Tag: TEQSA

Posted on

S is for Scope

TEQSA (Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency) have produced an A-Z of Predatory Publishing, which they tweeted (see figure).

You can also see the infographic on their web site.

We looked at the infographic, in a general sense, in an earlier article, but in this series we are focusing on specific letters, in this case S. 

Tweet from TEQSA

S is for Scope

The infographics from TEQSA says:

“The Scope of reputable journals is well defined and clearly stated on the journal’s web site.“

We have no argument with that.

Sometimes we find that some aims and scope, even for reputable journals, are a little long-winded, but they do try and be as clear and concise as they can. It is obviously in their interests to do this, as this is their calling card. It should be the aims and scope that attracts scholars to submit their articles.

There is obviously a balance to be struck as should not be too narrow (else they will limit the number of papers that will receive) but they do not want to be so broad that they receive papers that are outside the areas of the expertise of the editorial board and the reviewers that they can approach.

Predatory journals tend to have very wide aims and scope as they want to attract as many papers as possible.

What can you do when looking at the scope of a journal?

We would suggest a few relatively easy checks that you can do.

  1. Read the aims and scope. Is it well written? In our experience, high quality journals spend a lot of time getting their aims and scope “just right”. A balance between easy to read, written in an academic style, concisely written and supports the title of the journal.
  2. The breadth of the aims and scope: Many predatory journals simply make the aims and scope as wide as possible. Sometimes so wide that it borders on the ridiculous, in effect saying, “We will consider (and probably accept) a paper on almost any topic)“. If the aims and scope are too broad, it raise a red flag and you should carry out more checks and balances.
  3. Look at published papers: Do the papers that have been published match with the aims and scope of the journal, assuming they are not broad that it borders on the ridiculous (see point 2)? If papers have been published that are outside the scope of the journal this should be a warning sign that the journal may be predatory.

Concluding remarks

We’d like to thank TEQSA for creating their infographic. We find it very informative and, more importantly, it gives food for thought.

We hope, in the above article, that we have managed to present our view on the scope of the journal and how you might use it to check, or at least provide a warning, that a journal may be predatory.

Posted on

P is for Peer Review

TEQSA (Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency) have produced an A-Z of Predatory Publishing, which they tweeted (see figure).

You can also see the infographic on their web site.

We looked at the infographic, in a general sense, in an earlier article, but in this series we are focusing on specific letters, in this case P. 

Tweet from TEQSA

P is for Peer Review

The infographics from TEQSA says:

“Predatory journals typically have poor or non-existent peer review processes.“

We would fully concur with this view, but how do you know if the peer review is poor or non-existent? Here are our thoughts.

Metadata

One of the checks you can is to look at the metadata for a selection of the papers that the journal has published. This data may be on the web page for the particular paper, or the information may be on the paper itself.

If metadata is present (and, of course, it may not be), what are you looking for? In the context of peer review, you need to look at the dates when the paper was submitted, accepted and published (or some variant of those). If they are too close together, it should be (at least) a warning flag.

It is difficult to provide firm guidance but anything less then two months would raise alarm bells. We have seen examples where papers are submitted and accepted in two days. This would be a real concern to us, especially if this was the case across a number of papers and we would probably avoid that journal even if we had carried out no other checks.

 

Bibliography

A further check that we always do is to look at the bibliography, looking to see when the latest cited paper is dated. It is amazing the number of times you see that the most recently cited paper is at least five years old. This raises a number of issues but from a predatory publishing point of view, it could point to a lack of peer review, as any half decent reviewer should pick up that the related work is not up to date.

An out of date literature review is certainly not a definite indicator of the journal being predatory, but it is an indication of poor review, which is an indicator in itself of the journal being predatory.

 

English

The level of English can be illuminating. I think that we all feel for those whose native language is not English and we can forgive the odd grammatical error or phrases which grate as you read them. But, as long as the understanding is there, we are happy to let these go by.

The issue comes when the language gets in the way of the meaning and this could be an indicator of the lack of peer review. On our Twitter account we have given some examples of this (see, for example, this tweet and this one).

If the English is so bad it is a strong indicator that there has been no peer review.

Plagiarism

If we have doubts about a paper, with an obvious red flag being when hard to read English suddenly changes to perfect prose, we often run it through a plagiarism checker just to see what turns up.

In one of our studies, we found significant levels of plagiarism in published papers. You can see these examples on our Twitter account. For example, take a look at this tweet and/or this one.

Plagiarism is not a definitive indicator of a predatory journal but it is a warning sign, especially if you cannot find an easy way to report this to the journal (e.g. the is no Editor-in-Chief email, the only journal for the email is a generic gmail address etc.).

Concluding remarks

We’d like to thank TEQSA for creating their infographic. We find it very informative and, more importantly, it gives food for thought.

We hope, in the above article, that we have managed to present our view on how the lack of peer review can be detected which, in turn, provides indicators that the journal is predatory.

Without doubt there are many more way to detect lack of peer review and we would be happy to return to this topic at a later date.

Posted on

The A-Z of Predatory Publishing

“Predatory publishing: A to Z of elements” recently popped up on our Twitter feed (see image below). We found it very useful as a quick checklist for many aspects of predatory publishing.

Of course, fitting something into an A-Z format comes with challenges, as you need to find something for every letter. When you do this, ‘X’ is often a problem, and this checklist is no exception.

But, great work by TEQSA (Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency) who have created an infographic that is not only useful and eye catching, but is also informative. Presenting this list as an A-Z is certainly a great idea and gives you a reason to pay attention.

Tweet from TEQSA

This infographic is well worth a read. It will be two minutes well spent and you could learn a lot.

If you want to follow the links that are embedded in the infographic, take a look at their web site. Some of the links are behind “subscription accounts”, for example the Clarivate Journal Citation Reports referenced as part of letter ‘J’. That is not the fault of TEQSA and, we suspect, that many people who access this resource will have access via their institution so, hopefully, not too much of an issue.

Others links are freely available, such as the link to “Hijacked Journals”, which links to a version of Beall’s List, which we have also written about.

The other link we found useful is the link to Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA). If you are not aware of this organization, their web site is well worth a look.

In future articles, we plan to take a look in more detail at some of the points that are mentioned in this infographic, as we do have some views that we would like to share.