The citation impact of the Open Access accounting journals that appear on Beall's List of potentially predatory publishers and journals

Abstract

Although there are at least six dimensions of journal quality, Beall's List identifies predatory Open Access journals based almost entirely on their adherence to procedural norms. The journals identified as predatory by one standard may be regarded as legitimate by other standards. This study examines the scholarly impact of the 58 accounting journals on Beall's List, calculating citations per article and estimating CiteScore percentile using Google Scholar data for more than 13,000 articles published from 2015 through 2018. Most Beall's List accounting journals have only modest citation impact, with an average estimated CiteScore in the 11th percentile among Scopus accounting journals. Some have a substantially greater impact, however. Six journals have estimated CiteScores at or above the 25th percentile, and two have scores at or above the 30th percentile. Moreover, there is considerable variation in citation impact among the articles within each journal, and high-impact articles (cited up to several hundred times) have appeared even in some of the Beall's List accounting journals with low citation rates. Further research is needed to determine how well the citing journals are integrated into the disciplinary citation network—whether the citing journals are themselves reputable or not.