https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4888-2367
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Abstract
This study examines factors associated with journals’ violations of scholarly ethics, referred to as predatory practices. The investigation uses a sample of economics journals listed in Cabells’ Predatory Reports with data collected from this report and the journals’ websites. Journals in this sample (average age 6.6 years) committed, on average, 7.1 predatory practices (1.9 minor, 3.3 moderate, and 1.9 severe). Notably, 90.5% of journals had a website but only 53.4% made articles accessible. India (27%), U.S. and Canada (22.3%), Nigeria (16%), and China (8.1%) were the leading locations of predatory journals. By applying Poisson regression, we examine whether web presence, accessibility of articles, journal’s age, and journal’s region help explain the number and types of predatory practices. All these factors are statistically associated with the number of minor predatory practices followed by these journals. Further, a journal’s age and region relate to the number of both moderate and severe predatory practices, unambiguously signaling deceptive and unethical publishing practices. Economics journals from India (China) have more (less) predatory practices than other regions. The results suggest that as journals age, they tend to move across types of predatory practices, which may make journals appear less predatory.
Disclosure statement
All the authors declare no conflict of interest.
Notes
1 Cabells’ Scholarly Analytics currently identifies more than 13,000 predatory journals. More discussion on Cabells is provided below.
2 This database was previously known as Cabell’s Blacklist. On June 8, 2020, Cabells renamed the database to Predatory Reports, “in support of, and in solidarity with, the fight against systemic racism that our country is facing.” (Bisaccio, Citation2020).
3 The lists, however, have been “maintained” since then by other persons.
4 The Beall list had two subsets, one of publishers and a second for standalone journals. Xia (Citation2015) examined all journals in the standalone list as of February 2014.
5 Shen and Bjork (Citation2015) used both subsets of the Beall list, publishers and standalone journals, as of September 2014 to determine the sample size for their study.
6 Given our resources available at the time of data collection, we decided to collect data of about one third (35%) of all economics predatory journals listed in Cabell’s Predatory Reports, assuming that the total number of journals in the database were uniformly distributed across journal names’ first letter (i.e., there is a similar number of journals with a name starting with A than starting with B or other letter). Indeed, we later confirmed the total number of economics predatory journals in the database as of the end of 2020 were 346, meaning that our sample contains about 43% of the total number of economics predatory journals in the database.
7 In cases on which Cabells did not provide the journal’s first year of publication, this was obtained, when available, from the journal’s website.
8 The data collection in Cabells was done by the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018. Since then, Cabells has extended the predatory practices to a total of 74 by splitting into more than one a predatory practice in the initial database and by adding newly identified predatory practices.
9 One plausible explanation for this finding is that publishers of older predatory journals tend to hide their identity. For instance, the following violations, indicated in Appendix 1, are practices that predatory journals might commit as they become older: (1) there is no way to contact the journal, (2) the journal’s website does not identify a physical address for the publisher or gives a fake address, or (3) the publisher or its journals are not listed in standard periodical directories.