Identifying National, Institutional and Disciplinary Sites of Probable Predatory Publishing

Predatory publishing – for-profit academic publishers and journals publishing academic articles with inadequate quality control – is a professional and societal problem in modern science. Due to their illegitimacy and unprofessionalism, predatory publishers and journals are seldom indexed by major journal bibliographic indices, such as Scopus or the Web of Science. This lack of indexed metadata makes analyzing the predatory publishing market difficult. To fill this gap, we collected journal metadata of corpuses of six probable predatory publishers, comprised of 310,924 articles. We also collected metadata of four other publishers of higher – but contested – legitimacy, to compare with metadata of 54 million articles indexed in the Web of Science. Our research pinpoints precise geographic, institutional and disciplinary sites where probable predatory publishing occurs. Scholars affiliated with developing countries and lower-status institutions disproportionately publish in probable predatory journals. However, since academically central countries and high-status institutions are prolific publishers, they provide much of the money and articles that support the predatory publishing market, even if predatory publishing is a proportionately smaller problem in privileged institutions. Predatory publishing is a worldwide problem, with varying niches and consequences in different institutions and countries. Inequalities in resources and scientific reward structures influence intellectual choices of scholars throughout the world, including propensities for knowingly or naively publishing articles in predatory journals. Research integrity is an emerging axis of stratification in contemporary science.