Page 5 - IDEA Studie 6 2017 Pod poklickou Beallovych seznamu

Study 6 / 2017
Inside Beall’s lists2
MAY 2017
Vít Macháček and Martin Srholec
Summary
 Predatory journals undermine the credibility of scholarly publishing. The worst of them print anything for money without conducting a proper peer review. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, on his blog maintained lists of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory journals and publishers. Beall’s lists became widely used in practice, as they represented the only comprehensive source of information for identifying predatory journals. Beall’s blog has been all of a sudden and without anexplanation shut down not long ago. Nevertheless, the problem of predatory publishing remains real and more pressing than ever. Admittedly, this development makes it even more pertinent to bring fresh evidence on this matter.
 The previous IDEA study on this topic showed that many suspected predatory journals have infiltrated the leading citation databases, but also indicated that some verdicts of Jeffrey Beall appear to be quite controversial (Macháček and Srholec 2016). Hence, it is worth looking more closely on which journals are actually implicated of predatory practices on his lists. The study is focused on the suspected predatory journals that are simultaneously indexed in Scopus. Predatory nature of the journals is assumed to be negatively correlated to their scholarly relevance in terms of the citation impact and the share of authors from countries with an advanced culture of research evaluation. The true predatory journals are not expected to be recognized by the global academic community.
 The analysis confirms that the vast majority of journals implicated on Beall’s lists are scholarly marginal and often quite weird, which gives credibility to the suspicion that they are using non-standard editorial practices. Academics, who are concerned about their professional reputation, should better stay away from them. However, there are also enlisted journals that may not be predatory in the true sense. In particular, the list
2 This study received support from the research programme Strategy AV21 of the Czech Academy of Sciences. We would like to thank Michael Kommi, Daniel Münich and Tereza Šimandlová for valuable comments and suggestions. Any inaccuracies, omissions or errors are however down to the autohors.
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