Characteristics of scholars who review for predatory and legitimate journals: linkage study of Cabells Scholarly Analytics and Publons data.

Severin, Anna; Strinzel, Michaela; Egger, Matthias; Domingo, Marc; Barros, Tiago (2021). Characteristics of scholars who review for predatory and legitimate journals: linkage study of Cabells Scholarly Analytics and Publons data. BMJ open, 11(7), e050270. BMJ Publishing Group 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-050270

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OBJECTIVES

To describe and compare the characteristics of scholars who reviewed for predatory or legitimate journals in terms of their sociodemographic characteristics and reviewing and publishing behaviour.

DESIGN

Linkage of random samples of predatory journals and legitimate journals of the Cabells Scholarly Analytics' journal lists with the Publons database, employing the Jaro-Winkler string metric. Descriptive analysis of sociodemographic characteristics and reviewing and publishing behaviour of scholars for whom reviews were found in the Publons database.

SETTING

Peer review of journal articles.

PARTICIPANTS

Reviewers who submitted peer review reports to Publons.

MEASUREMENTS

Numbers of reviews for predatory journals and legitimate journals per reviewer. Academic age of reviewers, the total number of reviews, number of publications and number of reviews and publications per year.

RESULTS

Analyses included 183 743 unique reviews submitted to Publons by 19 598 reviewers. Six thousand and seventy-seven reviews were for 1160 predatory journals (3.31% of all reviews) and 177 666 reviews for 6403 legitimate journals (96.69%). Most scholars never submitted reviews for predatory journals (90.0% of all scholars); few scholars (7.6%) reviewed occasionally or rarely (1.9%) for predatory journals. Very few scholars submitted reviews predominantly or exclusively for predatory journals (0.26% and 0.35%, respectively). The latter groups of scholars were of younger academic age and had fewer publications and reviews than the first groups. Regions with the highest shares of predatory reviews were sub-Saharan Africa (21.8% reviews for predatory journals), Middle East and North Africa (13.9%) and South Asia (7.0%), followed by North America (2.1%), Latin America and the Caribbean (2.1%), Europe and Central Asia (1.9%) and East Asia and the Pacific (1.5%).

CONCLUSION

To tackle predatory journals, universities, funders and publishers need to consider the entire research workflow and educate reviewers on concepts of quality and legitimacy in scholarly publishing.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

04 Faculty of Medicine > Pre-clinic Human Medicine > Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM)

Graduate School:

Graduate School for Health Sciences (GHS)

UniBE Contributor:

Severin, Anna, Egger, Matthias

Subjects:

600 Technology > 610 Medicine & health
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 360 Social problems & social services

ISSN:

2044-6055

Publisher:

BMJ Publishing Group

Language:

English

Submitter:

Andrea Flükiger-Flückiger

Date Deposited:

28 Jul 2021 10:54

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:52

Publisher DOI:

10.1136/bmjopen-2021-050270

PubMed ID:

34290071

Uncontrolled Keywords:

medical education & training medical ethics medical journalism

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/157795

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/157795

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