PREVALENCE OF POTENTIALLY PREDATORY PUBLISHING IN SCOPUS ON THE COUNTRY LEVEL 1 Prevalence of Potentially Predatory Publishing in Scopus on the Country Level Tatiana Savinay∗ Ivan Sterligovy y National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia ∗Russian Foundation for Basic Research, Moscow, Russia. [email protected] [email protected] F Abstract—We present results of a large-scale study of po- of various degree of competence as well as by tentially predatory journals (PPJ) represented in the Scopus researchers themselves [Leydesdorff et al., 2016]. database, which is widely used for research evaluation. Both In short, research evaluation has become substan- journal metrics and country/disciplinary data have been evalu- tially more formalized relying on various indicators, ated for different groups of PPJ: those listed by Jeffrey Beall which are mostly based on publication and citation and those discontinued by Scopus because of “publication con- counts. This metrics explosion is partially attributed cerns”. Our results show that even after years of discontinuing, hundreds of active potentially predatory journals are still highly to the priorities of many nations and organizations visible in the Scopus database. PPJ papers are continuously to reproduce the success of world leaders in science produced by all major countries, but with different prevalence. and technology. Most ASJC (All Science Journal Classification) subject areas In this paper, we provide a bird’s eye view of the are affected. The largest number of PPJ papers are in engineer- growth of articles in potentially predatory journals ing and medicine. On average, PPJ have much lower citation (PPJ), a global phenomenon stemming from both metrics than other Scopus-indexed journals. We conclude with a the evaluation/metrics culture and globalization. survey of the case of Russia and Kazakhstan where the share of “Potentially predatory journals” refers to publication PPJ papers in 2016 amounted to almost a half of all Kazakhstan venues providing publishing services of question- papers in Scopus. Our data suggest a relation between PPJ able quality while having the formal characteristics prevalence and national research evaluation policies. As such of respected academic journals, usually to receive policies become more widespread, the expansion of potentially predatory journal research will be increasingly important. article processing fees. We introduce an algorithm that matches Jef- Index Terms—potentially predatory journals, government pub- frey Beall’s lists [Beall, 2016a,b] of publishers and lishing policy standalone journals with the Source title list from arXiv:2003.08283v3 [cs.DL] 7 Feb 2021 Scopus and achieve a significantly better rate of detection than in previous studies [Bagues et al., 1 INTRODUCTION 2017; Machacek and Srholec, 2017, 2019]. This al- ECENT years have witnessed many dramatic lows us to show a comprehensive breakdown of R changes in scholarly communication across the such publications by countries and disciplines over world. The main drivers of these changes are the time, and provide an overview of indicators for globalization of academia and proliferation of the PPJ, as compared to non-PPJ sources. We argue that Internet and digital technologies as well as the the PPJ phenomenon is mainly due to prolifera- spread of the evaluation culture in research manage- tion of indicator-based research evaluation systems ment [Dahler-Larsen, 2011]. The publish-or-perish [Glaser¨ et al., 2010] and is an example of a goal motto [Roland, 2007; Steele et al., 2006] and an ever- displacement [Colwell et al., 2012; Rijcke et al., 2016] increasing supply of available metrics [Weingart, and opportunistic behavior [Onder¨ and Erdil, 2017]. 2005; Wilsdon et al., 2015] have facilitated the rapid In contrast to the previous work [Shen and Bjork,¨ growth of “citizen bibliometrics” including the us- 2015], our data suggest that almost all countries are age of scientometric indicators by administrators affected, although with marked differences in the PREVALENCE OF POTENTIALLY PREDATORY PUBLISHING IN SCOPUS ON THE COUNTRY LEVEL 2 share of PPJ articles by country. intentional and central to its main marketed ad- First, we provide an overview of Scopus usage vantage over WoS, i.e. the scope, reflected in its across the world in order to justify choosing this name itself. Mongeon and Paul-Hus [2016] find that particular data source. Next, we describe the PPJ Scopus has a “larger journal coverage in all fields”, phenomenon and review emerging studies of it. especially in Business & Management and in Social We pay special attention to the peculiarities and Sciences. Country-level data presented by these au- limitations of Jeffrey Beall’s lists. We also describe thors also is favorable for Scopus for all 15 major our data and methods. Then, the main section countries studied both in the number of published describes global PPJ statistics in Scopus and also journals and in the number of published papers. reviews some recent efforts by Elsevier to clean its Thus, we conclude that in recent years Scopus has database. We conclude with an analysis of possible outperformed WoS in terms of coverage in all or at causes of the observed drastic variations in relative least in the vast majority of disciplines. PPJ publications across various nations and sum up Also, Scopus has been chosen instead of WoS with policy advice. for several high-profile nation-wide evaluation projects, namely Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom, Excellence in Research 1.1 Scopus in Research Evaluation for Australia (until 2019), and Evaluation of R&D Before talking about potentially predatory journals, Units in Portugal. As the Australian Research it is important to briefly describe the reasons of Council (ARC) put it in their press release, “When Scopus to be attractive for publishers and authors. selecting Scopus, the ARC had regard to their Scopus is widely used in research evaluation. Along coverage of relevant journals...”3. Scopus has with the Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar, recently replaced WoS as a bibliometric data source Scopus is a leading resource for searching relevant for the influential Times Higher Education World works and evaluation of researchers and journals University Rankings, and is already used by QS [Wouters et al., 2015]. These three databases, how- World University Rankings. ever, have different indexing policies and market- Overall, Scopus can now be considered as a ing strategies, leading to different coverage and more popular bibliometrics database, if we take indicator values (for recent comparisons see [Moed into account Google Trends data that reflects global et al., 2016; Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2016; Harz- search intensity (see Figure 1). This metric is plau- ing and Alakangas, 2016]). Google Scholar is not sible because there are almost no meanings of the widely used by research managers, because of its terms “Scopus” and “Web of Science” other than strategy of covering virtually all scientific literature those related to the two databases4. with little quality control. So the options suitable The country-level data may be more relevant to for research evaluation are the Web of Science and the topic of our paper (see Figure 2), which show Scopus. that in some regions people search for WoS and Sco- The Web of Science is the most exclusive in terms pus much more than in the others and that Scopus of the number of indexed journals and poses itself as leads the way in many of the countries studied in a “painstakingly selected, actively curated database the results section. Although vague, Google Trends of the journals that researchers themselves have data show that the general interest is substantial. judged to be the most important and useful in their fields”1. Scopus’ promotional text is similar, with a 1.2 Potentially Predatory Journals special reference of their customers’ high academic The PPJ phenomenon and its naming are both standards: “Scopus has a clearly stated selection directly linked to the work of Jeffrey Beall, an policy and an internationally acclaimed board of selection experts so you can be sure that what you 3. See http://www.arc.gov.au/news-media/ see on Scopus meets your high standards”2. Judging media-releases/scopus-provide-citation-information-era from the sheer number of indexed journals, Scopus accessed on 21 June 2017 and currently available only via Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/ has more inclusive criteria, which is perceived as 20151010083040/https://www.arc.gov.au/news-media/ media-releases/scopus-provide-citation-information-era 1. Promotional info at http://clarivate.com/?product= 4. While “Web of Science” usually clearly means relevant web-of-science accessed on 20 june 2017 database, “Scopus” may also refer to Mount Scopus, a historical 2. Promotional info at https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/ mountain in northeast Jerusalem, or a latin name of the bird scopus/content/content-policy-and-selection accessed on 21 species Hamercop (Scopus Umbretta), or a specialist journal on June 2017 east African ornithology. PREVALENCE OF POTENTIALLY PREDATORY PUBLISHING IN SCOPUS ON THE COUNTRY LEVEL 3 It is important to note that Beall clearly links the problem to the Gold Open Access (“author pays”) model of journal publishing. He quotes Reed Else- vier’s CEO Crispin Davis, who mentioned in 2003 that “if you are receiving potential payments for every article submitted, there is an inherent conflict of interest that could threaten the quality of the peer review system”6. The somewhat controversial term “predatory” was coined by Jeffrey Beall in his 2010 review [Beall, 2010] of nine Gold OA scholarly publishers. As a Fig. 1. Monthly Google Trends* data for search queries “Web of result of his subsequent efforts on maintaining his Science” (blue) vs “Scopus” (red) in 2004-2019. The horizontal famous lists, it became a standard term used by axis of the main graph represents time, and the vertical is how notable peer-reviewed articles published in main- often a term is searched for relative to the total number of stream journals in recent years [Shen and Bjork,¨ searches, globally.