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.

Comments

The result of "publish or perish"

[whitesea]

They prey on people whose career depends on the quantity of publications. My friend published a paper that became famous in his area of research overnight. Everybody and their brother cited the paper, even mainstream media mentioned it. His dept chairman said, "We are satisfied with the quality of your papers. It's the quantity that's insufficient."

Re:The result of "publish or perish"

[Anonymous Coward]

As a tenured professor, I can say the papers are just the tip of the iceberg. Academic science, at least in the biomedical sciences, is falling apart due a variety of problems: ponzi schemes with doctoral and postdoctoral training, indirect funds of grants inflating their value to universities as profit margin, cuts from state governments and passing the buck of research funding to the federal government, and a general "widget production" model of science being demanded from administrators and conservative legislative overseers.

I was in a faculty meeting a couple of years ago. A junior faculty member was undergoing annual review, and some of the faculty expressed concern that they were publishing too much in open access journals. These weren't questionable open access journals, though: they were pretty well-established ones that just weren't traditional academic journals. More importantly, the junior faculty member's impact factors, number of citations, etc. were all fine, comparable to any other successful junior faculty at that stage. However, some of the senior faculty felt that the journals weren't prestigious enough. So they created a memo to be circulated around the department, a list of journals, saying "these are journals junior faculty should be publishing in."

The memo was justified in the interest of fairness and clarity, I and I get the intent, but on the face of it is absurd. The focus should be on the quality of the research, not the reputation of the journal. It's as if someone denigrated Lolita as a work of literature because the publisher was of poor reputation.

These lists of predatory journals that float around are useful, and the journals should be criticized. But when you get to this scope of problem, these journals aren't the problem, they're a symptom. What you have now is an oversupply of very talented researchers, an underfunding of science (above and beyond the annual federal research budget, which we shouldn't be so dependent on), a focus on celebrity over substance, superficial indicators of productivity, nepotism... I could go on and on.

Publishing in particular is sort of a house of cards. A rational outside observer would ask what the economic reasons for the current structure are, with such low costs to publishing now on the web. Why do peer-reviewed journals even exist now? Are scientists really paying attention to what they should be? Open access journals are one solution, but if you look at them closely, they probably in aggregate do more harm than good because they are pay-to-publish, which creates huge misincentives.

These sorts of predatory journals are completely predictable, and are the tip of the iceberg. Keep in mind these are journals where there are *obvious* improprieties. Things get even more problematic if you realize that there even more "legitimate" journals that leverage moral greyness or plausible deniability as a way of avoiding these lists.

Most of the time I feel like academic science is in crisis, and even more so every day. There's a huge disparity between how science actually occurs and how people are compensated and recognized.

Re:The result of "publish or perish"

[Anonymous Coward]

"conservative legislative overseers"

How hilarious. Even when you manage to worm your way into an industry that's self-admittedly 99% liberal, you still blame conservatives for your problems.

Re:The buck ALWAYS stops with YOU.

[LynnwoodRooster]

If a researcher will not share their data and their methods, it doesn't matter WHERE it was published it should be highly suspect if not outright discounted. Back when I was in university (mid 80s) you had to show your work, show your data, show your experiment setup, and show the link between all of it or you'd get zero credit. Even if your experiment failed, you'd still get credit because you showed what you did and what data you collected.

More and more it's simply "we used a process like this, and we had this result, but we cannot share the data and actual process because it's proprietary and worth money but trust us - it's good!" Nope. Science is a process and requires disclosure of data and process so that your experiment can be done, exactly, by others. Science is skeptical by nature - NO ONE should accept the result of a study or paper unless there is sufficient data and process shared that would allow you to replicate if you so choose. The scientist should, on hearing any claim, think "OK, that's interesting - now what data is there and can I replicate their results?" - if not, it's not science.