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Some Science Journals That Claim To Peer Review Papers Do Not Do So (economist.com)
A rising number of journals that claim to review submissions do not bother to do so. Not coincidentally, this seems to be leading some academics to inflate their publication lists with papers that might not pass such scrutiny. The Economist: Experts debate how many journals falsely claim to engage in peer review. Cabells, an analytics firm in Texas, has compiled a blacklist of those which it believes are guilty. According to Kathleen Berryman, who is in charge of this list, the firm employs 65 criteria to determine whether a journal should go on it -- though she is reluctant to go into details. Cabells' list now totals around 8,700 journals, up from a bit over 4,000 a year ago. Another list, which grew to around 12,000 journals, was compiled until recently by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado. Using Mr Beall's list, Bo-Christer Bjork, an information scientist at the Hanken School of Economics, in Helsinki, estimates that the number of articles published in questionable journals has ballooned from about 53,000 a year in 2010 to more than 400,000 today. He estimates that 6% of academic papers by researchers in America appear in such journals.
As far as I can tell adademia has turned into quite a self-referential naval-gazing afair in recent decades. Point in case: I've finally gone into college and started my BsC Media-CompSci and on my first project I get a stern look for quoting details on RSA from a book from 1998. They told me they're embarrased to quote anything that's older than 5 years and I should never quote a book from 1998. ... WTF? Seriously? Even if it covers elemental basics that haven't changed a single bit since decades ago? Mind you, this is CompSci where you would expect some sort of academic credibility, unlike Sociology or "Gender Studies". Given, CompSci is still miles behind math, physics and engineering, but I still would expect it to me somewhat mature.
This paper-publishing apears to me like some intelectual masturbation academics like to indulge in and not neccesarly something that brings humanity forward.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I still can't shake the feeling that academia has degraded severly and the avantgarde has moved on.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Peter Higgs says he would not have survived in this system.
https://www.theguardian.com/sc...
Posting anonymously to avoid legal problems by disclosing the following information.
Not only fake journals are a problem. Supposedly "serious" journals with a corrupt editor using a coercive citation scheme are also an important issue. Coercive citation is typically used to increase the metrics of the journal, but I have seen at least one case in which it is used to increase the metrics of the Journal Editor (!)
Specific example: Springer's Journal of Supercomputing is edited by infamous Hamid Arabnia. Yes, this is the same folk that used to run the WorldComp conference series in Vegas, which is now rebranded as CSCE after it was widespread that they accepted any crap as long as you paid for registration.
Well, I submitted some years ago a real research paper to this Journal of Supercomputing. It was serious research, not top-level, but reasonable. Reviews were reasonable, but H. Arabnia requested to add citations to FOUR of his own personal papers, completely unrelated with our submission, in order to accept the paper. We didn't add any (and the paper was eventually accepted), but we could check that he did this routinely: you can check for example this paper, in which authors cite TEN unrelated papers from the editor of this journal. I don't blame the authors: in many cases, they badly need the publication and agree to the coercive mechanism.
You can also check H. Arabnia's Google Scholar page, with a very high h-index value. However, this page also allows you to check the citations of the papers. If you check the 88 citations to this paper from 1995, you can see that it was almost unnoticed for twenty years, and suddenly it resurged in 2015... with ALL citations coming from the Journal of Supercomputing, which he edits!!
The funny fact: The journal of Supercomputing has a JCR impact factor of 1.326 in the last (2016) list, being in the second quartile (Q2) of its category. Let's see the update, coming in a few days/weeks. According to the rankings, this should be a respected journal, but it happens to be the playground of this clown, abusing it to increase his own metrics.