Predatory publishing in Scopus: Evidence on cross-country differences

Abstract

Predatory publishing represents a major challenge to scholarly communication. This paper maps the infiltration of journals suspected of predatory practices into the citation database Scopus and examines cross-country differences in the propensity of scholars to publish in such journals. Using the names of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory journals and publishers on Beall’s lists, we derived the ISSNs of 3,293 journals from Ulrichsweb and searched Scopus with them. A total of 324 of journals that appear in both Beall’s lists and Scopus, with 164,000 articles published during 2015–2017 were identified. Analysis of data for 172 countries in four fields of research indicates that there is a remarkable heterogeneity. In the most affected countries, including Kazakhstan and Indonesia, around 17% of articles were published in the suspected predatory journals, while some other countries have no articles in this category whatsoever. Countries with large research sectors at the medium level of economic development, especially in Asia and North Africa, tend to be most susceptible to predatory publishing. Policy makers and stakeholders in these and other developing countries need to pay more attention to the quality of research evaluation.