Search results

Scientific publishing has recently faced challenges in dealing with questionable (predatory and hijacked) journals. The presence of questionable journals in any field, including management science, will yield junk science. Although there are studies about questionable journals in other fields, these journals have not yet been examined in the field of business and management. This study aims to identify facilitators and barriers to dealing with questionable journals in management science.

A Delphi research method consisting of three rounds was used in this study. Data were collected from 12 experts in the first two rounds, and ten experts in the final round.

The present study shows that management science is vulnerable to questionable journals. A total of 18 barriers and eight facilitators to dealing with questionable journals in management science were found. The present study also identifies some new barriers and facilitators for avoiding questionable journals, which are specific to management science and have not been identified in previous research. Most of these barriers and facilitators were identified as “important” or “very important”. Publishers and scientific databases, government, the research community and universities and research centers were identified as critical players in overcoming challenges posed by questionable journals.

The number of articles that investigate predatory journals in management science is limited, and there is no research focused specifically on hijacked journals in this field. This study identifies facilitators and obstacles to dealing with predatory and hijacked journals in the field of management, by gathering opinions from experts. Thus it is the first study to examine hijacked journals in the field of management science. It is also one of the few studies that examine predatory and hijacked journals by conducting exploratory research rather than with a descriptive/conceptual approach.

Implementation of research evaluation policies based on neoliberal orientations of performativity has transformed higher education institutions globally, reshaping academic work and the academic profession. Most lately, the mantra of “publish or no degree” has become the norm in many contexts. There has been little empirical research into the unintended consequences of this neoliberal academic performativity for inexperienced researchers. This article focuses on the role institutional research evaluation policies play on doctoral students and early-career doctoral graduates’ publication practices and on their decision to sometimes publish in journals with ethically “questionable” publishing standards in particular through the concept of figured worlds.

The study was conducted in a higher education setting employing a variety of research incentive schemes to boost research productivity where “publish or no degree” policy is the norm. It employs qualitative approach and involves in-depth interviews with nine doctoral students and seven early career academics who have been working part-time or full-time for five years following PhD completion.

Findings demonstrate publishing in journals with ethically “questionable” publishing standards is not always simply the result of naivety or inexperience. Some authors choose these journals in order to retain a sense of self-efficacy in the face of rejection by more highly ranked journals. Under institutional pressure to publish, they are socialized into this “shadow academia” through (existing) academic networks, conferences and journal special issues.

It is often assumed that scholars are trapped into “questionable” journals through the use of unsolicited emails. This paper challenges this assumption by demonstrating the crucial role research evaluation policies based on neoliberal orientations of performativity and contextual dynamics play on the publication practices of doctoral students and early-career doctoral graduates on their decision to submit to journals with “questionable” publication practices. It introduces the concept of unethical publication brokering, an informal network of ties promising fast and easy publication in outlets that “count”.

The purpose of this paper is to share the author’s experience as an academic librarian for innovation services in library clinic of Universitas Sebelas Maret, Indonesia. The emergence of the predatory journals, which have trapped victims, takes the role of the librarian as an information manager through the expertise’s required to become practicing professionals in implementing the knowledge, skills and experience.

The author draws upon own personal experiences as an academic librarian and presents evidence acquired through observations and conversations. This paper conducts a thorough literature review on how to implement innovation in library clinic services.

There are many academicians who have not been aware of the existence of predatory journals and many have been stuck into. Through the efforts of the library clinic, innovation will arise the ability to grasp information literacy and apply critical thinking skills.

Education and literacy as a key to the way to avoid mistakes in choosing an online journal. Hopefully, the library clinic services will minimize or avoid academicians to conduct transactions on the predatory journals.

The purpose of this paper is to link up and think through two bodies of literature, namely the critique of predatory publishing practices and the critique of political economy of established publishers, while introducing a reflection on the dynamic asymmetries of geopolitics and economics of globalizing knowledge production.

The authors deploy a conceptual approach developed with reference to a case study in order to explore the embedded logic of the current system of academic publishing.

The analysis shows that rather than examining two seemingly different issues (predatory publishing vs established publishers) as conflictual dualism, it is more productive to conceive them in associative and mutually constitutive fashion.

A nuanced and multidimensional research approach is needed if we are to understand the dynamics of contemporary academic landscape.

The originality of the contribution lies in its problematizing of three established approaches that feature debates on the transformation of the academy. It moves beyond a micro-level explanation by (the lack of) individual morality as well as a structural explanatory framework preoccupied with publishing infrastructure and culturalist approach based on ready-made dichotomies of west/north vs south/east. Instead, the analysis provides an account that engages both with morality and geopolitics whilst tackling them as dynamic processes in making.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how predatory journals use spam emails to manipulate potential authors. This has been done based on McCornack’s information manipulation theory (IMT). Generally, predatory publishing is on the increase globally but more pronounced in developing countries. Although it affects both young and seasoned scholars, inexperienced scholars and those ignorant on credible publishing are the most affected.

The current study through document analysis focuses on email invites from predatory journals sent to the author between June 2016 and December 2018 after publishing a peer-reviewed journal article. The resultant texts were analysed using a directed qualitative content analysis.

Findings indicate that the invites flouted all the four Gricean maxims (of quality, quantity, manner and relevance) as posited by IMT. This suggests that the spam mails sent to the author sought to manipulate potential authors to publish with predatory journals.

This qualitative study focuses on email invites to the author which may not fully capture the manipulation by predatory journals.

It is important that scholars in developing contexts are aware of how predatory publishers seek to manipulate their victims. Universities and research institutions should be intentional in enlightening their academic staff on predatory journals and their characteristics. Similarly, universities should consider disincentivising their faculty members who publish in such platforms.

The originality in this study lies in its use of IMT to explain how predatory journals manipulate potentials authors.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss questionable research practices (QRPs) in business research, particularly in the logistics and supply chain management discipline, in light of antecedents influenced by the current academic environment and the consequences for academic rigour and relevance to stimulate thinking and debate among the academic community.

A literature review and autoethnographic approach were used to examine these issues based on over 60 years’ collective academic experience of the authors. Data were collected from discussions among the paper’s authors as well as recounting open discussions with other academics and journal editors to collate their observations.

Evidence is provided of issues the authors have seen first-hand where antecedents in the academic environment influences QRPs, which then detrimentally affect research rigour and relevance, integrity and proper contributions to ground-breaking research and knowledge advancement.

This paper is based on personal observations and experiences of the three authors as well as open-ended discussions with others in the academic community. Suggestions are provided for various academic stakeholders to address these issues.

Practical implications are only provided for academics in their roles as authors, journal editors and reviewers.

Encouraging the academic community to eliminate QRPs to improve the rigour, relevance and quality of research will provide more credibility and integrity resulting in better impact and outcomes for society at large.

The value of this paper is in stimulating thinking and debate among academics to return to core issues and values in academia opposed to focusing on narrow university goals focussed on other antecedents of QRPs.

This is a comparative investigation of how university libraries in the United States, Canada and Spanish-speaking Latin America are responding to predatory publishing.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings was used to identify the top ten universities from each of the US and Canada, as well as the top 20 Spanish-language universities in Latin America. Each university library's website was scrutinized to discover whether the libraries employed scholarly communication librarians, whether they offered scholarly communication workshops, or whether they shared information about scholarly communication on their websites. This information was further examined to determine if it discussed predatory publishing specifically.

Most libraries in the US/Canada sample employ scholarly communication librarians and nearly half offer workshops on predatory publishing. No library in the Latin America sample employed a scholarly communication specialist and just one offered a workshop addressing predatory publishing. The websites of the libraries in the US and Canada addressed predatory publishing both indirectly and directly, with US libraries favoring the former approach and Canadian libraries tending towards the latter. Predatory publishing was rarely addressed directly by the libraries in the Latin America sample; however, all discussed self-archiving and/or Open Access.

Brazilian universities were excluded owing to the researchers' language limitations. Data were collected between September 15 and 30, 2019, so it represents a snapshot of information available at that time. The study was limited to an analysis of library websites using a fixed set of keywords, and it did not investigate whether other campus units were involved or whether other methods of informing researchers about predatory publishing were being used.

The study reveals some best practices leading to recommendations to help academic libraries combat predatory publishing and improve scholarly publishing literacy among researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to present results of a survey of Croatian academic libraries’ user education about open access (OA)-related issues. The concept of OA literacy will be explained, and the term will be put in the context of information literacy (IL) and scholarly communication.

An anonymous online questionnaire was sent to all the Croatian academic libraries with the aim to find out if libraries are involved in OA and to learn about plans for user education about the aspect of IL that is important for using OA information.

Almost all the libraries are involved in OA publishing, either through OA repositories or through OA journals. However, 22 per cent of the libraries do not educate their users about OA. Two most important IL skills in the context of OA are finding OA information and understanding OA citation advantage. Academic libraries in Croatia mostly recognize the questionable publishers as a threat for OA. However, 40 per cent of libraries do not plan any form of education about OA literacy.

The results of this research can be a basis for creating programmes of user education in academic libraries. Some problems are recognized, some skills are identified and further steps could be undertaken to improve academic library users’ OA literacy skills.

The research results contribute to understanding the importance of academic libraries in developing OA literacy of their users. The paper gives results of a survey of Croatian academic libraries and some new perspectives for authors, readers and libraries on how to evaluate OA sources using OA literacy skills.

Citation analysis as a method for studying scientific communication is frequently criticized for being based on biased citation practices. Questionable motives for the reference selection have been suggested including the claim that authors tend to cite hot papers in order to show-off. In this study, the authors investigate the claim that authors tend to cite the recent literature in order to show-off.

Following Moed and Garfield (2004), the authors investigate the claim by analyzing the proportion of recent references as a function of the length of the reference lists of citing papers. The authors analyze reference lists of citing papers in the fields of biomedical engineering, economics, medicine, psychology and library and information science between 2010 and 2019. From each of these fields, a number of journals are included in the analysis to represent the field. In total, 42 journals are included in the analyses comprising a selection of almost 65,000 journal articles. The proportion of recent references is calculated using two citation windows. The proportion of recent references as a function of the length of the reference lists is calculated through simple linear regressions to predict the share of recent references based on the number of references.

The results of the linear regressions indicate that in most cases, there are a statistically significant relationship between the share of recent references and the number of references. This study’s results show that when authors display selective referencing behavior, references to the recent literature tend to be only marginally increased, and some results even display the opposite tendency (marginally overciting the older literature).

This study of the claim that authors tend to cite the recent literature in order to show-off does not confirm the hypothesis.

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.