Negative Effects of "Predatory" Journals on Global Health Research

Abstract

Predatory journals (PJ) exploit the open-access model promising high acceptance rate and fast track publishing without proper peer review. At minimum, PJ are eroding the credibility of the scientific literature in the health sciences as they actually boost the propagation of errors. In this article, we identify issues with PJ and provide several responses, from international and interdisciplinary perspectives in health sciences. Authors, particularly researchers with limited previous experience with international publications, need to be careful when considering potential journals for submission, due to the current existence of large numbers of PJ. Universities around the world, particularly in developing countries, might develop strategies to discourage their researchers from submitting manuscripts to PJ or serving as members of their editorial committees.

Figure 1

Google Trends of yearly web queries as proxies of general awareness about predatory publishing (PP) and predatory journals (PJ). Compared to trends of queries about predatory publishing and journals (red continuous and dotted lines), trends of web queries about open access publishing (OAP) and journals (OAJ) have more steady trends (blue continuous and dotted lines), are weakly correlated and significantly different (r_PP-OAP = 0.3; r_PJ-OAJ = –0.2; Both PP-OAP and PJ-OAJ comparisons had t-test p-values < 0.05). Trends of Academic and Scientific publishing were included as a reference (gray continuous and dotted lines).

Figure 2

Scopus (Left) and PubMed (right) trend reports of number of articles about Predatory Publishing (PP, red) and Open Access (OA, blue) by year. Correlations between PP-OA trends were high (Scopus r = 0.72 PubMed r = 0.87). By t-tests, differences in Scopus were in the limit (p = 0.05) and in PubMed were non-significant (p > 0.05). In Scopus, the growing trend predominantly relies on original articles (dotted red line).