Tag: Editorial Board

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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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What is an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)?

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As scholars, who publish scientific papers, we often hear the term “ISSN”, but what does it mean, do you need one, how do you get one and what assumptions can you make about an ISSN? In this article, we explore these questions.

An ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) uniquely identifies all types of print and electronic media, such as scientific journals, magazines and newspapers. It is important that it is a periodical. An ISSN is represented by an eight-digit code, often separated in the middle by a hyphen. The digits that make up the ISSN have no meaning in themselves, they just have to be unique from all other ISSNs.

Why do ISSNs exist?

In many aspects of life, we need to be able to uniquely identify something. This might be to identify you as a customer for (say) an electricity provider, for the tax office or as a member of an organisation.

It is not just individuals that need to be identified. In a warehouse each item will have an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) and in a shop each item will have a Product Code. Even airports have a unique three-digit code so that we can differentiate one airport from another, which is very important for many areas of airport operations, not least of all making sure that our baggage gets to the right place.

Scientific publishing is no different. We have to have a way of uniquely identifying certain elements within this area of our lives. DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is one aspect, which provides a unique way to identify a paper. An ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) identifier is a way to uniquely identify a single author.

An ISSN is just another form of unique identifier, in this case it identifies some form of electronic or print media. In the context of this article, an ISSN identifies a scientific journal.

Just to be clear, an ISSN will be unique to a specific journal. It is not unknown for two journals to have the same name, or almost the same name, which is a tactic used by some predatory journals to try and trick researchers into submitting their journal. However, two journals cannot have the same ISSN; each one will be different.

The ISSN system

The ISSN system is managed by an international centre in Paris. They take responsibility for assigning ISSNs in France and also for countries that do not have their own national centre.

There is a network of more than 80 centres across the world who take responsibility for assigning ISSN’s in their respective countries.

Is there an ISSN standard?

The ISO (International Organization for Standardization, yes, we know the acronym does not match the wording) has a standard on ISSN (ISO 3297:2017) which provides a definition of an ISSN, namely “Each International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is a unique identifier for a specific serial or other continuing resource in a defined medium.“

Does a journal need an ISSN?

No, a journal does not need an ISSN.

It is perfectly okay to publish a journal, and many do, without an ISSN. This does not mean that the journal is better or worse than a journal with an ISSN, although some will try to give the impression that a journal with an ISSN has some mark of quality about it.

On the ISSN web site, it specifically says “ [an ISSN] does not guarantee the quality or validity of the contents” (see image below).

Why would you apply for an ISSN?

Having an ISSN does provide some credibility to your publication, even if that is unwarranted as ISSNs are relatively easy to get and are no measure of quality. But having an ISSN does provide a unique identifier, which may help others when searching for your publication.

As ISSN’s are for publications that are produced regularly, it also helps tie them together, so that readers know that they are reading the same periodical.

How much does an ISSN cost?

ISSNs are free, at least for the countries we look at. This is different to ISBNs (International Standard Book Number), which have a charge.

This would seem to be another good reason to get an ISSN. As they are free, there does not seem to be a downside?

What are the guidelines for requesting an ISSN?

Each country has its own guidelines but the ones we looked at are similar in the advice they offer.

You can see the guidelines produced by India at this link, but we have downloaded and made it available from this link, just in case the links stops working.

Some of the common guidelines we saw include:

  • ISSNs are available at no charge.
  • An ISSN can be revoked if it is shown that misleading information was provided at the time it was requested.
  • ISSNs are assigned for certain categories of print/electronic media, including serials, journals and magazines. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) provides some information about what types of material are suitable for an ISSN. They say that “ISSN are applicable to serials and to other continuing resources, whether past, present or to be published or produced in the foreseeable future, whatever the medium of publication or production.”
  • Books cannot be assigned an ISSN. They require and ISBN.
  • In some cases you can apply for an ISSN before publication but the general rule seems to be that you either need to wait until you have proof of publication or the ISSN will not be formally assigned until you have proof that the publication exists, even if you have previously applied and have been assigned an ISSN.
  • For online publications, an ISSN can only be assigned after the first issue has been released.
  • The guidelines on journals are particularly interesting. In India, for example (but other countries have similar guidelines), they have these guidelines.
     
    • There should be a minimum of five editorial board members.

    • Official postal and email addresses should be provided. The emails should have an institutional domain and personal email addresses (such as Yahoo and Gmail) should be avoided.

    • The editorial board should be international in its make-up, with some members being from respected institutions from overseas.

    • An ISSN can be withdrawn if plagiarism is detected.

    • For non-annual e-journals, five articles is the minimum for a complete issue. Annual publications require ten articles for a complete issue.

    • Editorial board members should be senior faculty members. Students, research fellows etc. should be avoided.

    • The name and complete postal address (specifically India) of the publisher must be displayed on the publication or publication website. It is particularly important for the name of the publisher and the place of publication to be printed or displayed on the serial.

It should be noted that these guidelines apply to an application for an ISSN. Whether breaching these guidelines after the ISSN has been assigned will lead to it being revoked, we are unsure. 

How do you apply for an ISSN?

It is relatively easy to get, or at least apply for, an ISSN, but it does depend on what country you are in.

If you look at the ISSN web site, specifically the area on “Requesting an ISSN”, you will be asked to provide your country. This will then link you to the country agent(s), typically with a “Contact Us” button and a “Submit Your Request” button.

At the time of writing, the UK page asked for a form to be filled in, which has to be sent to British Library. In fact, you can access this form through the ISSN web site, but you can access a similar form through the British Library itself.

If we look at another country, let’s say Australia, you will be routed to their page. This also leads to a form that has to be submitted.

So, the exact method of applying for an ISSN will different from country to country but from looking at various countries it appears to be a pretty simple, straight forward process and they generally ask for similar information.

What do the eights digits mean?

An ISSN is made up of eight digits, which are all numbers, although the last digit can be an ‘X’. This last digit is actually calculated from the other seven digits.

The numbers in an ISSN have no meaning. This is different to an ISBN, where each part of the 13 digits has a meaning, or a DOI, where the first part represents the organisation that requested it. Our article has more details.

The only digit that has a meaning is the last one. This is known as a check digit and its role is to ensure the integrity of the other seven digits. This means that if one of the other seven digits changes, or the check digit changes, then it can be shown that there is an error in the ISSN number.

If you want to know how the check digit is calculated, the Library of Congress has an explanation.

What is ISSN-L?

You may see the term ISSN-L, which refers to a “linking ISSN”. This is a type of ISSN that groups together different media formats of the same serial publication.

We have not seen linking ISSNs used very often. In our experience, it is more common to see a journal with a print ISSN and a separate electronic ISSN.

Displaying or printing the ISSN

The standard way to display (or print) an ISSN is:

  • ISSN followed by a space
  • The first for digits
  • A hyphen
  • The last four digits

For example, (without the quotes when displaying/printing), “ISSN 1476-4687”, which is the ISSN for the journal Nature.

Conclusion

ISSN’s are probably more applicable to publishers than they are to authors and, as an author, ISSNs can almost be ignored.

For publishers, it might be important to have an ISSN, as it provides the rest of the world some way of uniquely identifying your publication. An ISSN also comes with some credibility, even though that might not be justified.

As an author, you may not ever care about ISSNs. It may become important when you are trying to track down a specific journal. Certainly, for this web site, ISSNs are important as it can enable us to differentiate between journals, which is not always as easy as it sounds. To give another example, we have also used ISSN’s in our bibliographic databases as a way to group the same journals together as, even for the same journal, they are sometimes spelt differently.

Most people reading this article will never need to apply for an ISSN but, if you do, it is a pretty easy process and it is free.

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Why is predatory publishing evil?

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We thought we would draw out some of the reasons why we subscribe to the view that predatory journals and publishers should be avoided, rather than just expecting others to take this view at face value.

Publishing in predatory journals, and supporting the publishers that publish those journals, should be avoided. Saying that they are evil may be a little strong, but we can’t think of a better word to describe the practice of infecting the scientific archive with non-peer reviewed research.

As an evidence-based community, we would expect any argument that is put forward to be justified in some way and we hope that the reasons below will convince you that there is no justification for publishing in predatory journals.

Peer review

Peer review underpins the scientific archive. If we read something from the scientific archive, we know two things:

  1. The paper has been read by, and reviewed by, those who are experts in the discipline being addressed. We have confidence that others have looked at the paper and decided that this paper has made a contribution to knowledge and has advanced the field in some way.
  2. The paper we are reading is EXACTLY the same as the one that the author (finally) submitted. If a mistake was subsequently found then a correction would have had to have been made in a later paper, referred to as an erratum. Unlike, say, a blog post or a wikipedia entry, which can be changed after being published, you can be certain that a paper in the scientific archive is the same as was originally published.

The problem with predatory publishers is that there is no, or very little, peer review yet the papers that they publish become part of the scientific archive. This not only undermines the scientific process, as experts are not evaluating the papers, but it is infecting the scientific archive. If this infection penetrates too deeply, there will come a point where we can no longer trust the science that is being reported. We discuss this is a little more detail in the next section.

Infecting the scientific archive

What do we mean by infecting the scientific archive?

We draw an analogy with a virus, that attacks its host and gradually spreads, eventually killing the host. Assume that the scientific archive is the host. The purpose of the scientific archive is to store the peer reviewed research of all humankind in a way that there is confidence that anything that is referred to has been validated by experts in that area. There might be mistakes, which we hope will be found in the future, but the fact that every paper that is in the scientific archive has gone through a peer review process gives us a high level of confidence in the research that is stored in the archive.

Let’s say that a predatory journal comes into being. It starts to publish articles, which have not undergone the same rigorous peer review. To the uninformed, and even seasoned scholars, these journals/articles may look legitimate. Given that there is no overall management of the scientific archive, the papers that are published within this journal can now be viewed as being part of the archive. In effect, the scientific archive has been infected as it now contains material which has not been peer reviewed, at least to the levels that we would expect.

As more and more predatory journals are started, and articles get published, so the infection spreads.

“Ahhh“, you might say, “but if we find a paper that we know has been published in a non-predatory journal, we can trust that, right?“

Wrong. The research that is reported might be based on the ‘research’ from a predatory journal or the paper may cite papers from a predatory journal, which cannot be relied upon. Taking this to its logical conclusion, if predatory publishing is allowed to infect the scientific archive, then the archive will eventually be invalid as we will not be able to tell the difference between science that has been properly peer reviewed from the science that does not have this solid foundation. The host will inevitably die.

So, we must be careful when (what was) the healthy scientific archive starts to cite the predatory articles as the virus is really starting to take hold and it is now even harder, if not impossible, to get rid of the infection. Once credible journals start to cite predatory articles, how does the reader decide what is valid in the scientific archive? And, of course, it is in the interests of the predatory journals/articles to get cited, as it provides them with some validation that enables the virus to spread even further.

This infection has started already. Take a look at this article, or this one, both which note that predatory publishers have already infected citation databases and the scientific archive.

A virus will eventually kill its host and, if we do not eliminate predatory publishing, then it will eventually kill the scientific archive as we will not have any confidence in it. A major operation may be able to bring it back to life but the longer the virus is allowed to infect the host, the harder that operation becomes and we may to accept that the patient can never recover.

Profiteering

There is often discussion about the profits that traditional scientific publishers make. Or rather the discussion is often around what the publishers do for their money. Authors write the papers and other scientists review those papers. The authors do not receive payment for their work, nor do the reviewers. Indeed, the authors have to sign over the copyright to the publisher, who then publishes the paper and charges others to read that paper. Ironically, the author and reviewers may have to pay to read the paper they wrote or reviewed.

Many see this as profiteering, but predatory publishers take this to a new level. They take money from authors/institutions but provide hardly of the services that we would normally expect, such as a solid peer review process, a recognized editorial board, a well maintained web site, credibility as an established scientific publisher, printing and distributing the journal etc. It is for these reasons that traditional publishers would argue that they require the copyright and charge subscription fees as they have significant costs that they have to pay.

Predatory publishers are unlikely (if ever) to provide a hard copy of the journal, meaning that there are no print and distribution costs. They will not have the same level of editorial checks and balances that a non-predatory publisher would have, saving on the costs (typically staff) to provide those services. They are unlikely to have the same level of post-publication marketing so will not invest in social media, maintaining email lists for table of content alerts etc.

Really, all predatory publishers need to invest in is a web site, which is often of poor quality and email software to spam potential authors asking for papers. Customer support is non-existent and, although, we have no evidence to support this, we suspect that the staffing for any given predatory journal is one or two staff who use a variety of names that appear to be different people, performing different functions. Indeed, the same people may even service different predatory journals so a small number of staff may, using different names and represent many different predatory journals.

Undermining Open Access

When the open access model of publishing really took hold, in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s it was meant as a way that scientific research could be made available to the general public, as well as making it more accessible to those institutions that were not able to afford journal subscription fees or buy individual papers.

It was also felt that government funded research, which uses funds from the tax-payers, should be made available to those that funded that research. That is the general public.

As the open access movement gained momentum, unscrupulous publishers saw it as an opportunity to profit from this initiative (you can read about the difference Open Access publishing and predatory publishing here). Thus, they set up publishing houses and journals that would publish papers for a fee, but without the usual practices in place that we would expect to see from even the most low-quality journals.

If there are criticisms of the open access movement (and there are a few) one of them would be that predatory publishers have taken advantage of open access and it can be difficult to differentiate between legitimate open access journals and those that operate in a predatory way.

Conclusion

You would find it difficult to find somebody who would have a legitimate argument that predatory publishers and journals are a good thing. The publishers themselves might make an argument, even some authors might try and make a case, but we cannot think of any legitimate reason why any scholar would support a predatory journal. We have given a number of reasons why publishing in predatory journals is a bad idea. There are many more, but we hope that the reasons given above will persuade most people that publishing in predatory journals is a bad idea. If you are still not convinced, take a look at how publishing in predatory journals can harm your CV.

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Three quick ways to spot a predatory journal

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Predatory publishers accept papers without the usual levels of peer review that you would expect from a traditional publisher. In some cases, there is not even any peer review. The paper is just accepted.

Predatory publishers expect you to pay to publish the article, under the Open Access model of publishing. This model is an accepted way to publish scientific articles, but predatory publishers take advantage of this model, purely for monetary gains. If you are not familiar with the Open Access model of publishing there is plenty of help of the internet, as well as books such as “Open Access (MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)” by Peter Suber.  A link to Amazon for this book is here.

There are many ways to identify a predatory publisher, but if you want to do a quick check you can look at the following three things. 

  1. The journal promises very fast review times
  2. The journal promises very fast publication times
  3. Validate the editorial board

Any concerns about any one of these should be enough to make you ignore that journal.

Having this quick check list could save you a lot of time, and money, as any questions thrown up to any of these checks are likely to indicate that it is a journal from a predatory publisher and why take the risk where there are so many other journals to submit to?

We discuss these items in more detail below.

1. Very fast review times

When I publish a paper, in my own discipline, I expect to have to wait about six months for a review. Three months would be short, twelve months bordering on the unacceptable but between three and twelve months is okay.

I would not expect, and have never experienced, a review in a matter of days. That is not strictly true. I have had a couple of rejections within days. This is when a paper is rejected as the paper has been reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief and/or the Associate Editor and they have decided not to send it out for peer review. The usual reason for this is because the paper is out of scope for the journal.

The important point is that the paper is rejected in a matter of days. I have never had a paper accepted in a matter of days.

A predatory journal often promises very quick review times. The image above shows a snippet from an email that promises to review a paper within 21 working days. This seems unrealistic to us, at least from our own experience.

If you think that 21 days is reasonable, what about 5-7 days? The email snippet below promises to review the paper, and give a decision, within a week.

You might be interested in other emails that we archive, and report on our Twitter feed, using the hashtag #PredatoryPublishingEmails.

If you get an email inviting you to submit an article, which promises very short review times, I would simply ignore it. If you are tempted, carry out more due diligence by doing extra checks and seeking the advice of others.

2. Very fast publication times

When a paper is accepted, it can only take a few days for the paper to get a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). This gives the paper a permalink and means that the paper can be cited. But this is not the same as the paper being assigned to a volume/issue and having page numbers. There are some credible online journals that do away with these formalities but generally papers do still have a volume, issue and page numbers. In our view, this is a good thing (have volume, issue and page numbers, but that is very much a persoanl view).

In our experience, the time from when you have uploaded the camera-ready paper to it being published, complete with volume, issue and page numbers can take up to a year, or even more. This used to be a concern as you could not say the paper was published until that time. Now that DOI’s are commonplace it is not such an issue as the paper can be cited using the DOI.

If a journal is promising very fast publication times, it should raise alarm bells. The image above shows an EMAIL snippet that we have seen. This is not only promising publication in about 10 days but, I assume, also promising to review the paper in that time as well.

Like a journal promising very quick reviews, you should also treat with caution a journal which is promising quick publication times. We would strongly suggest that you simply ignore such a journal but if you do what to consider it, carry out further due diligence and take advice from your colleagues.

3. Validate the editorial board

One way of measuring the quality of a journal is the quality of its editorial board. The editorial board should be drawn from well-respected scholars from the relevant discipline and it is often desirable to have the members drawn from across the world so that the board represents the international community.

When you look at the editorial board for a journal there are some quick checks that you can do. You can certainly dive deeper, if you wish, but these quick checks might save you having to spend a lot of time researching the editorial board.

  1. Can you find the editorial board? If you struggle to find the editorial board on the journal’s web site, that should be cause for concern. It is usually easily accessible as the journal is rightly proud of the quality of the editorial board.
  2. Do the editors have pictures, URL or email addresses? If the editors do not have pictures or some way to contact them (via EMAIL or their home page) this should be cause for concern. I do not think this one is necessarily a deal breaker but this check, combined with the next suggestion, can raise a big red flag.
  3. Search for the editors: If the editors are not accessible directly from the editorial board page, then try and search for one or two, including the Editor-in-chief. Most scholars are easy to find on the Internet, especially if the search includes their institution.
  4. Is the editorial board international? A good measure of quality is how international the editorial board is. If the members are predominantly drawn from a single country this may not indicate that it is a predatory journal, but it does say something about the quality of the journal.

Final Thoughts

You should NOT submit to a predatory journal.

That goes without saying, but we state it anyway. If you think differently then we need to talk, as we are poles apart in our views!

The problem you face is identifying whether a journal is predatory. This can be time consuming but there are some quick checks that you can do and this article has given you three ideas. If the journal does not pass any of the above checks, then we would advise that you avoid that journal. Further checks might show that you were wrong, and it is not a predatory journal, but it is better to err on the side of caution and not to submit to a journal that is not predatory, rather than submitting to a journal and finding out later that it is predatory later.

We hope that the checks above will take only a few minutes and they will inform your decision with a high level of confidence. Those few minutes will be time well spent as you will not then contaminate your CV with articles in predatory journals.

You might also want to look at our article, which suggests ways to identify a NON-predatory journal or our article on how you can analyze a journal for signs that it might be predatory.

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Analysing a journal: An example

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Recently, we saw an email from a journal asking the recipient to submit a paper. Looking at the email, we immediately assumed it was a predatory journal, but as we looked at it a little closer, we started to wonder whether it was predatory or whether the journal editors were perhaps just a little inexperienced or naive.

We thought it was worthwhile just recording some of our thought processes as we looked through the web pages of the journal and the conclusions that we reached.

It is probably a little unfair to focus on this one journal. It is not our intention to be unfair, but the journal did grab our attention as it seemed a little different to some others we had seen, so we thought it was worth taking a closer look.

We also hope that you can take some of these ideas when looking at other journals.

If you are new, or relatively inexperienced, in scientific publishing you might want to seek further advice. The book “How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper” might be useful. You can link to it here.

The Journal

The journal we are looking at is the International Journal of Advance Study and Research Work (IJASRW). It has an ISSN of 2581-5997.

IJASRW is published by Alborear (OPC) Pvt. Ltd. Thane, India. It was first published in April 2018. It published nine issues in 2018 and (at the time of writing, 7 Jan 2020) it had published twelve issues in 2019. This complete its 2019 volume as the twelfth issue was published in December 2019.

IJASRW is an open access journal, meaning that once your paper has been accepted there is an Article Processing Charge (APC). This means that you have to pay a fee to have the paper published. The benefit is that the paper is freely available to anybody who wants to access it. This is different to a subscription-based model where you would either need to have a subscription to the journal or pay a fee for specific article.

It is the open access movement that gave rise to predatory publishing, which has brought all the problems, and benefits, that we face today.

Journal's positive points

1. Publication Schedule

As mentioned above the journal has been in press since April 2018. Since that time, it has published an issue every month (click on graph to expand it). That is  21 issues (Apr 2018 – Dec 2019).

The journal should be applauded on getting out an issue every month but given that in seven of those issues they only published one paper and in six of the issues , they only published two papers, it might have been wiser to start off as a quarterly journal?

2. Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

Each article that is published by the journal has been assigned a DOI. We see this as a positive, although it is easy to register for a DOI and some journals promote this in a way that having a DOI is some sort of validation of the quality of the journal. It most certainly is not. We have another article that looks at this topic.

Having said that, when we tried to access a paper via its DOI it was not found. For example, the paper:

“The Changing Face of Education Needs Makeover through Assessment for Learning” by Dr. Sushma Singh [PDF]
…. has a DOI of ‘10.5281/zenodo.1250268‘. If you try and access this paper (accessed 7 Jan 2020) using its DOI URL – https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo/1250268, it says that the DOI is unknown.

We also checked a few more DOIs and none of them seemed to work, although we did eventually found one that did – https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1218381.

3. Article Processing Charges (APCs)

It is interesting to look at the fees that the journal charges, although it is not always easy to find what the fees are.

For this journal it is very easy to find as it is a menu item on the home page, and that is to be welcomed and the journal should be applauded for that.

Moreover, the APCs are actually quite reasonable. Even $50 is a lot cheaper than many predatory journals and they are offering a reduction of 50% at the moment.

This would suggest that this journal’s main motivation is not the bottom line and they are actually trying to build up a reputable journal?

Areas of Concern

In looking at the journal’s web site, these are some negative points that we identified.

1. Quality of articles

We are not experts in the areas covered by the journal, so this assessment only considers generic issues.

Some of the articles were quite short (perhaps only two or three pages) and the number of references were often limited.

In one 20 page article [PDF], the literature review is only four lines and it only references two papers. Moreover, those two papers did not appear in the list references at the end of the paper.

Moreover, the three references that are given are:

[1] NIE Singapore learning, (Teaching and Mentoring Program Run -3 by DOE of GNCT of Delhi).
[2] Assessment for learning website by Curriculum Corporation of Australia.
[3] Assessing Student Outcomes by Robert J. Marzano, Debra Pickering and Jay McTighe.

… it is difficult to see how you could access these references and, we suspect, that only one of them is a journal paper.

In another article [PDF],that is only two pages, there were five references but none of those were to the scientific archive. The references are:

[1]. Hamid Mohsin (2007). The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Penguin Books. Print.
[2]. Delillo Don (2007) Falling Man. New York: Scribner. Print.
[3]. Updike John (2006). Terrorist. New York: Ballantine Books. Print.
[4]. Anurag Kashyap dir. Black Friday perf. Kay Kay Memon, Pavan Malhotra, Aditya Shrivastav, Imtiaz Ali, Pratima
[5]. Kazmi, Zakir Hussain. India. 2007.

Three of the references are to books [1,2,3]. The other two [4,5], to be honest, we are not sure what the citation means.

Another three page paper [PDF] only cited four sources and none of these were to the scientific literature. The references were:

1 Census 2011, Govt. of India.
2 Ibid.
3 “List of universities”. Education info India. Archived from the original on 11 April 2017. Retrieved on 27 October 2018.
4 “List of Universities in Uttar Pradesh”. Education department of U.P. Archived from the original on 21 June 2012. Retrieved on 27 October
2018.
5 http://naac.gov.in/index.php/assessment-accreditation#process.Retrieved on 27 October, 2018.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid

We could have looked at other papers, but we stopped the cursory analysis at that point.

In our view, the three articles we looked at make for very weak articles and does not give confidence in the journal.

2. Authors/Country Diversity

We looked through each of the 48 papers that were published in the journal, shown in the graph on the left – click to expand.

We were interested to see how diverse the authorship was. We did not do a deep dive, but the figure shows how the 101 authors were split across different countries. We note that some authors may be repeated if they appeared on more than one paper, as we just looked at each paper and recorded the countries for each author.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the highest number of authors come from India (as the journal is based in India).

What does stand out is that there are no authors for countries such as the USA, UK, Canada or Australia. Europe is also largely ignored.

Given that the name of the journal is the International Journal of Advance Study and Research Work, there is still some work to do if the journal wants to be recognized as an international journal in a way that most people would recognize.

3. Aims and Scope

The aims and scope, as stated on the journal’s web site says “International Journal of Advance Study and Research Work (IJASRW) is the multidisciplinary, peer review, open access journal. Our ideology is to sustain the research work and provide platform for all research scholars from various domains. Research itself a vast word which require in all disciplines. We provide Hassel free service to all researchers with limited charges. Journal is dedicated to publish worthy and innovative research papers which provide meaning to society.“

To us, this does not provide the aims and scope except, perhaps, for the last sentence. But the real problem is that the aims and scope are just too wide. You can literally submit anything to this journal as there are no parameters to follow. This is supported by some of the papers that have been published. Take a look at these few titles.

– Women related News: A Comparative Study of the Portrayal by National and Local Print Media
– 9/11 Incident and its Impacts: The Worst Portrayal in Selected Post 9/11 Literature
– Effect of Macroeconomic Variables on the Economic Growth of Pakistan
– Bacterial, Fungal, and Protozoal Microflora of Hay

To us, these papers do not feel that they should have come from the same journal and the journal is just too broad.

4. Editorial Board

The Editorial Board is (very) large.  When we looked at the website, there were 127 people listed, with another 25 listed as members of the Reviewer Board. This, in our view, is way too many people to support a journal that has so far published only 48 papers. It raises the question, why are there so many? We cannot answer that but we did note that 83 (65%) members of the Editorial Board were from India. This seems disproportionate for an international journal. Similarly, 19 of the 25 (76%) Reviewer Board members were from India. Again, this seems disproportionate.

One thing we do like is that the email addresses are listed for each member of the Editorial and Reviewer Board. This is unusual to see for a predatory journal and although we have not done this, it would be interesting to contact them all to ask if they are aware they are listed on this web site as a member of the board.

5. Important Dates

The most worrying aspect of this journal are the “Important Dates“. You’ll see a screen shot calling for papers for the Dec 2019 issue (Volume 2, Issue 12). The submission deadline is 20 Dec 2019, with the issue being published by 31 Dec 2019. This only gives eleven days, if you submitted the paper on the deadline, and there would be the Christmas holidays in between.

In fact, we are writing the first draft of this article on 24 Dec 2019 and the December issue was already published.

To us, the call for paper dates are not what we would expect from a high quality journal.

6. English

One of the criticisms often aimed at predatory journals is their usage of English. Unfortunately, this journal suffers from poor English. We have copied this text from their page on the “Peer Review Policy“.

“To maintain the quality of publication, we are dedicated towards standard evaluation process for approved manuscript publication. All submitted manuscript followed by the careful assessment process. In this process Reviewers and Editors play an important role to analyze the manuscript. We followed Double Blind Review Process, in which both reviewer and author are unknown about their identity. The important purpose to follow this process is to maintain confidentiality, unbiased and fair results for quality publication.

For review process, manuscript meets all the requirements and guidelines.
1.Initial Scanning: Submitted paper/manuscript have less than 10% plagiarism content and have less grammatical errors.
2.Review Process: If the submitted paper/manuscript has cleared the initial scanning, sent the paper for review. If all OK then we go for acceptance for publication else any revision required sent to author accordingly.
3.Acceptance and Publication: After completing all the formalities.“

Another example, from the Open Access statement:

“IJASRW is an open access journal which is freely accessible by all the authors without any obligations for their references and reading purpose. Open access model support the reading knowledge and encourage others to write and showcase their ideas to others and enhance their ideology which support towards the betterment.“

They are certainly not the worst example we have seen, but it is still not good and does not inspire confidence in the journal’s editorial standards.

7. Copyright

The journal requires you to complete a copyright form, part of which is shown here. We are not sure why authors have to assign the copyright to the journal. The idea of open access is that the paper is made available to everybody for free. In most cases, the copyright is retained by the author, but they accept that the paper is freely available, via the publisher. The problem we have with assigning the copyright to a journal is that, firstly they do not need it and secondly, if they do own the copyright they could decide to withdraw that from general distribution at any time and instead ask people to pay.

Copyright law is a little (a lot actually) outside of our area of expertise, but it does seem strange that this journal is asking you to sign over the copyright to them. If copyright is important to you, you might want to take legal advice or start with a couple of books. These two rate highly on Amazon;  “Copyright: What Everyone Needs to Know” and “The Copyright Handbook: What Every Writer Needs to Know“.

8. Journal Impact

Given that the journal has been around for 18 months, or so, we thought we would have a look at the impact it was having. The journal kindly provides a link to Google Scholar, so we followed that. This is what we saw.

You can see that the journal has received four citations, to three of the papers that it has published.

We investigated a little further, by following the “CITED BY” links. To be honest, we were not surprised to find that the citations were all self-citations. For the first two papers, DN Morah had cited his own papers. In fact, not only had this author cited his own publications in IJASRW, but these citations were also from papers that had been published in IJASRW. So not only author self-citations, but also journal self-citations.

The third paper was also a self-citation by A Faiza. This time it was from a different journal (International Journal of Research in Engineering, Science and Management), but the author was citing himself.

This suggests that the journal is having little, or no, impact. Having said that, it is early days for the journal but to be recognized as an international, high impact journal but it should really have started attracting non-self citations; both by the authors and to the journal itself.

9. Indexing

If you look at the journal’s home page, there is a link to the external agencies which indexes the journal. The image on the left shows this (click it to expand).

The journal provides a link to each of the indices that it lists.

In these types of indexes you would typically hope (expect) to see agencies such as Scopus and ISI Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics).

We have looked at each link that is listed and make the following comments (we make a specific comment on whether we found an impact factor).

Google Scholar: We have discussed Google Scholar above. We would just add that Google Scholar is something that anybody can be part of and is not any indication of quality. It does have some measure of impact which, we discussed above, does not seem that high.

Scribd: Scribd is a system where anybody can upload papers (and other types of data). So, it is more of a repository system that an indexing system. It is certainly not a validation of quality. IJASRW do upload their papers to a Scribd channel they have created, so they have decided to index the journal on Scribd, rather than the other way round.

Zenodo: This is interesting in that this does appear to be a indexing system, which lists papers that have appeared in the journal. It is noticeable that the DOI for the journal has zenodo in it, for example https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3526360, suggesting that this is not an external indexing system but one which the journal has some management of? 

Researchbib: This link leads to a web site called “Academic Resource Index: ResearchBib” (not one that we are familiar with)  The journal is listed but it says that the 2019 impact factor is  pending evaluation.

J-GATE: This link leads to a web site called https://jgateplus.com/home/. Once you are on the home page, you cannot actually search for anything as it is a subscription based service.

Cite Factor: Looking at the CiteFactor web site, IJASRW is listed as having an index of 35. Looking at how this impact (later referred to as an impact factor) it takes into account four factors (Quality of Publication, Maunscript Quality, Presentation Quality and Editorial Quality), along with Scientific Method and Citation Analysis.

SJIF: Looking at the web page, it says that IJASRW is under evaluation for 2019 and is is not indexed 2015-1028. So, it has under evaluation by SJIF (Scientific Journal Impact Factor) but that evaluation is not yet complete.

IP-indexing: If you follow the link on the journal’s web site, you arrive at a page which lists the journal. On the page there is no mention of an impact factor but if you dig deeper into the web site you will see that the journal has an IPI value of 2.4. The evaluation criteria are listed on the web site and include Quality of Publication (5 points), Quality of Article (5 points), Stability of Regularity of the Journal (5 points), Editorial and Reviewer Board Quality (5 points) and Presentation Quality (5 points). It is not clear how the actual score is calculated.

IARC: The link to this site shows that the journal is recognized. but it does not provide a year or an impact value.

SAJI: When you access the SAJI (Scholar Article Journal Index) web site, you need to search for the journal and get to a page that lists the journal. There is no mention of any impact factor.

Issuu: This website advertises itself as a place to “Instantly transform your images, text, videos, and PDFs into ready-to-publish content for every digital channel, format, and device.“. If you follow the link given on IJASRW’s web site it takes you to a page where it shows that the journal is listed but there is no mention of any impact factor.

Researcher ID: This leads to a broken link.

I2OR: The I2OR (International Institute of Organized Research) web site promotes itself as a way “promote various domains to Education and Research around the globe to make it easily accessible and more organized.” If you search for the journal on this web site, it does appear but the link just takes you to the journal’s own web site. There is no mention of any impact factor.

ICMJE: If you search for the journal on this web site, it does appear but the link just takes you to the journal’s own web site. There is no mention of any impact factor.

SIS: The SIS web site does report IJASRW as a listed journal but it says that it is still awaiting an impact factor.

ESJIndex: The link to the ESJI (Eurasin Scientific Journal Index) web site, shows that it is recognized by the indexer. It states that it has yet to be evaluated by ESJI.

Cosmos: Following the link from the IJASRW’s web site, takes you to its Cosmos page. This shows that it has a 2018 impact factor of 2.658. A sample evaluation sheet [PDF] is given by Cosmos which provides details about how the impact factor is derived. We found this quite subjective.

Root Indexing: Following the link given by the journal, shows that IJASRW is indexed but it is still waiting for an impact factor.

General-IF: When we tried to search for the journal, we received a MYSQL error.

NSDL:  Following the journal’s link to NSDL (National Science Digital Library), leads to a page which shows that IJASRW is indexed but it does not have any “Standards aligned yet” (whatever that means).

It is interesting to look at these various indexing schemes and, in future articles we plan to look at some of these in a little more detail, along with their impact factors, just to see what they offer and how legitimate they are.

Final Thoughts

The aim of this post was to look at the journal web site and draw out some of the things that we saw. We chose this journal as we had to chose one, but what we looked at could be applied to many other journals. Indeed, there are many other things we could also look at, which we will cover in other articles.

Ultimately, we have to decide whether we would submit to this journal. Our view would be no. It has the look and feel of a predatory journal and even if you do not feel this is the case why take the risk. There are so many other journals out with, with much better credentials that you may as well err on the side of caution and submit to those journals.

Finally, apologies for the length of this post, but there was so much to say.