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These three red flags could unmask dodgy journals
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Bibliometric databases review the journals they list to ensure they are indexing quality titles that do not engage in shady publishing practices.Credit: Hisayoshi Osawa/Getty
Researchers have identified three warning signs that suggest journals might be engaging in suspicious publishing activities. Using these, they have found dozens of titles indexed in the leading scholarly database Scopus that could be problematic.
The three red flags are, for any given journal in a single year: a doubling of publication output; having more than 70% of published articles originating from a single country; and having at least 15% of articles flagged by the Problematic Paper Screener, a free online tool.
Using titles extracted from the freely available database OpenAlex, the researchers identified 3,753 journals that met at least one of these criteria. They cross-referenced these with journals indexed in Scopus and found that, of those, 5% had been delisted. The findings were published in a preprint1 on 20 October.
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The researchers, and research-integrity specialists, say that the signals help to identify journals that merit further investigation — but do not prove that titles are problematic. They serve as “rudimentary flags”, says Achal Agrawal, a co-author of the preprint and freelance data scientist in Raipur, India. And they indicate the problems that databases face as poor publishing practices proliferate, he adds.
Bibliometric databases such as Scopus are important in the global research ecosystem because they inform many rankings used to evaluate individual researchers and institutions. Inclusion in Scopus, run by the Dutch publisher Elsevier, typically indicates that a journal is reputable.
Scopus regularly reviews the journals it lists, using a tool to spot signs of suspicious activities that suggest titles are churning out low-quality research that doesn’t adhere to accepted scholarly standards. These include “changes in publication volume and journal scope, unusual patterns in authorship and author collaboration, anomalous citation behaviour, and indications that a journal has become vulnerable to questionable content”, a spokesperson for Elsevier told Nature.
For flagged journals, Scopus then conducts “a careful, individual assessment of all available information, including consideration of the journal’s own response”, the spokesperson added. It removes journals that do not meet certain metrics thresholds. Scopus delisted 156 journals last year, and 100 so far this year.