Citation

Severin A, Low N. Int. J. Public Health 2019; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Bern, Mittelstrasse 43, 3012, Bern, Switzerland. nicola.low@ispm.unibe.ch.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s00038-019-01284-3

PMID

31342093

Abstract

Publishing in predatory journals has been described as a “waste of people, animals and money” (Moher et al. 2017). Because predatory journals were assumed not to be indexed in well-known academic search engines and citation databases, it was assumed that their publications would rarely be cited by other scholars or be applied in practice. But publications in these scientifically questionable journals have already infiltrated citation databases such as PubMed (United States National Library of Medicine) and Scopus (Elsevier) (Manca et al. 2017a, b; Cortegiani et al. 2019). Many initiatives aimed at combating predatory journals have focused on reducing submissions by warning researchers not to publish in them. With citation databases already contaminated, researchers, academic institutions, journals, publishers and research funders will need additional strategies to prevent the further spread of predatory publications.

Researchers and authors should now all be aware of the term ‘predatory journal’, but might not know how they work. Publishers of predatory journals are businesses that reap profits by ignoring scientific integrity (Pai and Franco 2016). They exploit the online open access model of publication, which aims to make research findings freely available to all and to allow authors to retain copyright of their work. Predatory publishers operate large numbers of online ‘journals’ that offer to publish articles in return for a fee, but do not conduct the kind of peer review, or offer the editorial services, expected from legitimate journal publishers (Frandsen 2019). Indeed, many of their practices are fraudulent. In April 2019, the predatory publisher OMICS Group was fined USD50 million for deceptive business practices including falsely claiming peer review, listing scientists as journal editors without their knowledge, using fake impact factors and unauthorised use of logos implying that journals were indexed in the US National Library of Medicine PubMedCentral and Medline (Timmer 2019).

There are potentially serious consequences of scientifically questionable publications being indexed in well-known citation databases. Manuscripts in predatory journals that do not undergo rigorous quality control are more likely than those published in legitimate journals to have inadequate standards of reporting of methods, results and of approval from research ethics committees (Moher et al. 2017). Researchers might base their research activities on poor-quality, unethical or even fabricated findings and cite these in their own publications, thereby further disseminating untrustworthy evidence.

Language: en