How many predatory journals are there?

We believe that there are about 15,000 predatory journals, although, it is quite a difficult question to answer; as we explore in this article.

What was the first predatory journal?

If there are predatory journals, they had to start somewhere. There had to be a number one.

In one of our previous articles, we identified the first predatory journal to be the Journal of Biological Sciences, which was first published by ANSInet in January 2001.

8,000 predatory journals in 2014

In our view, the most cited paper that talks about a definitive number of predatory journals is the paper by Shen and Björk. Looking at Scopus (15 Jan 2022), this paper has been cited 388 times. Most of those citations, we would guess, is due to their estimates of the number of predatory journals.

Figure 1: Part of the abstract from Shen and Björk, 2015

Figure 1 shows the contribution from the paper that is most often cited. It says:

Over the studied period, predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals.

Although the figure we are focusing on here is the number of predatory journals (i.e. 8,000 in 2014), we still find it astonishing that 420,000 articles were published in 2014, in predatory journals.

Just to be clear, that is 420,000 articles were published in 8,000 predatory journals in 2014, NOT cumulatively up until 2014. This is shown in figure 3 of the Shen and Björk paper.

The rise in the number of articles in predatory journals from 53,000 to 420,000 between 2010 and 2014 represents an almost an 800% increase.

If there were 8,000 predatory journals in 2014, how many are there now? As far as we are aware, but we are very happy to be corrected, there is not another paper that provides any, peer review, updated figures since this 2015 paper.

Cabells: Web site

 

One of the best resources that we have found, for up to date information, is Cabells. They are a commercial company, and are subscription based, but they do have some information in front of their pay wall.

To quote from their web site (with regard to their Journalytics service) [accessed 15 Jan 2022]:

Our curated list of over 11,000 academic journals spanning 18 disciplines guides researchers and institutions in getting the most impact out of their research.

They also provide Predatory Reports and, again, to quote from their web site [accessed 15 Jan 2022]:

Specialists analyze over 60 behavioral indicators to keep the community aware of the growing threats and to keep academia protected from exploitative operations.

What is not clear from their web site is how many of their 11,000 curated journals are predatory? But given that there were 8,000 journals in 2014, we suspect that 11,000 is not a bad figure to use. However, see below for another figure from Cabells.

Cabells: The source

Cabells also has a blog, called The Source.

In September 2021, Simon Linacre (Director of International Marketing & Development at Cabells) wrote a blog post where he said:

Cabells’ Predatory Reports database reached a total of 15,000 journals, 15,059 at the time of this post [1 September 2021] to be precise, pushed to that level by a recent surge in positive identifications of predatory journals.

That is now of best estimate of the number of predatory journals, 15,059. Of course, it will have changed in the last few months but, we believe that a figure of around 15,000 is a reasonable value to use, until further evidence is provided.

Final remarks

It is difficult to know exactly how many predatory journals there. This is largely down to the difficulty in identifying them, which is partly the purpose of our blog and Twitter feed.

Indeed, Cabells has a team of people looking at 60 indicators for each journal. If they have analysed over 15,000 journals, you can only imagine the man hours involved.

What we do find interesting is, in 2014, there were 420,000 articles published in 8,000 predatory journals. If, in 2021, there were 15,000 predatory journals this suggests that they published about 787,000 articles. If this is true, this is both astounding and worrying.

Not only are those 787,000 articles worthless in the scientific sense, but think about how much money has been wasted (and we use that word purposefully). Even if the Article Processing Charges are as low as USD 500, that is USD 393 million that has gone to line the pockets of the predatory published and has not helped the advancement of science. This is something that would be worthy of further discussion/investigation.

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