Abstract
One of the most fundamental issues in academia today is understanding the differences between legitimate and questionable publishing. While decision-makers and managers consider journals indexed in popular citation indexes such as Web of Science or Scopus as legitimate, they use two lists of questionable journals (Beall’s and Cabell’s), one of which has not been updated for a few years, to identify the so-called predatory journals. The main aim of our study is to reveal the contribution of the journals accepted as legitimate by the authorities to the visibility of questionable journals. For this purpose, 65 questionable journals from social sciences and 2338 Web-of-Science-indexed journals that cited these questionable journals were examined in-depth in terms of index coverages, subject categories, impact factors and self-citation patterns. We have analysed 3234 unique cited papers from questionable journals and 5964 unique citing papers (6750 citations of cited papers) from Web of Science journals. We found that 13% of the questionable papers were cited by WoS journals and 37% of the citations were from impact-factor journals. The findings show that neither the impact factor of citing journals nor the size of cited journals is a good predictor of the number of citations to the questionable journals.
Highlights
Journals as a key communication channel in science receive much attention from scholars, editors, policymakers, stakeholders and research-evaluation bodies because these publication channels are used as a proxy of the research quality of the papers published in them
The main aim of our study is to reveal the contributions of citation indexes, which are accepted as the authority in research evaluations, to the visibility of questionable journals whose scientific levels are always considered quite low in academia
13% of the questionable articles were cited by WoS journals and 37% of the citations came from the impact-factor journals
Summary
Journals as a key communication channel in science receive much attention from scholars, editors, policymakers, stakeholders and research-evaluation bodies because these publication channels are used as a proxy of the research quality of the papers published in them. While the impact factor is often used to identify quality publications in the scientific community, low-quality publications and ethical issues in publishing have recently been discussed. Predatory publishing is one of the most discussed topics regarding journal publishing, which crosses over narrow fields of bibliometrics, scientometrics and academicpublishing studies. This topic related to publishing in the so-called questionable or lowquality journals attracts attention in academia and outside it (Bohannon, 2013; Sorokowski et al, 2017). The most famous attempt to list predatory journals was initiated by Jeffrey Beall, whose list (: Beall’s list) gained attention from scientific fields and media. Following some recent studies (Eykens et al, 2019; Frandsen, 2019; Nelhans & Bodin, 2020), we will refer to such journals as questionable, in recognition of the fact that it is hard to adequately distinguish bad-faith outlets from low-quality ones
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
