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Predatory publishing is a growing and global issue infecting all scientific domains. Predatory publishers create counterfeit, not (properly) peer-reviewed journals to exploit the open access (OA) model in which the author pays. The plethora of predatory marketing journals along with the sophisticated deceptive practices of their publishers may create total confusion. One of the many highly likely risks of that bewilderment is when peer-reviewed, prestigious marketing journals cite these pseudo-marketing journals. This phenomenon is called citation contamination. This study aims to investigate the extent of citation contamination in the peer-reviewed marketing literature.

Using Google Scholar as a citation gathering tool, this study investigates references to four predatory marketing journals in 68 peer-reviewed marketing journals listed in the 2018 version of the Academic Journal Guide by the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABSs).

Results indicate that 59 of the 68 CABS-ranked peer-reviewed marketing journals were, up to late January 2021, contaminated by at least one of the four sampled predatory journals. Together, these four pseudo-journals received (at least) 605 citations. Findings from nonparametric statistical procedures show that citation contamination occurred irrespective of the age of a journal or its 2019 Journal Impact Factor (JIF). They also point out that citation contamination happened independently from the fact that a journal is recognized by Clarivate Analytics or not.

This study investigated citations to only four predatory marketing journals in only 68 CABS-listed peer-reviewed marketing journals.

These findings should sound an alarm to the entire marketing community (including academics and practitioners). To counteract citation contamination, recommendations are provided for researchers, practitioners, journal editors and academic and professional associations.

This study is the first to offer a systematic assessment of references to predatory journals in the peer-reviewed marketing literature.

Although many in academe have speculated about the effects of pressure to publish on the management discipline – often referred to as “publish or perish” – prevailing knowledge has been based on anecdotal rather than empirical evidence. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the perceptions of management faculty regarding the pressure to publish imperative.

The authors surveyed faculty in 104 management departments of AACSB accredited, research‐oriented US business schools to explore the prevalence, sources, and effects of pressure to publish.

Results indicate that pressure to publish affects both tenured and tenure‐track management faculty, although the latter, as a group, feel significantly more pressure than those who are tenured. The primary source of this pressure is faculty themselves who are motivated by the prospects of enhancing their professional reputation, leaving a permanent mark on their profession, and increasing their salary and job mobility. The effects of pressure to publish include heightened stress levels; the marginalization of teaching; and research that may lack relevance, creativity, and innovation.

The sample was intentionally restricted to faculty from management departments affiliated with research‐oriented US business schools and does not include faculty from departments that are less research‐oriented and, therefore, would be expected to put less pressure on their faculty to publish.

Although the effects of pressure to publish are not necessarily always negative, the paper offers some fundamental suggestions to management (and other) faculty who wish to mitigate the deleterious effects of pressure to publish.

Although the findings may not be surprising to more seasoned faculty, to the authors' knowledge this is the first time they have been documented in the published literature. As such, they advance discussions of “publish or perish” beyond mere conjecture and “shared myths” allowing management faculty to more rationally debate its consequences and their implications for academic life.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the sources and qualities of information on climate change commissioned by the US Congress from its affiliated research bodies.

Cited material in reports commissioned by Congress from three legislative research bodies were categorized and tallied for the years 1990‐2005. Qualities of cited material, such as indicators of primary‐level data analysis and references to peer‐reviewed academic scholarship were considered.

Of the three agencies, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) makes reference to peer‐reviewed academic scholarship most often. Nevertheless, only around a quarter of all cited material in CBO reports are from academic journals and comparatively few cites are to articles in top‐tier journals. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) cites its own past publications more often than it cites peer‐reviewed scholarship.

Refereed academic journals are not the only source of rigorous scientific information in the reference materials used by the three legislative research bodies. Primary‐level data are found in governmental gray literature, and these data are analyzed by the legislative research bodies in their reports to Congress. The research bodies also make use of peer‐reviewed research by private research organizations, though these latter materials may not be published in academic journals. Further research is needed to determine whether and to what extent the legislative research bodies' reports are consequential in shaping lawmakers' deliberations versus other sources of information and persuasion, e.g. reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, news reportage, constituent perspectives, witness testimony in hearings, campaign contributions, etc.

Legislative research organizations are official conveyors of policy‐relevant information to Congress. It is reasonable to expect these organizations to provide competent analyses derived from peer‐reviewed science. The present paper suggests that commissioned reports by these organizations vary in terms of the range of source materials relied on, but reference materials are seldom derived from top‐tier academic journals. At least one research body, the CRS, frequently refers to its own reports as a major source for information on climate change. Two out of three of the legislative support bodies make greater use of governmental gray literature versus academic scholarship.

References to purported shortcomings in the legislative research bodies' technical/analytical capacities exist in the public affairs literature, but are anecdotal. The present paper offers an empirical exploration of this concern, focusing on the most important environmental problem of the time.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether preprint servers are a disruptive technology for science, librarians or information seeking among the general population.

This column explores what preprint servers are, how they are used in the world of science, how their usage changed in response to the deluge of COVID-19 related research papers and how they might impact the work of librarians and society in general.

Preprint servers are not a highly disruptive technology, but they do challenge both scientists and librarians to understand them better, use the information they find on them with care and educate society in general on topics such as peer review and the importance of using well-vetted, good quality science in making important decisions.

Up until the past year and a half, only a small segment of the librarian profession needed to be concerned with preprint servers. With the increasing presence of references to non-peer-reviewed articles from preprint servers in popular media reports, most librarians now need to know something about this technology. It is also useful to consider how the technology might benefit and create challenges for their work.

The aim of this study is to examine how reviewers for academic journals learn to carry out the task of peer review and the issues they face in doing this.

A total of 45 reviewers completed a questionnaire which asked about their experience in doing peer reviews, how they had learnt to do them, and the issues they faced in doing these reviews. Follow up emails were also sent to reviewers in order to seek further elaboration on the answers they had provided in the questionnaire.

Over half of the reviewers had learnt to do reviews by reading reviews of their own submissions to peer‐reviewed journals. Others had learnt to write reviews by just doing them; that is, by practice. The most challenging aspect for the reviewers was writing reviewers' reports that were critical but still constructive. There was no consensus on the most straightforward aspects of writing peer reviews.

The study has implications for reviewer development, proposing an experiential, “learning by doing” approach to the training of reviewers rather than a didactic, information transmission style one.

The study has implications for reviewer development, proposing an experiential, “learning by doing” approach to the training of reviewers rather than a didactic, information transmission style one.

The study provides insights into how reviewers learn to write peer reviews and the challenges they face in doing this. The paper also suggests strategies for improving reviewer development which can have benefits, especially for early career researchers.

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) continually edges toward the mainstream of Western medicine. This is due in large part to the increasing trend of research and publication in peer‐reviewed journals of the medical mainstream and the establishment of government sponsored initiatives such as the US National Institute of Health’s National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This article reviews online sources of CAM information, including English language databases, print publications and CAM clearinghouses. It is not an exhaustive review, but examines CAM resources that are easily accessible in the online environment. Where appropriate, comments about efficacy, accuracy and applicability are included.

The purpose of this paper is two‐fold: to explore the intellectual core of the knowledge management (KM) academic discipline in order to test whether it exhibits signs of a reference discipline; and to analyze the theoretical and practical impact of the discipline.

The most influential articles published in the Journal of Knowledge Management were selected and their cited and citing works were scientometrically analysed.

The KM discipline: builds its knowledge primarily upon research reports published in the English language; successfully disseminates its knowledge in both English and non‐English publications; does not exhibit a problematic self‐citation behavior; uses books and practitioner journals in the development of KM theory; converts experiential knowledge into academic knowledge; is not yet a reference discipline, but is progressing well towards becoming one; exerts a somewhat limited direct impact on practice; and is not a scientific fad.

KM researchers need to become aware of and use knowledge published in non‐English outlets. Given the status of KM as an applied discipline, it is critical that researchers continue utilizing non‐peer reviewed sources in their scholarly work. KM researchers should promote the dissemination of KM knowledge beyond the disciplinary boundaries. The issue whether KM should strive towards becoming a reference discipline should be debated further.

This study analyzes the KM field from the reference discipline perspective.

In editorial peer review systems of journals, one does not always accept the best papers. Due to different human perceptions, the evaluation of papers by peer review (for a journal) can be different from the impact that a paper has after its publication (measured by number of citations received) in this or another journal. This system (and corresponding problems) is similar to the information retrieval process in a documentary system. Also there, one retrieves not always the most relevant documents for a certain topic. This is so because the topic is described in the command language of the documentary system and this command does not always completely cover the “real topic” that one wants to describe. This paper aims to address this issue.

Based on this statement classical information retrieval evaluation techniques were applied to the evaluation of peer review systems. Basic in such an information retrieval evaluation are the notions of precision and recall and the precision‐recall‐curve. Such notions are introduced here for the evaluation of peer review systems.

The analogues of precision and recall are defined and their curve constructed based on peer review data from the journal Angewandte Chemie – International Edition and on citation impact data of accepted papers by this journal or rejected but published elsewhere papers. It is concluded that, due to the imperfect peer review process (based on human evaluation), if we want to publish a high amount of qualified papers (the ones we seek), several non‐qualified papers should also be accepted.

The authors conclude that, due to the imperfect peer review process (based on human evaluation), if we want to publish a high amount of qualified papers (the ones we seek), one will also accept several non‐qualified papers.

The key purpose of this study is to gain an insight into the quality of the scholarly publishing and refereeing system used by Emerald’s Library and Information Science (LIS) journals from the perspectives of the Arab authors who are publishing in this wide-ranging database. It also tries to provide helpful guidance for authors to fit their authorship for publication.

Of the total 3,846 papers published in Emerald’s LIS journals in the past five years (the beginning of 2011 to the end of 2015), there were only 81 papers (research/technical/conceptual papers and case studies only) authored by Arabs, representing 2.11 per cent of the whole productivity in the discipline of the LIS in Emerald in this period. Corresponding authors (mostly first authors) (n = 73) were contacted to answer the questionnaire of the study. Five of those 73 authors could not be reached because of the lack of validity of their e-mails. Out of the remaining authors (n = 68), 47 returned their valid questionnaires, representing 69.1 per cent of the total number of the Arab authors.

This study revealed that the Arab male authors dominated (78.7 per cent) the publishing in Emerald’s LIS journals in the past five years. Two-thirds of the Arab authors are aged between 36 to 45 years (mostly males with doctoral degrees), followed by those authors (17 per cent) who are aged between 46 to 50 years (mostly males with doctoral degrees) and by those authors (12.8 per cent) aged between 31 to 35 years (all are males and half of them hold a doctorate). The study also found that there was a direct proportionality between the Arab authors’ research experience with the history of publishing in Emerald’s LIS journals because the more research experience they have, the greater the number of their research history of publishing in Emerald. Assistant Professors (44.7 per cent) were found to be the group most frequently publishing in Emeralds’ LIS journals with research experience ranging between 11 and 20 years (mainly with a publishing history of five years), followed by lectures with research experience ranging between 1 and 20 years (mostly with a publishing history of five years) and then associate professors with research experience ranging between 11 and 20 years (mostly with a publishing history of ten years). The findings also found that most Arab authors (80.9 per cent) publishing in Emerald’s LIS journals preferred the sole or single authorship. The co-authorship or co-authored works were not much preferred by many of them. A large number (87.2 per cent) of the Arab authors, who are mainly described as experts and advanced authors in using the Emerald refereeing system, see this system, at least, as good. Regarding the reasons/factors to submit articles to Emerald’s LIS journals, this study revealed that the availability of papers in electronic formats, the journal’s impact factor, the association with the research area, the academic coverage of the journal, abstracting and indexing services, the availability in hard copy, the speed of reviewing, the size of readership, the ease of acceptance and the standing of the editorial board were the most significant reasons and factors to submit articles papers for publication in Emerald. The Arab authors in this study have shown considerable positive attitude and perceptions towards the publishing in Emerald’s LIS journals because all of them, at least, agree that publishing in Emerald can increase the speed of finding information and reduce the use of papers. A very large number of them also showed that such publishing may also help create a wider spread, build confidence, be convenient, secure credibility and be objective. Compared to their positive attitude and perceptions towards the publishing in Emerald’s LIS journals, Arab authors had little negative feelings about the publishing in these journals. A few of them (8.5 per cent) have shown a considerable concern about the time it takes in reviewing their articles because they reported that such publishing requires a long time for the peer review process, and it also needs long communications with the editorial staff; this may affect negatively on the time of the research topic. Not being their first language, a few Arab authors (8.5 per cent) have also shown a considerable concern about the use of English being the publishing language in Emerald, as it requires certain skills needed not only to publish their articles but also to deal with the Emerald system and communicate with editorial staff. Overall, this small percentage did not affect the rest of the authors who described their concerns about this obstacle as modest to some extent. Although there is a lot of enthusiasm for publication in Emerald showed by the Arab authors, there have been also some concerns expressed by them towards that goal. A modest number of the Arab authors suggested that the lack of language skills needed for publishing in Emerald, followed by the lack of patience needed to wait for issuing papers, the technical problems related to the system and its interface and the lack of technical skills needed for publishing, as well as the time needed to be online, were significant to them when looking to publish in Emerald.

The paper investigates the quality of the scholarly publishing and refereeing system used in Emerald’s LIS journals from the perspectives of Arab authors who are publishing in this wide-ranging database. Such topic, to date, has limited previous research, as well as the limited size of the representation of the Arab authors in Emerald’s LIS journals in the past five years, which is due logically to the lack of their research and scientific contributions in this database during this period. Future research could focus on varied contexts or samples, such as other different disciplines and nationalities.

The paper provides valuable insight into the perception about the Emerald’s peer review quality by a very significant client group – academic researchers representing 22 Arab countries.

This study is to be the first one of its kind conducted by one of the Arab authors who has published in Emerald’s LIS journals. Being one of the few studies about the scholarly communication/productivity/collaboration of Arab authors in these journals, this study considers a pioneer one among many studies conducted in scholarly communication, especially with Arab authors.