RESEARCH ARTICLE Methodological considerations for identifying questionable publishing in a national context: The case of Swedish Higher Education Institutions Gustaf Nelhans1,2 and Theo Bodin3 an open access journal 1University of Borås, Sweden 2University of Southern Denmark, Denmark 3Karolinska Institutet, Sweden Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/qss/article-pdf/1/2/505/1885789/qss_a_00033.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Keywords: national level, publication blacklists, publication ethics, questionable publishing Citation: Nelhans, G., & Bodin, T. (2020). Methodological considerations ABSTRACT for identifying questionable publishing in a national context: The case of The overall scope of this study is an attempt at a methodological framework for matching Swedish Higher Education Institutions. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(2), publication lists at the national level against a combined set of blacklists for questionable 505–524. https://doi.org/10.1162/ qss_a_00033 publishing. Using the total verified set of publications from Swedish Higher Education Institutions (HEI) as a case, we examined the number, distribution, and proportion of DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00033 publishing in questionable journals at the national level. Journal publication data was extracted from the national SwePub database and matched against three curated blacklists Received: 2 July 2019 Accepted: 10 February 2020 of questionable publishing. For the period 2012–2017, we identified 1,743 published papers in blacklisted journals, equal to an average of 0.5–0.9% of the total publications Corresponding Author: Gustaf Nelhans from Swedish HEIs. There was high variability between different HEI categories, with
[email protected] more established universities at the lower end of the spectrum, while university colleges ∼ Handling Editor: and new universities had a much higher proportion ( 2%).