Are predatory journals undermining the credibility of science? A bibliometric analysis of citers

Warnings against publishing in predatory journals are plentiful and so are the suggested solutions to the problem. The existing studies all confirm that authors of articles published in potential predatory journals are typically young, inexperienced and from Asia or Africa. To what extend we can con...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientometrics 2017-12, Vol.113 (3), p.1513-1528
Main Author: Frandsen, Tove Faber
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bibliometrics
Computer Science
Documents
Information Storage and Retrieval
Library Science
Scholarly communication
Scientific papers
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Summary:Warnings against publishing in predatory journals are plentiful and so are the suggested solutions to the problem. The existing studies all confirm that authors of articles published in potential predatory journals are typically young, inexperienced and from Asia or Africa. To what extend we can consider the problem negligible is determined by the impact they are having on the scholarly communication in terms of publications and citations. The existing literature can provide more information about the former than the latter. This paper is an analysis of potential predatory journals as well as potential poor scientific standards journals. Citations to 124 potential predatory journals and poor scientific standards journals are looked up in Scopus and the citing authors analysed in regards to geographic location, publications and citations. The results show that the characteristics of the citing author indeed resemble those of the publishing author. Implications for recommendations and future research are discussed.
ISSN:0138-9130
1588-2861
DOI:10.1007/s11192-017-2520-x