE.
Figure 4: International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology displays the COPE logo on its web site, but it is not a COPE member (accessed 13 Nov 2020)
We have not carried out a full analysis of the International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology, so we cannot say definitely whether we believe it is a predatory journal, but if you are planning to submit to this journal, we would advise you to carry out your own checks.
In this section, we briefly look at various aspects of the journal, just to give some additional information in addition to the journal article itself.
Article Processing Charges
Looking around the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research web site we found that Article Processing Charges (APCs) are $1,179 or $1,479 (see Figure 5). This agrees with the amount requested to be paid by the author (see Figure 1).
In an editor’s note to the The Scientist article that reports this sting operation, it is stated that “Editor’s Note (November 1, 2020) – The American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research has informed Shelomi that it will be removing the paper that serves as the subject of this piece as he has not paid the publication fees.“
The last time we checked (14 Nov 2020), the article was still accessible via the journal’s web site, via this link. https://dx.doi.org/10.34297/AJBSR.2020.08.001256. We are not sure how long this link will remain valid.
If/when this link does fail to work, we have saved a copy of the paper which you can download from here.
Article in The Scientist
The author of “Cyllage City COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat Consumption” has written an article in The Scientist called “Opinion: Using Pokémon to Detect Scientific Misinformation” which describes the sting operation that was mounted against the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research.
We drew heavily on that article, as you might imagine, but we also delved a little deeper to look at the article and the journal in more detail.
Conclusion
Most (sensible) scholars would agree that predatory journals and publishers are problematic for many reasons, many of which we explore in other articles (see the list of articles below). We summarize below some of the issues posed by predatory journals/publishers.
Nothing in the paper we focus on in this article, has any scientific credibility, yet some people might believe some of the statements that are made in the paper.
The paper under investigation has been published in a peer reviewed scientific journal, or at least readers may believe that the paper has been peer reviewed, thus making the assumption that the claims made must have been validated by experts in the field. It has been stated that the paper we are focusing on is a spoof paper, but what about other papers that are not spoof, yet the research has not been peer reviewed?
The paper we focus on has already been cited by another paper. In this case, we believe that the article that is citing the paper is also published in a predatory journal, but the citation could easily have been made from within a respectable journal. This would give some credibility to the paper published in the predatory journal.
If predatory papers are cited in the legitimate scientific archive, it will infect that archive and a logical conclusion is that we can no longer have faith in the scientific archive and it will fall into disrepute.
Other researchers might take the “contribution” of papers published in predatory journals and use it as a basis for their own research, This is not only doomed to failure, but it also a waste of time and money and could be dangerous.
If research that is based on a predatory journal article is funded by some agency, then that money is wasted. A lot of research is funded by governments, through the taxes that they generate. This is, in effect, stealing money from the man in the street.
Predatory journals/articles can be dangerous, especially those that are related to health. The general public, or even medics, could take the information in the paper as true and use that to make, what could be, life changing decisions.
We conclude by saying that predatory journals/publishers are not wanted as part of the scientific archive but, more importantly, if we let them infect the scientific archive, predatory journals could be dangerous if others start to believe, and act on, the statements made in those papers.
Where an article has been updated since first being written, we provide a history of the changes. Why? Why not :-).
The original article was published on 14 November 2020.
The article was updated on 29 July 2023. We removed profanities (at least, putting in special characters) we we felt that search engines did not like it. It was actual in the title of papers, so the profanities should have remained, but we felt it better to remove them.
We recently saw an article published in Retraction Watch which talks about AI generated content and how it creates citations to papers which do not exist.
The article is worth a read, but we were particularly drawn to a one part of the article.
This statement was made by a representative at MDPI, but the same sentiment could have been made by any publisher.
In this article we consider a possible consequence of this, what at first sight, might seem a benign statement.
The need for better AI detectors
Given the introduction of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, and the many hundreds of tools that have been released in the past year, there is an urgent need to detect AI generated content. This is required for a number of reasons.
An AI generator tool cannot be listed as an author, so the human authors have to take responsibility for the article. As such, content cannot be simply generated by an AI tool and published as-is.
At the present time, AI tools are not able to develop knowledge, which is a main requirement of a peer reviewed scientific paper. That is, the paper must make a contribution to the development of the current knowledge base. AI, at the present time, can only draw on the existing knowledge base due to the way it is trained.
Peer reviewers have the right to know that what they are reading is written by (or not) an AI tool. Similarly, authors have a right to know that their paper is being reviewed by a human and not an AI tool, but that is a different topic.
Authors are required to acknowledge any help they have received and this includes AI tools. If AI is detected, and it has not been acknowledged, this could be a reason for rejecting a paper.
How can we detect AI generated content?
Unfortunately, we cannot tell you how to detect AI generated content, but we do know that there is a lot of work being done in this area.
It won’t come as a surprise that the scholarly community will play a significant role in the development of such tools.
To be truthful, I suspect that the community will relish and rise to this challenge. After all, that is what researchers live to do; look at problems and try to find solutions.
Who will fund the research into detecting AI generated content?
Like a lot of research, it will be funded by universities and/or research grants. Research grants are most likely funded by the public purse, that is tax payers money. It is the tax payers that is likely to bear the largest burden.
Research will also be carried out by corporations, with the expectation that they will get a return of that investment by selling, or licensing, the software that is developed. It is good to see corporations investing in R&D but one downside is that they are less inclined to publish, so the know how will be less widely disseminated than if the research was carried out in a university, where there are pressures to publish the results of that research.
Who benefits financially from research into detecting AI generated content?
The simple answer is that corporations that develop these detectors will benefit as they will have a product to sell.
Researchers and universities will benefit as they will be able to publish their research, in the same way that they benefit from other research they undertake. This may not lead to a direct financial benefit unless they are able to protect the intellectual property and exploit it in some way. This is certainly possible, but the majority of research is not exploited in this way as there is more pressure on publishing papers, which places the research into the public domain.
The other beneficiaries will be those that use the AI detectors. Publishers will come under increasing pressure to detect AI generated content and if they are able to do this in a financially prudent way (i.e. cheaply) then so much the better, for the publisher anyway.
Who should the develop of detecting AI generated content?
In the above message from MDPI it says:
“We hope that more powerful tools will be developed to assist in the detection of AI-generated content.“
We are sure that everybody wishes for this, for the reasons given above, but it does beg the question, who should fund the development of these tools?
“Elsevier has a profit margin approaching 40%, which is higher than that of companies such as Microsoft, Google and Coca Cola, and the curve is pointing upwards“, citing several sources such as a Guardian article, an STM report and an article in The Bookseller.
Given that scholarly publishing is a profitable industry, should they not pick up part of the bill for addressing the issues that are of concern to not only their sector but also to their customers?
If effective tools are not developed, the sector that supports their livelihoods will fall (further) into disrepute as those less scrupulous than themselves will take advantage of these tools and our inability to detect their use will enable agents,
Final Thoughts
Scholarly publishers are often criticized for taking advantage of the scholarly community by charging them to publish the articles are/or charging them to read their own work. This is done via article processing charges (APCs) [to pay to publish an article] or subscription fees [to pay to read articles that a scholar has written but then signed the copyright over to the publisher].
Moreover, the scholars not only write the papers (and pay for the privilege) but also act as an unpaid work force in reviewing and acting as editors for the journals.
We hope that the development of tools to detect AI generated content is not another example which the scholarly community effectively funds and the publishers take advantage of, at no cost to themselves.
In a recent tweet we mentioned an article that gave a list of guidelines for dealing with requests to review a paper for a peer reviewed (obviously) journal.
The advice given was sound, such as do not take on too much, make sure it is within your area of expertise and do not use ChatGPT to do the review. We do not have any issues with the advice presented.
However, from the perspective of predatory publishing, we would add a few items to the list, which we present in this short article.
Guidelines to ensure you are not reviewing for a predatory journal
In addition to the guidelines given in the article mentioned in this article, we would suggest that you also consider the following points before deciding whether to review a paper.
Have you heard of and/or published in the journal? If you have no knowledge of the journal, unless you are a very early career researcher, then why have you not heard of the journal?
Who has published in the journal? Do you know any of the authors, especially those that are leaders in your area?
What is the look/feel of the web site. Does it look professional? Is it easy to navigate? Do they make claims about things like impact factors that are difficult, if not impossible, to validate?
If they are an open access journal, are their article processing charges (APCs) easy to find?
Is it an open access journal? If it is, this is not an immediate reason not to review the paper but a few more checks should be carried out.
If the journal is open access, is it s a member of DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)? If it is, it gives you a high degree of confidence that the journal is legitimate. If the journal is not a member of DOAJ, it is not necessarily a predatory journal but it is another warning sign.
Similarly, you can check if the journal is a member of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) and the publisher is a member of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association). Again, if the journal/publisher is a member that is a good sign. If they are not, it is not necessarily a negative but another red flag that is worthy of further investigation.
How long are you given to return the review? If it is a matter of days, that is a red flag as predatory journals want to publish papers as quickly as possible. There is also a movement towards faster reviews and some (legitimate) journals charge authors an extra fee to fast track the review process. As an aside, we are not sure we are happy with this idea of paying for quicker reviews, but that is for a discussion on another day.
Look at the papers that have been published by the journal. Are they well written? Are they within the scope of the journal? Does the journal publish consistently, both in terms of the number of issues published each year and that the same (roughly) number of articles are published in each issue?
Take a look at the editorial board. Are there people on it that you recognize, especially the Editor-in-Chief? If you do not recognize them, can you validate any of those that are there, especially those that are at well known universities? Does the journal list the affiliation of each editorial board member?
Who invited you to review the paper? Was it an Associate Editor, or was it a member of the editorial staff at the journal, or even the publisher? Ideally, we would expect to see the invite come from an Associate Editor (or the Editor-in-Chief), rather than some administrative person who has nothing to do with making the editorial decision.
None of the above, on their own, are deal breakers, and would not stop you reviewing a paper from the journal but the more red flags you see, the more inclined we would be not to review a paper from that journal.
It is also of no surprise that many of the checks above are exactly the same as those you would make if you were wondering whether to submit a paper to that journal.
If the term Predatory Publishing is new to you and you want a quick introduction, then this article might be just what you need.
We suggest three articles that you might want to take a look at, which will give you a good overview of this topic.
These three articles on predatory publishing are all open access
In this article we suggest that you read three articles. These articles are all open access. This means that they are free to download for anybody who wishes to access them. The other method, often referred to as traditional publishing, means that the articles sit behind a pay wall, so you would either need a subscription to access the article, or would need to pay a one-off fee.
The irony of suggesting you read open access articles
It is a little ironic that we are pointing you towards open access articles as it is the move towards open access publishing that was the catalyst for predatory publishers to enter the market. If it were not for open access, there would be no business model for the predatory publishers to exploit.
Can you get an appreciation of predatory publishing from just three articles?
Each of the three articles that we suggest you read was chosen for a different reason (more below) and we hope that they provide a good introduction to the topic of predatory publishing.
Being able to read just three articles, and get a good understanding of an area, is not possible in most disciplines, but we think it is possible with predatory publishing as it cuts across all disciplines (so is not embroiled in technical terms from a given discipline) and it is an area that we are all familiar with, that is publishing the results of our research.
What are the three articles on predatory publishing?
We provide more details about each paper, in case you want to just get on and read them, here are the three articles that we suggest you read. The links below each article will take you directly to the paper.
The full references to the three articles on predatory publishing
Beall, J. (2013) Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences of gold open access, Learned Publishing, 26(2): pp 79-84. DOI: 1087/20130203
Bowman, J.D. (2014) Predatory publishing, questionable peer review, and fraudulent conferences, American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 78(10): Article 176. DOI: 5688/ajpe7810176
Dobusch. L. and Heimstädt, M. (2019) Predatory publishing in management research: A call for open peer review, Management Learning, 50(5): 607-619. DOI: 10.1177/1350507619878820
Why did we choose these three papers on predatory publishing?
Here we provide our reasoning as to why we suggested these three papers on predatory publishing as good starting points.
To be honest, there are many other papers that we could have chosen but these are the ones we went with. It was also important that they were open access so that anybody can read them.
1. Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences of gold open access
We chose this article as it was written by Jeffrey Beall. He is credited with coming up with the term predatory publishing and so it is useful to read something from him, as it is always good to read one of the seminal papers.
Beall gives a brief history of open access publishing, how this started predatory publishing and how he got involved in this new way of publishing scientific research.
He also discusses the early days of his blog and how it developed.
Beall is probably most famous for the list of predatory journals he maintained on his blog, which actually attracted quite a lot of controversy and criticism. His list of predatory journals became the “go to” place if you wanted to see if a journal was classified as predatory.
He eventually took his blog down due to the pressure his institution received. His blog is still available in an archived form, but it is no longer updated and, as a result it gets out of date as time passes.
Jeffrey Beall has written a number of papers on predatory publishing. If you look at his Google Scholar page (last accessed 14 Jun 2023), you will see that his most cited paper is a one page discussion on predatory publishing, which you may want to take a look at. You can access it here (it is also open access).
The reason we included this article is because it was the most cited article when we searched one of the leading bibliographic search engines (Scopus), searching for all the articles that has “Predatory Publishing” in the title of the article.
We reported these results on a Twitter post. Interestingly, when we downloaded the data from Scopus it did not return a DOI, which is why the graph we show on Twitter says that it was not provided. We later found the DOI, which is 10.5688/ajpe7810176.
Being the most cited paper (using the search term we mentioned above) suggests that people have found it useful, at least useful enough to cite the paper.
It should be recognised that older papers tend to be cited more. This is not surprising as they have been around for longer and so have had more opportunity to be cited. So, the fact that a paper has been cited more than any other paper, does not necessarily mean that it is the best paper, but it does indicate that other reserachers have accessed it.
The paper does a good job of relating the history of scientific publishing, with Nature first being published in 1869 and Science being published in 1880. According to the paper (actually they cite a paper in Science) a scientific paper is published every 20 seconds. Personally, we find that amazing.
One of the quotes we like from the paper is “Predatory publishing is the practice of publishing journals that exploit the emerging acceptance of open-access academic journals to undermine peer-review processes.” To us, this sums up what predatory publishing is, where it has come from, the change that it is exploiting and the dangers that it brings. If you want to know what predatory publishing is, you have it right there.
The paper also tells you how predatory publishers operate, which is mainly by cold calling researchers via emails asking them to submit papers and asking for payment. They may even promise that the researcher will become part of an editorial board.
It is also interesting to read about papers that had been generated by software, resulting in a non-sensical article, which was accepted by a journal and which forced the editor-in-chief to resign as a result.
Whilst not being about predatory publishing per se, the paper also relates the story of citations being manipulated, which were indexed by Google. It provides this as another example of the pressure that researchers are under, in this case to demonstrate that their published research is having impact.
The final part of the paper suggests that those at institutions who have responsibility for hiring and promotion need to be aware of these predatory practices. It also notes that the those with budgetary oversight also need to ensure that procedures and appropriate due diligence is in place to ensure that funds are being used in an appropriate way.
3. Predatory publishing in management research: A call for open peer review
We chose this article as it is one of the most recent that has been published (for this search we used Web of Science and searched for articles which included “Predatory Publishing” in the title).
We wrote the first draft of this blog post in November 2019 and the selected article was published in October 2019. We could have selected an article that was published slightly later, but it would not have been open access.
We thought it was useful to include a recent article so that you could read what is happening right now, rather than reading about what happened historically, which is the case with the previous two papers.
The opening of the paper states “Predatory journals have emerged as an unintended consequence of the Open Access paradigm.”
Given that this paper was published five years after the second paper we suggested above, it does appear that predatory publishing is still an issue that has yet to be resolved. Indeed, that is the reason for this web site, to have a go to place where this issue can be discussed and like minded people can come together to try and rid scientific publishing of predatory journals and publishers.
This article, which itself calls it a provocation piece, describes two ways that predatory journals are harming the management discipline.
They go onto suggest that a solution to predatory journals is the concept of open peer review. This relies on the idea that the peer review is made more transparent by making known who reviewed the paper, or at least their institution. It is assumed that predatory journals would not be willing to do this as they do not have robust peer review processes. It’s an interesting idea.
Summary
Trying to get up to speed on a new topic is always difficult. Predatory publishing has a couple of advantages.
The concept of predatory publishing is easy to understand. There is hardly any learning curve at all, at least to understand the basic issues that it raises.
The second factor that is that the literature base is not that large. We have highlighted three papers that you may want to read, but there are currently only about 100 papers with “Predatory Publishing” in the title of the articles.
If you open up the search and include the abstract and keywords (but still putting the term in quotes), there are still less than 200 papers. So, unlike, most other disciplines, the barrier to entry is quite low.
Article history
Where an article has been updated since first being written, we provide a history of the changes. Why? Why not :-).
The original article was published on 1 January 2020.
The article was updated on 14 June 2023. The main content was not changed but we reformatted it a little (as we now have more experience with the tools we use) and also to try and improve the flow.
When we started this web site, along with our Twitter feed, it was focused on fake journals. That was supposed to really cover predatory publishing but, in our naivety, we thought they were the same thing (we now know differently).
Since those early days (we started in 2018), we have really focused on predatory journals and publishers. We are grateful for the interaction we have had and for the great support from the community.
We are now going to change direction a little, which we’ll say more about later but first let’s discuss the elephant in the room.
Why do we remain anonymous?
We know that being anonymous can be frustrating for some (us included) but we realize that we only have one opportunity to go public and reveal who is behind this initiative. Suffice to say, it is something that is always in the back of our mind, the burning question being, “Could we have more impact if you knew who was behind this web site and our Twitter account?“
The reasons we remain anonymous include:
We do not want to go through the trials and tribulations that Jeffery Beall went through, and which we have seen others going through in more recent times. Publishers have access to resources (financial and legal) that we do not have, so any legal challenge would pose a serious threat, not just financial but also the mental strain it would place on us.
The upsides of revealing who we are include:
We try not to make accusations, rather present facts. Some may see what we present as biased, but we try to be fair. We are aware though that what we say is not backed up by an academic reputation we may, or may not have. Perhaps (big perhaps) if you knew who we were, what we say may be better received.
It would be easier to operate on other platforms, such as LinkedIn and Facebook; as well as Twitter and a web site. At the moment, it is much more difficult to be anonymous on some platforms than it is on others.
We recognize that it may be easier to get funding for our work, if the funders knew who we were (of course, they may not want to fund us if they do know who we are :-)). At the moment this initiative is totally self funded, which is a struggle at times both financially and in terms of the amount of time it takes.
Other platforms, and bloggers, who also write about similar areas that we address do make themselves known so, perhaps, we should not be so worried? It would be interesting to hear the experiences of others.
If our identities were known, we could write papers and mention that we are affiliated with this initiative and even reference the data that has been collected. If nothing else, it would promote the work that we are doing (assuming the peer reviewers agreed with the way that this was being done).
We have published some papers in the areas that we address but this is not done with reference to our work here. It would be nice to be able to state that we also manage this initiative.
If we have the trust of the community, there may be opportunities to work with others in advisory capacities, perhaps mentoring, writing reports, acting as independent assessors etc.
We might be able to produce our own reports, guidelines and advisory papers. Of course, we could do this now, but they would carry a lot more weight if the authors were known,
Having got that out of the way, we can now say more about our change of direction
Predatory publishing is not the only problem
Over the past few months, we have been posting, and writing about, other topics, not just predatory publishing and we have also been thinking about other (potentially) unethical practices. In fact, we briefly touched on this in one of our posts a few months ago.
Given that previous article, our more recent posts and after a lot of thought, we are going to (formally) broaden the topics we cover. For example (and some of these will overlap with others), we are now going to look at:
Predatory publishing
Fake journals
Cloned journals
Issues brought about by open access
Open science
Paper mills
Selling authorships
Citation manipulation
Reviewers exerting pressure
Authoring too many papers
Not acknowledging help received
Fake and/or non-transparent impact factors
Claims that memberships are a signal of quality, when they are not (e.g. DOI, ISSN, Scribd, Google Scholar)
Use and misuse of generative AI
Comment on retracted papers
Plagiarism
Two tier review systems
… there will be (many) others. In fact, let us know if you can think of any other topics that fall under the broad heading of “Publishing with Integrity“.
Why do this, predatory publishing is a big enough problem?
It is true that predatory publishing is a huge problem and we could easily just focus on that and we could have enough to write about (sadly) for many years to come.
However, predatory publishing is just one area that we need to worry about. If, through this web site/Twitter account we managed to help eliminate predatory publishing, there would be many other issues that would still need to be dealt with. Therefore, we want to be more far reaching than we have been to date or, at least, make it a little more formal that we will also look at these other areas, as we have been doing so already.
The change in direction
We have outlined the areas that we will now cover, but the question remains – what should we now call ourselves.
Our Twitter handle is @fake_journals, and we will not change that. At least we can’t change that, without starting a new Twitter account – which we don’t twant to do.
The name of the Twitter account is currently “Predatory Publishing“, but we will change that to “Publishing with Integrity“, with a tagline of “The ethical landscape of scientific publishing.” We will also reflect these changes on our web site.
In fact, by the time we post this article, these changes will have already been made.
Final remarks
We hope that this change in direction will be welcomed. We will not stop looking at predatory publishing, after all, we have spent the last five years addressing this topic and we do not want to waste that investment, but we hope that the attention we can also give to other areas will be welcomed.
We have been tweeting about MDPI, making sure that we do not state whether they are predatory (or not) as we just don’t know. The jury is still out (as far as we are concerned) so, for now, we are presenting facts/figures and allowing discussion to take place.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Clarivate did not provide a reason why it delisted International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, along with about 50 others including another one from MDPI (Journal of Risk and Financial Management), but there is a lot of speculation. Amongst the most popular suggestions is that the number of articles the journal publishes has significantly increased and does this affect the quality of the papers?
Increase in the number of papers
The Science article mentioned the increase in the number of papers published, across the MDPI portfolio. Of particular note is the number of special issues that MDPI publishes. Figure 1 is a graphic from the Science article that shows the comparison between the number of special issues published by MDPI and some other publishers. It is apparent that MDPI publishes more special issues that the other publishers shown in the graphic.
Figure 1: Comparison of special issues publishged by MDPI and other leading publishers. The graphic is from C. BICKEL/SCIENCE; (DATA) PAOLO CROSETTO/FRENCH NATIONAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR AGRICULTURE, FOOD, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
On our Twitter feed we looked at how many articles the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health had published year-on-year. You can see that tweet here, (we note that there is a mistake in the tweet as we said that the journal had been delisted by Scopus, but we should have said Clarivate Web of Science).
The main message from that tweet was a figure, which we have shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Number of articles published by International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, by year
Figure 2 certainly shows a rise year-on-year but as 2023 is only part way through, it begs the question “Is this going to continue this year?” Only time will tell but we can try and make a prediction.
Figure 3 shows the number of papers that are published every day (we tweeted about this here).
For the complete years (2005-2022), this means taking the total number of papers published in that year and dividing by 365 (or 366). For 2023, we divide the number of papers published so far and divide by 101, the number of days that had passed in 2023 when we collected the data.
Figure 3: Number of articles, published each day by MDPI's International Journals of Environmental Research and Public Health
Based on Figure 3, it looks as if the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health will publish more journals in 2023, than it did in 2022 which, was already a record year. But, as we say, time will tell. We plan to revisit these stats in a few months, just to see how things are progressing.
So what?
Does it matter that one of MDPI’s journals has seen a significant rise in the number of articles it publishes year-on-year? To be honest, we do not know. There is simply not enough evidence and not enough comparative data.
We are currently working to address this. We have two sets of comparison in mind, which should provide more context and, perhaps, answer the question whether this rise in one journal should be seen as a problem, or is just par for the course. It might even be seen as a positive condition.
We’ll get back to you when we have collected the data and carried out the analysis.
In the meantime, let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Throughout December 2022, under the guise of an advent calendar, we have been listing the most highly cited papers that have addressed predatory publishing.
You can see the tweets that we made here, but we thought it worthwhile recording these papers in this article as some people may find it easier to access it in this way.
How were the papers selected?
We recognize that there are many ways that we could have selected the papers that made the final list. Therefore the papers in the list should be seen as indicative of the most highly cited paper and if this motivates others to search for papers on predatory publishing, then we see that as a good thing.
The data collection was carried out on 22 November 2022 and we searched for paper that had “Predatory Publishing”, “Predatory Journals” or “Predatory Publisher” in article titles.
Once we have completed the search, we sorted the list by the number of citations and took the top 24. This si what we used in our advent calendar posts, starting with the lowest number of citations (actually the 24th most cited) on 1 December 2022 and finishing on the 24th December 2022, with the most cited papers.
In the list below, we reverse that ordering, so the most cited paper is listed first.
The 24 most highly cited papers on Predatory Publishing
Predatory publishers are corrupting open access (2012). Nature 489(7415):179. 489 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/489179a
Who publishes in “predatory” journals? (2015). Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66(7):1406-1417. 219 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.23265
Predatory journals recruit fake editor (2017). Nature 543(7646):481-483. 138 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/543481a
Beyond Beall’s list: Better understanding predatory publishers (2015). College and Research Libraries News 76(3):132-135. 120 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.5860/crln.76.3.9277
Science for sale: The rise of predatory journals (2014). Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 107(10):384-385. 92 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0141076814548526
Why do authors publish in predatory journals? (2018). Learned Publishing 31(2):141-147. 91 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/leap.1150
The false academy: predatory publishing in science and bioethics (2017). Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 20(2):163-170. 84 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11019-016-9740-3
Predatory journals: Ban predators from the scientific record (2016). Nature 534(7607):326. 80 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/534326a
Predatory publishing, questionable peer review, and fraudulent conferences (2014). American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 78(10):1-6. 76 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.5688/ajpe7810176
Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences of gold open access (2013). Learned Publishing 26(2):79-84. 76 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20130203
Dangerous predatory publishers threaten medical research (2016). Journal of Korean Medical Science 31(10):1511-1513. 74 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2016.31.10.1511
India’s scientific publication in predatory journals: Need for regulating quality of Indian science and education (2016). Current Science 111(11):1759-1764. 70 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.18520/cs/v111/i11/1759-1764
Best practices for scholarly authors in the age of predatory journals (2016). Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 98(2):77-79. 70 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1308/rcsann.2016.0056
Problems and challenges of predatory journals (2018). Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology 32(9):1441-1449. 64 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jdv.15039
Are predatory journals undermining the credibility of science? A bibliometric analysis of citers (2017). Scientometrics 113(3):1513-1528. 63 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2520-x
A walk on the wild side: ‘Predatory’ journals and information asymmetries in scientific evaluations (2019). Research Policy 48(2):462-477. 63 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.04.013
Time to stop talking about ‘predatory journals’ (2018). Learned Publishing 31(2):181-183. 63 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/leap.1135
The extent of South African authored articles in: Predatory journals (2017). South African Journal of Science 113(44780). 54 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2017/20170010
Knowledge and motivations of researchers publishing in presumed predatory journals: A survey (2019). BMJ Open 9(3). 54 citations. Access paper via https://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-026516
One of the challenges our community faces is identifying predatory publishers, in a way that everybody agrees upon. Is it possible to come up with a way where we can definitively state whether a given journal or publisher is predatory? Moreover, would everybody agree with the classification of a given journal/publisher?
In this article, we discuss some of these issues and ask if there is an alternative way of classifying a predatory publisher/journal and, at least, start a discussion as to how these ideas could be developed.
Binary Classification of predatory journals by Beall
If you know about Beall’s List (and if not take a look at our article), especially the reason for it being taken off line so abruptly, you will know that part of the reason is that Beall had a binary classification. Either a journal/publisher was predatory (and was on his list) or it was not (and was not on his list).
The fact that Beall was the only person making the decision as to whether a journal/publisher was predatory or not was (in hindsight) unhelpful as Beall was a lone voice, and when somebody disputed whether the journal/publisher should be classified as predatory, it was difficult to defend.
If Beall had a support team around him, perhaps his list may have lasted longer than it did, but the fact he was a lone voice, and it was a binary classification, both contributed to its ultimate demise.
Do we need to be definitive whether a journal is predatory?
Do we really need to be definitive about whether a journal/publisher is predatory or not?
Or do we just need to be able to say “buyer beware” and suggest to others that they may want to carry out their own checks and balances before deciding whether to submit to a given journal.
Indeed, you may also want to check before citing a paper from a possible predatory journal, but that is digressing from the main points we want to discuss in this article.
So, it could be argued that we are not concerned with being absolutely certain whether a journal is predatory or not. We only need to have an element of doubt so that we can simply look for another journal in which we have more confidence, or we can carry out our own checks if we are really attracted to that journal.
Multiple points of view
One of the issues that Beall had, was that he was the only person making the decision whether a journal/publisher was predatory or not.
It might be more helpful if more people were involved in that decision, if nothing else so that the classification of a journal is the view of many people, which might be seen as a better indicator than just one person making the decision.
There are a few ways this could be done, for example:
Wisdom of the Crowds: This asks the opinion of as many people as possible, drawn from different sectors (such as authors, readers, editors, publishers etc.). The main idea is to get a range of views and as the number of people contributing increases, the results get more and more accurate. If you have never heard of wisdom of the crowds (or crowd sourcing), take a look at this article or this book (The Wisdom of Crowds). You might also want to read where it all started, with Francis Galton visiting a country fair in 1906.
Surveys on social media: Many platforms now enable the use of surveys, which is a type of crowd sourcing, with Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook being the obvious ones.
Peer review articles:This is not something that has been done very much, but we would like to see it done more often. That is, a review of a publisher, or a journal, that is subject to peer review and which becomes part of the scientific archive. This has the benefit that more than one person has looked at the evidence and the conclusions drawn and it also provides a data point in the scientific literature which might be useful to other researchers.
Traffic light system for predatory publishers
Two of the main points we mention above are:
A suggestion that we do not require a binary decision as to whether a publisher/journal is predatory or not. Rather we just need some warning signs that it may be, so that further action can be taken.
The classification should not be down to just one person, but should involve as many people as possible.
We expand on each of these points below.
Classification
Rather than classifying publishers/journals using a binary classification (it is predatory, yes or no?), why not use a system with more categories; say a traffic light system where green says a journal is not predatory, red says that it definitely is and amber says that the jury is out and further investigation is necessary?
Of course, not even that is ideal, not even if we extend the range of the classification options to give us a little more latitude (say a five category system). The main problem is that the red (definitely predatory) and green (definitely not predatory) will still not be agreed by everybody, so there will be a tendency to push more towards amber than one possibly would like. Even if we extend to more categories (say five) the end points will suffer from the same issue.
However, we still argue that a non-binary system is better than a binary classification.
More than one viewpoint
As already mentioned, Beall was the only person deciding whether a publisher/journal was predatory or not.
We have already suggested as to how this could be expanded (wisdom of the crowds, surveys and peer review).
Of the three, we favor peer review. This may not get as many viewpoints as a survey but at least we know who wrote the article and (at least the editors do) who reviewed the article. The evidence that supports the conclusions drawn are also part of the scientific archive and it can be referenced by others.
Leave it with us
We would like to say “Leave this to us, we’ll implement something that enables a traffic light system to be assigned to each publisher/journal.“
However, we are realistic enough to recognize (at least) two issues with this.
If we try and do something like Crowd Sourcing (Wisdom of the Crowds), we are not drawing from a diverse enough population (as the people that follow our Twitter feed and read our blog are probably biased; not in a bad but they are likely to think as we do). We may also struggle to get a large enough sample size. Our preferred option are peer reviewed articles, but this is not something we can do on our own, but we would encourage you to join us in this ambition.
Given the large number of predatory publishers/journal there are (Cabells say (23 Nov 2022) “The searchable Journalytics database includes 18 academic disciplines from more than thirteen thousand international scholarly publications.“), we do not have the resources to look at all possible journals in realistic timescales.
Call to action
If you agree (or even disagree) with the points we make in this article we would welcome your thoughts. We would also encourage you to consider how the classification of predatory publishers/journals could be done, which improves on current methodologies.
How can you help us?
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.
Our team does not include nurses, or indeed, anybody from a medical discipline, but we have noticed that the nursing discipline does seem to over-represented in predatory publishing.
This observation is made after working on another project and nursing seemed to stand out from the other disciplines. We delved a little deeper and we quickly found the following articles, which fitted well with the project we were engaged with.
This is by no means a comprehensive list (see the end of the article for more) but it did highlight to use the amount of research material that is published in the nursing domain.
Clark, A.M. and Thompson, D.R. (2017), Five (bad) reasons to publish your research in predatory journals. J Adv Nurs, 73: 2499-2501. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.13090
Gabrielsson, S., Eriksson S., T. Godskesen. 2021. Predatory nursing journals: A case study of author prevalence and characteristics. Nursing Ethics 28(5) 823–833. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0969733020968215
Hijji, B. M. 2021. A warning against predatory publishing services. Journal of Nursing Measurement 29(3) 377.
Lewinski, A. A., M. H. Oermann. 2018. Characteristics of e-mail solicitations from predatory nursing journals and publishers. Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing 1(4) 177–177. https://dx.doi.org/10.3928/00220124-20180320-07
McCann, T. V., M. Polacsek. 2018. False gold: Safely navigating open access publishing to avoid predatory publishers and journals. Journal of Advanced Nursing 74(4) 809–817. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.13483
Oermann, M. H., J. L. Conklin, L. H. Nicoll, P. L. Chinn, K. S. Ashton, A. H. Edie, S. Amarasekara, S. C. Budinger. 2016. Study of predatory open access nursing journals. Journal of Nursing Scholarship 48(6) 624–632. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12248
Oermann, M. H., L. H. Nicoll, K. S. Ashton, A. H. Edie, S. Amarasekara, P.L. Chinn, H. Carter-Templeton, L. S. Ledbetter. 2020. Analysis of citation patterns and impact of predatory sources in the nursing literature. Journal of Nursing Scholarship 52(3) 311–319. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12557
Oermann, M.H., L.H. Nicoll, P.L. Chinn, K.S. Ashton, J. L. Conklin, A. H. Edie, S. Amarasekara, B.L. Williams. 2018. Quality of articles published in predatory nursing journals. Nursing Outlook 66(1) 4–10. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2017.05.005
Rawas, H., J. de Beer, H. A. J. Najjar, N. Bano. 2020. Falling prey to predatory journal: Experiences of nursing faculty. International Journal of Africa Nursing Sciences 13 100222. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijans.2020.100222
Figure 1: Number of "Predatory Publishing" returned by Scopus
Figure 2: Number of Predatory Publishing papers, by discipline
To try and be a little more subjective, we took a look at Scopus and searched for “Predatory Publishing” (the quotes are part of the search). The search was done on 19 April 2022.
This search returned 310 articles (see Figure 1). If we delve a little deeper, 52 (16.77%) of the 310 articles were in the nursing domain (see Figure 2). It is also interesting to note that 136 (43.87%) of the articles were in the Medicine discipline. We assume, but have not checked, that the 52 nursing articles are captured within the 136 Medicine articles.
Putting the 118 Social Sciences articles aside (as this will cover many disciplines), Medicine and Nursing are the top represented disciplines which, we would suggest, supports our initial gut feeling that nursing has a higher representation than other disciplines in the area of predatory publishing research.
It is not necessarily the case that nursing publishes more papers in predatory journals (though we suspect that may be the case) or that there are more predatory journals that focus on nursing (we are unsure about this).
Conclusion
This article has not provided any answers. It is more like the future work section of a paper as it suggests that there is some research that is crying out to be done to try and work out why nursing (together with medicine) represents almost half the published research on predatory publishing. Perhaps this discipline just cares more about the problem that predatory publishing poses.
If you know, and would like to contribute a blog post, explaining why, please let us know and we would be very happy to work with you to publish your thoughts.
Finally
We thought it might be useful to list the 52 articles that we retrieved from Scopus that were published on predatory publishing in the nursing discipline, rather than just the 15 that we found as part of our current project.
Hijji, B.M. A Warning Against Predatory Publishing Services (2021) Journal of Nursing Measurement, 29 (3), p. 377.
Teixeira da Silva, J.A. Should anonymous and pseudonymous entities be cited or acknowledged? (2021) Journal of Professional Nursing, 37 (6), pp. 1207-1209. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2021.08.014
Broome, M.E., Oermann, M.H., Nicoll, L.H., Waldrop, J.B., Carter-Templeton, H., Chinn, P.L. Publishing in Predatory Journals: Guidelines for Nursing Faculty in Promotion and Tenure Policies (2021) Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 53 (6), pp. 746-752. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12696
Munn, Z., Barker, T., Stern, C., Pollock, D., Ross-White, A., Klugar, M., Wiechula, R., Aromataris, E., Shamseer, L. Should I include studies from “predatory” journals in a systematic review? Interim guidance for systematic reviewers (2021) JBI Evidence Synthesis, 19 (8), pp. 1915-1923. https://dx.doi.org/10.11124/JBIES-21-00138
Gabrielsson, S., Eriksson, S., Godskesen, T. Predatory nursing journals: A case study of author prevalence and characteristics (2021) Nursing Ethics, 28 (5), pp. 823-833. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0969733020968215
Oermann, M.H., Nicoll, L.H., Ashton, K.S., Edie, A.H., Amarasekara, S., Chinn, P.L., Carter-Templeton, H., Ledbetter, L.S. Analysis of Citation Patterns and Impact of Predatory Sources in the Nursing Literature (2020) Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 52 (3), pp. 311-319. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12557
Moldoveanu, B., Cuciureanu, G. Publishing as an Indicator of Scientific Research Quality and Ethics: The Case of Law Journals from Moldova (2020) Science and Engineering Ethics, 26 (2), pp. 1039-1052. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00189-2
Rawas, H., de Beer, J., Al Najjar, H., Bano, N. Falling prey to predatory journal: Experiences of nursing faculty (2020) International Journal of Africa Nursing Sciences, 13, art. no. 100222, . https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijans.2020.100222
Likis, F.E. Predatory Publishing: The Threat Continues (2019) Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health, 64 (5), pp. 523-525. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jmwh.13056
Nahlen, D., Clark, S. The Publisher’s Perspective on Journal and Book Publishing (2018) Seminars in Oncology Nursing, 34 (4), pp. 381-385. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.soncn.2018.09.006
Memon, A.R. Predatory Journals Spamming for Publications: What Should Researchers Do? (2018) Science and Engineering Ethics, 24 (5), pp. 1617-1639. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9955-6
Sanz, Á., del Valle, M.L., Flores, L.A., Hernansanz, S., Gutiérrez, C., Ramos, D. Open access journals and predatory publishing in palliative care [Revistas de acceso abierto y voracidad editorial en cuidados paliativos] (2018) Medicina Paliativa, 25 (3), pp. 184-190. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.medipa.2017.03.003
Aponte, J. Predatory Publishing and Organizers: What Scholars in Academia Need to Know (2018) Hispanic Health Care International, 16 (2), pp. 54-55. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1540415318790704
Umlauf, M.G., Mochizuki, Y. Predatory publishing and cybercrime targeting academics (2018) International Journal of Nursing Practice, 24, art. no. e12656. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ijn.12656
Lewinski, A.A., Oermann, M.H. Characteristics of e-mail solicitations from predatory nursing journals and publishers (2018) Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 49 (4), pp. 171-177. https://dx.doi.org/10.3928/00220124-20180320-07
McCann, T.V., Polacsek, M. False gold: Safely navigating open access publishing to avoid predatory publishers and journals (2018) Journal of Advanced Nursing, 74 (4), pp. 809-817. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.13483
Miller, E., DeBerg, J. The Perils of Predatory Publishing: Views and Advice from an Editor and a Health Sciences Librarian (2017) Pain Management Nursing, 18 (6), pp. 351-352. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pmn.2017.10.003
Relf, M.V., Swanson, B. Predatory Publishing: A Growing Threat to HIV Nursing? (2017) Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, 28 (3), pp. 303-305. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jana.2017.03.001
Lowe, N.K. Open Access and Predatory Publishing (2017) JOGNN – Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing, 46 (2), pp. 161-162. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jogn.2017.01.003
Baker, J.D. Professional versus predatory publishing: Cautions for perioperative nurse authors (2016) ACORN, 29 (4), pp. 48-49.
Angelini, D., Bakewell-Sachs, S. Predatory Publishing: What Do Perinatal and Neonatal Nurses Need to Know (2015) Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing, 29 (2), pp. 95-96. https://dx.doi.org/10.1097/JPN.0000000000000095
Stone, T.E., Rossiter, R.C. Predatory publishing: Take care that you are not caught in the Open Access net (2015) Nursing and Health Sciences, 17 (3), pp. 277-279. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/nhs.12215
Baker, J.D. Professional Versus Predatory Publishing: Cautions for Perioperative Nurse Authors (2015) AORN Journal, 101 (6), pp. 599-601. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aorn.2015.04.012
Kearney, M.H., Thorne, S., Chinn, P.L., Nicoll, L.H., Pickler, R., D’Antonio, P., Connolly, C., Peternelj-Taylor, C., Welliver, D., Don Baker, J., Flanagin, A., Bradley-Springer, L., The INANE Predatory Publishing Practices Collaborative Predatory publishing: What authors need to know (2015) Research in Nursing and Health, 38 (1), pp. 1-3. https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/nur.21640
Djuric, D. Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing: The Romanian Connection (2015) Science and Engineering Ethics, 21 (1), pp. 183-202. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4
Beall, J. Behind the Spam: A Spectral Analysis of Predatory Publishers (2015) Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 11 (A29A), pp. 166-171. https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1743921316002684
Sorrell, J.M., Owens, J.K. Ethics: Predatory publishing: Keeping the wolves from your office door (2015) Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 20 (3), 1 p. https://dx.doi.org/10.3912/OJIN.Vol20No03EthCol01
Roberts, D. Author, beware! a look at the dangers of predatory publishing (2015) MEDSURG Nursing, 24 (1), p. 7.
Smith, G. Predatory publishing houses: Challenging the legitimacy of open access journals (2015) Australasian Journal of Paramedicine, 12 (2), 2 p. https://dx.doi.org/10.33151/ajp.12.2.234
Pearson, G.S. Predatory Publishing Practices and Nurses (2015) Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 51 (1), pp. 1-2. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ppc.12094
Yucha, C. Predatory Publishing: What Authors, Reviewers, and Editors Need to Know (2015) Biological Research for Nursing, 17 (1), pp. 5-7. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1099800414563378
Boumil, M.M., Salem, D.N. In … And out: Open access publishing in scientific journals (2014) Quality Management in Health Care, 23 (3), pp. 133-137. https://dx.doi.org/10.1097/QMH.0000000000000035
