The scientific community suffers annually from unscrupulous periodical publications. These journals pursue purely commercial goals, causing financial and moral harm to scientists. This article discusses how to avoid falling prey to such "predators" and how to recognize a low-quality publication.
Concept and Types of Predatory Publications
A predatory journal is a periodical that claims the status of a scientific journal but is actually a fraudulent scheme that involves collecting funds from authors without proper publication of scientific articles.
The term "predatory" publication first appeared in 2008, when American librarian J. Beall first named journals that exploited the scientific potential of researchers without providing peer review. The list, known as "Beall's List," is a catalog of potentially predatory journals and publishers. It is continuously updated and considered the primary base for checking publishers. Currently, the "blacklist of scientific publications" includes more than a thousand predatory journals.
All unscrupulous publications can be divided into three categories:
- Fraudulent – the most dangerous type of publishers that extract funds from scientists without further publishing articles.
- Journals with lost review, which were once indexed in Scopus but were removed from the scientometric base.
- Clone journals – copies of publications that passed identification in Scopus, with a fake website identical to the original.
How to Distinguish Predatory Journals from Reputable Publications?
There is a problem of mislabeling peer-reviewed journals as predatory. This is due to the negative impact of Jeffrey Beall's research, which also affected journals with excellent reputations. The hasty conclusions of the librarian unfortunately left a negative imprint on their reputations.
We have identified the main signs of predatory journals:
- Lack of peer review (the journal does not pay attention to the criteria by which a scientific article should be written)
- Rapid approval of the article without a review process by reviewers and editors
- Excessively low publication cost
- Lack of or insufficient information about the publisher
- High growth of new publications in the journal
- No information on the quality indicators of published articles
- Self-citation rate above 80%
- Ability to publish an article in a short time
- Signs of plagiarism in published materials
It should be remembered that scientometric studies cannot undergo quality peer review in a short time; sometimes, the verification of novelty and relevance of the research takes up to a year.
Methods of Combating Predatory Publications in the Scientific Community of Azerbaijan
As of 2024, more than 250 articles by Azerbaijani scientists have been published in predatory journals. At least 484 Azerbaijani authors have suffered from the fraudulent activities of fake journals. This is a serious gap in scientific ethics that needs urgent resolution.
The main measures to combat unscrupulous publications include discussing the issue of predatory journals in broad scientific circles, particularly at universities and conferences. Discussing the problem of fraudulent publications in the Azerbaijani academic environment will help reduce the number of publications in the latter and, as a result, protect the reputation of scientists.
Another way to solve the problem is to introduce regulation of scientific publications at the level of the Ministry of Science and Education of Azerbaijan. Creating a separate monitoring group within a higher scientific institution will significantly improve the level of scientific activity in the field of education in general.
Unfortunately, universities and other higher educational institutions in Azerbaijan cannot provide authors with conditions where they can publish articles only in reputable journals indexed by major databases. Scientists simply do not have the physical time to check each publisher for reputation in the scientific community.
The company "Scientific Publications" will help choose a rated publication and publish a scientific work, thereby saving time for quality research.
