The writing style of predatory publishers

Abstract

In 2010, librarian Jeffrey Beall started a list of journals that allegedly use predatory practices to recruit manuscripts for publication. Coined "Beall's List,"1 this working catalogue highlights over two hundred open- Access journals that may feign editorial processes, peerreview, or other procedures of a reputable publisher. Given the recent attention to scientific misconduct2-8, an important question is whether there are methods to detect predatory publishers from authentic ones. In this study, we apply an automated language analysis technique from the social sciences to examine how predatory and authentic journals differ in their writing style in the About Us and Aim/Scope sections of their websites. Compared to authentic journals, predatory journals use more discrepancy terms (e.g., "should" "would") and positive emotions (e.g., "exciting") but fewer function words, including articles (e.g., "a" "the"), and prepositions (e.g., "before" "in"), quantifiers (e.g., "more" "less"), and terms related to causality (e.g., "therefore"). These results follow recent patterns in the deception literature9-13, suggesting that language features may be useful when evaluating predatory versus authentic publishers. In addition to analyzing writing style, we examined meta-linguistic properties of predatory publishers (i.e., editorial statistics, website features, and contact information) from the same database of journals. Compared to authentic publishers, predatory publishers use more third-party email addresses, claim false impact factors, fake rapid peer review, and simulate academic expertise. This is the first study to investigate predatory publishing through an empirical social science lens and our results suggest that there are quantifiable linguistic and meta-linguistic indicators that can, to some degree, distinguish between predatory publishers and those journals that seek to publish honestly. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2013.