Abstract
The extent of publishing in predatory journals in economics is examined. A simple model of researcher behavior is presented to explore those factors motivating an academic to publish in predatory journals as defined by Beall (Criteria for determining predatory open access publishers, Unpublished document, 3rd edn, 2015. https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/). Beall’s lists are used to identify predatory journals included in the Research Papers in Economics archives. The affiliations of authors publishing in these outlets indicate that the geographic dispersion of authorship is widespread. A very small subset of authors is registered on RePEc. A surprising number of authors who are in the RePEc top 5% also published in predatory journals in 2015.
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Notes
Shen and Björk (2015), p. 1.
More formally he characterizes journals and publishers as “potentially, possibly or probably predatory.” Reflecting common usage, we will use the term ‘predatory journal’ to describe a journal either on his list of stand-alone journals or from a publisher on his publisher list at the time of data collection in late 2015 and early 2016. An attempt was made to consult Beall’s lists on January 17, 2017. Although the format of the page remained the same, the lists had disappeared and were replaced with the message “[t]his service is no longer available.” The most recent versions of Beall’s lists are archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20170112125427/https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172309/https://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/.
For example, Pyne mentions an article in a journal from a predatory publisher that is cited as evidence of a conspiracy in the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001.
All the journals in our data set follow the ‘gold’ open access model, that is articles are available without charge on the journal’s website. Reference to open access herein should be understood to mean the ‘gold’ model. Graziotin et al. (2014) discuss the various open access options.
Djuric (2015), p.184. The portion of Thomson Reuters Corporation that produced impact factors was sold in 2016; Clarivate Analytics now publishes the measures.
Given the large number of papers in the PLoS journals they started with the first issue of each and compiled the author characteristics, stopping once they had data for 300 authors.
An article processing charge (APC), a fee charged by the journal after acceptance of a paper, is uncommon in economics and other business fields. The referee noted that APCs are the norm in open access computer science journals, while traditional journals in the field charge neither a submission fee nor an APC.
Beall’s blog cited a particularly egregious case of a paper originally written by Mazières and Kohler (2005), but all blog posts have also disappeared from Beall’s website. We thank Nick Sisto for making us aware of the paper. A summary of events may be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Journal_of_Advanced_Computer_Technology.
Allowing for the fact that some papers do not get published anywhere would not materially affect the results.
There are low quality journals that are not predatory in which many scholars appear to have a high probability of getting an article published. We are aware of one such journal with a published acceptance rate of around 25%, although most of the scholars we know have almost certainty in acceptance of their papers. If the published acceptance rate is accurate, there must be many papers submitted to these journals that are truly low quality. Such journals fall under our category of ‘good.’.
One way to justify this assumption is to suppose there is a fixed cost of producing high quality papers, a cost for which a university compensates a professor. For example, summer research support may be taken away if a sufficient number of good journal articles is not produced.
Card and DellaVigna (2013) find that acceptance rates have fallen at the American Economic Review (from 13.8 to 8.1%), Econometrica (from 27.1 to 8.5%), and the Journal of Political Economy (from 13.3 to 4.8%) between 1976 and 1980 and 2011–2012.
We do not wish to direct attention to any specific accreditation body so we have altered the terms used and simplified the requirements to some extent. However, the scenario fits our experiences and those of colleagues in other institutions.
Note that the reward to cost ratio required for the university to meet the standard depends only on the lowest quality faculty member needed to meet the minimum share, not the others. More concretely, 7 of 10 faculty members could have θ = 1, but the eighth having \( \theta = \frac{1}{5} \) (with the other two of still lower quality) must be compensated sufficiently for the accreditation standards to be met.
Any journal from a publisher on Beall’s list is considered predatory in this study. A list of journals is shown in Table 3 of the appendix. The criteria used by Beall was downloaded from https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ but, as with all other postings on that site, is no longer available online.
The use of Cabell’s directory for screening journals occurred before Cabell’s began to publish a blacklist of journals that violate its behavioral standards. The journals in our data set did not appear in what Cabell’s now refers to as the whitelist of journals, i.e. those that satisfy its criteria.
Dates of initial submission and acceptance appear on some published papers that were examined during the course of data collection, and reinforce the notion of less-than-thorough referee reviews by the predatory journals. Many papers that were individually examined had been accepted within a month or less of the initial submission. One paper had been submitted just 2 days before acceptance. What papers are rejected by these journals? Our conjecture is that some papers are so poorly written in English that they can quickly be rejected after an editor reads a small portion of the paper.
Fifteen of the twenty-seven journals in our data set appear on Cabell’s recently published blacklist. The number and nature of the behavioral violations committed by each journal are shown on the blacklist.
A colleague wondered whether bias might exclude Iranian academics from authorship in reputable journals restricting them to publishing in predatory outlets. Although we are skeptical of this conjecture, it cannot be rejected by the data.
Data collection for the subset of registered authors began on July 9 and ended on July 25, 2016. Each author’s publications appearing on RePEc were reviewed to collect the additional information on publications. A count was made of the number of publications in predatory journals for each individual, regardless of the date. Thus the number of papers published in predatory journals includes those from 2015 as well as publications prior to 2015 and some in 2016.
We assume that most registered authors have doctorates. The referee noted that standards for obtaining a Ph.D. differ across fields; in some disciplines one or more publications is a requirement of graduation.
Alternatively the number of publications could be used as a proxy for research experience. Twenty-one registered authors have more than forty published papers, a group we regard as highly experienced.
To their credit, those who manage RePEc are aware of these issues and taking steps to address them. A recent post on the RePEc blog requests a volunteer to head a committee on journal quality.
References
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Mazières, D. & Kohler, E. (2005). Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List, Unpublished paper. Downloaded on May 20, 2016 from https://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11/20/bogus-journal-accepts-profanity-laced-anti-spam-paper/.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the anonymous referee for thoughtful and useful comments. For their helpful remarks and suggestions we thank the participants in the Crime and Microeconomic Topics session at the Western Economics Association meetings in Portland, Oregon, June 29 to July 3, 2016. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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Appendix 1: data collection
Appendix 1: data collection
A list of journals showing the RePEc aggregate ranking for the last 10 years was downloaded on December 13, 2015. The list contained 1642 journals and the identities of each journal’s publisher. The RePEc list was reviewed to find journals or publishers appearing on Beall’s lists of predatory publishers or journals. Thirty-nine journals from eighteen different publishers on the RePEc list are considered predatory in Beall’s classification. The journals are listed in Table 3.
In response to comments regarding the alleged subjectivity of Beall’s lists, we searched in the DOAJ, OASPA, and Cabell’s directory for those journals/publishers indexed in RePEc and appearing on Beall’s lists. None of the predatory journals are in Cabell’s, and none of the publishers are members of the OASPA. Nine of the thirty-nine journals in our data set have passed muster by DOAJ acceptance criteria and remain in the directory. As noted in the main body of the paper, eight other predatory journals in our data set were originally in the DOAJ but were removed for failing to adhere to DOAJ standards.
After identification of the predatory journals, authors and titles of papers published in each journal in 2015 and appearing on RePEc were pasted into an Excel file on December 27, 2015. Over the next 2 months, each available 2015 issue of each predatory journal was reviewed to identify the affiliations of authors and, in cases of authors registered on RePEc, other characteristics of their publication records. By the time some journals were reviewed, additional issues of the journal had appeared on RePEc. In such instances the new information was not incorporated into the data set. Thus the data file generally does not include all papers published in 2015 by each journal, and journals/publishers that promptly submit issues to RePEc will be overrepresented in the data set compared to those that delay their submissions.
Due to variations in lags between publication of an issue and its appearance on RePEc, the data set excludes some predatory journals listed on RePEc. Twelve journals had no 2015 issues on RePEc when the data were compiled, so the final data set includes twenty-seven predatory journals with publications in 2015. Of these twenty-seven journals, the number of 2015 papers from each journal ranges from one to two hundred and thirty-six for a total of 1284 published papers in predatory journals.
We began this study with an implicit assumption that a journal listed in Research Papers in Economics is an economics journal. However, the titles of many articles and journals suggest that not all authors are economists. One of the characteristics used by Jeffrey Beall to identify a predatory publisher is that the journal is “excessively broad … to attract more articles,” (Beall 2015). Thus published papers outside the usual scope of economics do appear in the data set.
Two characteristics of each author were identified from the initial examination of papers: the country in which the author’s affiliated institution is located, and whether the author is registered on RePEc. If registered, the number of each author’s publications appearing on RePEc is recorded. There are 2774 authors in the data set. Note that there are individual authors with more than one paper in the data set for predatory journals, so the total number of authors exceeds the number of individuals. Variations in how an author’s name might appear on a paper led us to forgo any attempt to determine the number of different authors in the overall data set. However, we also examine more closely the much smaller subset of RePEc registered authors, and readdress this issue. This portion of the data collection process was completed on February 28, 2016.
Data collection for the subset of registered authors began on July 9 and ended on July 25, 2016. Each author’s RePEc publications were reviewed to collect the additional information on publications. Counts were made of the number of publications in predatory journals for each individual, and of total journal publications.
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Wallace, F.H., Perri, T.J. Economists behaving badly: publications in predatory journals. Scientometrics 115, 749–766 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2690-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2690-1