Abstract
ObjectivesThe number of predatory journals is increasing in the scholarly communication realm. These journals use questionable business practices, minimal or no peer review, or limited editorial oversight and, thus, publish articles below a minimally accepted standard of quality. These publications have the potential to alter the results of knowledge syntheses. The objective of this study was to determine the degree to which articles published by a major predatory publisher in the health and biomedical sciences are cited in systematic reviews.MethodsThe authors downloaded citations of articles published by a known predatory publisher. Using forward reference searching in Google Scholar, we examined whether these publications were cited in systematic reviews.ResultsThe selected predatory publisher published 459 journals in the health and biomedical sciences. Sixty-two of these journal titles had published a total of 120 articles that were cited by at least 1 systematic review, with a total of 157 systematic reviews citing an article from 1 of these predatory journals.DiscussionSystematic review authors should be vigilant for predatory journals that can appear to be legitimate. To reduce the risk of including articles from predatory journals in knowledge syntheses, systematic reviewers should use a checklist to ensure a measure of quality control for included papers and be aware that Google Scholar and PubMed do not provide the same level of quality control as other bibliographic databases.
Highlights
Since librarian Jeffery Beall first coined the term “predatory publishers” in 2010, listing nine journal publishers he believed engaged in questionable practices, the numbers of questionable academic publications have increased considerably [1]
Google Scholar was chosen to determine the number of citations of the indexed papers and to identify the citing systematic reviews, because most predatory journals are not indexed in traditional bibliometric databases and can only be found using Google and Google Scholar
As each systematic review could cite more than 1 article, a total of 157 systematic reviews cited an article from a journal from this predatory publisher
Summary
Since librarian Jeffery Beall first coined the term “predatory publishers” in 2010, listing nine journal publishers he believed engaged in questionable practices, the numbers of questionable academic publications have increased considerably [1]. In 2012, Beall began publishing regular blog postings on journals and publishers he deemed predatory, a list of journals to exclude that quickly grew in size, commonly called “Beall’s list.”. He shut down the blog in January 2017, several archived versions are available. There are no generally accepted criteria of what makes a journal predatory This can pose a problem as both Beall’s list and its various replacements are not always clear in their definition of what makes a journal predatory or what a specific journal or publisher has done to gain entry to the list [3]. But not exclusively, linked to open access publishing models, and an earlier reference to the proliferation of these journals linked the gold open access model of publishing to the rise in these questionable journals [4]
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