Fact-finding survey of predatory journal list

イデ, カズキ

Ide, Kazuki

林, 和弘

ハヤシ, カズヒロ

Hayashi, Kazuhiro

⼩柴, 等

コシバ, ヒトシ

Koshiba, Hitoshi

National Institute of Science and Technology Policy

In recent years, predatory journals have become a serious problem. In this paper, we analyze the distribution of predatory journals in the only existing commercial database of such journals, Predatory Reports, to investigate why these journals were suspected of being predatory by the database publisher. The results showed the following. 1) The number of publishers and journals followed a power distribution, with a very small number of publishers publishing a large number of journals and a large number of publishers publishing only one to ten journals. 2) The vast majority of journals are open access (about 98% of around 17,000 journals). 3) Among the criteria defining what constitutes a predatory journal, the top three were "no policy for digital preservation" (72% of all journals), "no article published or no issue or article in the archive" (52%), and "no peer review policy clearly stated on the journal’s website" (45%). Predatory journals were not concentrated in a specific field but were spread across many. Focusing on the database itself, we found that it had a variety of weaknesses of its own: there was no consistency in granularity of classification by discipline; there were many typographical errors and omissions in the names of disciplines, etc.; and for individual journals, the results for a single criterion were listed repeatedly. Furthermore, our view that the concept of predatory journal is difficult define was affirmed by this study, as even the publisher of the database seemed to have difficulty deciding on what basis the journals should be suspected of being predatory. In addition, it was difficult to confirm the overall quality of the database, as there is no competitor database to compare it with. As academic papers are strongly emphasized in research evaluations, the influence of predatory journals is significant, and therefore a greater understanding of their characteristics is urgently needed. While the criteria used by the Predatory Reports database to identify such journals are helpful to a certain extent, further enhancement of the database, including transparency in evaluation and judgment, is required.

林, 和弘

⼩柴, 等