analysed 93 checklists in a systematic review of checklists for identifying predatory journals from biomedical fields. This investigation is centred on Clarivate's JCR, perhaps the most prestigious and best recognized database in academia with the widest use at a global level, in order to analyse the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). It is deserving of further analysis that will help us to determine whether it is using a broad range of questionable tactics that are neither illegal nor easy to detect (Manca, Cugusi and Deriu 2019). In some cases, where an MDPI-journal was indexed in more than one JCR category, the non-MDPI-journal with the highest impact factor was chosen for comparison. Search for other works by this author on: Plagiarism and Predatory Journals: A Threat to Scientific Integrity, Publishing in Predatory Tourism and Hospitality Journals: Mapping the Academic Market and Identifying Response Strategies, Supporting a Definition of Predatory Publishing, Predatory Publishers Are Corrupting Open Access, Predatory Journals and the Breakdown of Research Cultures, Dangerous Predatory Publishers Threaten Medical Research, Faculty Applicants Attempt to Inflate Cvs Using Predatory Journals, American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, Predatory Publishing is Everyones Concern, A Large-Scale Analysis of Impact Factor Biased Journals Self-Citations, On the Skeweness of Journal Self-Citations and Publisher Self-Citations: Cues for Discusin from a Case Study, Inclusion of Predatory Journals in Scopus is Inflating Scholars Metrics and Advancing Careers, Predatory Journals and Conferences: Why Fake Counts, Citations and Metrics of Journals Discontinued from Scopus for Publication Concerns: The GhoS(t)copus Project, Checklists to Detect Potential Predatory Biomedical Journals: A Systematic Review. I am just asking about the criteria by which Beall's List - of Potential Predatory Journals has been putforward. Editors JIF-Boosting stratagems-Which Are Appropriate and Which Not? (2020) highlight, publishers could not explain not following best practices since there are settled by the industry principles for transparency and best practices in scholarly publishing. Copiello (2019) also analysed the citations and self-citations of articles published in the journal Sustainability in 2015 and found that the journal had a higher self-citation level than expected. More specifically, 84.9% of analysed journals stated that they provided a first decision within <19days. As Siler (2020) stated since APC-based OA publishing involves remunerating publishers based on how many articles they publish, this can underpin perverse incentives to accept as many articles as possible to maximize revenue, so predatory journals operate in such a manner, eschewing legitimate peer review or other types of quality control (p. 1386) and prompting an excessive publication of articles, often of inferior quality (Siler 2020). Frontiers in Oncology publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research across the entire field of cancer research. Many of the studies on predatory journals in different scientific fields have been completed in reference to the journals listed on Bealls list, since discontinued (Shen and Bjork 2015; Frandsen 2017; Demir 2018; Alrawadieh 2020; Downes 2020). Given the immense difficulties of keeping a list of predatory journals updated, the use of one from among the very many abundant checklists, such as Think.Check.Submit (https://thinkchecksubmit.org/), is encouraged1. From December 2019 to January 2020, almost all MDPI-journals (94.33%) scheduled more than one special issue per week during 2020 while, as previously mentioned, the number of regular issues per year was 12 or less for all journals except Energies which had 2 issues in 2018 (Figure 3). The Author(s) 2021. Specifically, with regard to the previously mentioned third step, the analysis of the background of the 53 MDPI-journals in JCR showed drops in their impact factors when excluding self-citations, which could be significant if the level of self-citations exceeded those of the leading journals in those categories in which they are indexed. (, Forero D. A., Oermann M. H., Manca A., Deriu F., Mendieta-Zern H., Dadkhah M., Bhad R., Deshpande S. N., Wang W., Cifuentes M. P. (, Grudniewicz A., Moher D., Cobey K. D., Bryson, G. L., Cukier, S., Allen, K., Arden, C., Balcom, L., Barros, T., Berger, M., Buitrago Ciro, J., Cugusi, L., Donaldson, M. R., Matthias, E., Graham, I. D., Hodgkinson, M., Khan, K. M., Mabizela, M., Manca, A., Milzow, K., Mouton, J., Muchenje, M., Olijhoek, T., Ommaya, A., Patwardhan, B., Poff, D., Proulx, L., Rodger, M., Severin, A., Strinzel, M., Sylos-Labini, M., Tamblyn, R., van Niekerk, M., Wicherts, J.M., Lalu, G. M. (, Kratochvl J., Plch L., Sebera M., Korikov E. (, Manca A., Cugusi L., Cortegiani A., Ingoglia G., Moher D., Deriu F. (, Manca A., Martinez G., Cugusi L., Dragone D., Dvir Z., Deiru F. (, Manca A., Moher D., Cugusi L., Dvir Z., Deriu F. (, Moher D., Shamseer L., Cobey K. D., Lalu, M. M., Galipeau, J., Avey, M. T., Ahmadzai, N., Alabousi M., Barbeau, P. Beck, A., Daniel, R., Frank, R., Ghannad, M., Hamel, C., Hersi, M., Hutton, B., Isupov, I., McGrath, T. A., McInnes, M. D. F., Page, M. J., Pratt, M., Pussegoda, K., Shea, B., Srivastava, A., Stevens, A., Thavorn, K., van Katwyk, S., Ward, R., Wolfe, D., Yazdi, F., Yu, A. M., Ziai, H. (, Oerman M. H., Nicoll L. H., Ashton K. S., Edie, A. H., Amarasekara, S., Chinn, P. L., Carter-Templeton, H., Ledbetter, L. S. (, Shamseer L., Moher D., Maduekwe O. Turner, L., Barbour, V., Burch, R., Clark, J., Galipeau, J., Roberts, J., Shea, B. J. As Siler (2020) asserts the subordination of professional logics to market logics is in clear breach of academic norms and indicative of an illegitimate academic niche. Similar pernicious effects can be expected from citation stacking when journals cite each other to raise their impact factors (Heneberg 2016). Once again, days from submission to first decision varied greatly, even within the same research field in Elsevier journals, while the MDPI-journals under analysis presented much greater homogeneity and, even, less difference between the maximum and the minimum times, which is to say the lowest intervals. More specifically, the case of the mega-publisher OMICS International is well known, which publishes 700 different journals and has been ordered to pay 50.1 million USD in damages in the USA for deceiving thousands of authors who published in its journals and attended its conferences (Brainard 2019). No longer merely a medium for dissemination, scientific journals are now a key foundation for appointments and funding in scientific research (Shu et al. However, some articles from some predatory journals are in fact indexed, both in PubMed (Manca et al. This step is greatly facilitated when a journal operates with open peer review. 2017a, b)an alarmingly high number of them in the opinion of Manca et al. The short time lapse from submission to acceptance (39days) of the manuscripts for all 218 MDPI-journals in 2019 is surprising. before print) varies but is usually accomplished within 2 weeks (Broome 2017). Hence, specific recommendations are given to researchers, educational institutions and prestigious databases advising them to review their working relations with those sorts of journals. Just in the same year 2007, the OA publisher Frontiers was . As depicted in Figure 5, the impact factors of all journals were reduced when self-citations were removed. As a consequence of the new context generated by the proliferation of predatory journals, it becomes necessary to review the evaluation policies (Beall 2016). Take a look at their peer review process and publication timelines 6. (2020). Figure 2: Analysis of Impact Factor and CiteScore rankings in the JCR Oncology category and CiteScore Oncology category. Predatory Journals Are Infiltrating Citation Databases, Potential Predatory and Legitimate Biomedical Journals: Can You Tell the Difference? 2020b). Even though, on the one hand, the Journal Impact Factor is qualified by Ioannidis and Thombs (2019) as the most widely used, misused and abused bibliometric index in academic science, it is, on the other hand, a widely used tool for curricula evaluation and for making grant awards, as well as being used as a selection criterion for the dissemination of scientific results. Besides, data were collected from JCR (2018) on the Journal Impact Factor and the Impact Factor Without Self Cites. Predatory journals usually offer rapid peer-review processes, but without experts reviewing the quality of research and accuracy of the information (Oerman et al. In 2019, 24 journals out of 53 had self-citation rates as high as 15%, which is the upper end of the normal range set by Clarivate (Table 2). About Journal : Frontiers in Oncology publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research advancing our knowledge of cancer epidemiology, molecular pathways, diagnosis and imaging, personalized therapeutics, and novel treatment and management strategies.. Field Chief Editor Giuseppe Giaccone at Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international . Another more sophisticated ruse (along the same lines, although less obvious) consists of collaboration between two or several journals to all cite each other in what have been dubbed citation cartels (Chorus and Waltman 2016). We hope researchers make use of this checklist and avoid falling prey to bogus conference organizers. Exceptionally, data on the MDPI-journal self-citation rates were collected on 3 June 2020, to assure data accuracy in relation to the 2019 self-citation rates. These lists very soon become outdated and incomplete, especially if the resources to keep them updated are scarce. All journals published by a predatory publisher are potentially predatory unless stated otherwise. Frontiers is merely a symptom of an utterly rotten scholarly publishing system, which is beyond repair. The formal criteria together with the analysis of the citation patterns of the 53 journals under analysis all suggest they may be predatory journals. By 2019, 106,152 articles had been published in its 218 journals, an increase of 64.1% over 2018. Further research would be needed to understand how these faster times are achieved. In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall. Field Chief Editor Heike Wulff at UC Davis is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international researchers. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (2019) clarified that predatory publishing generally refers to the systematic for-profit publication of purportedly scholarly content (in journals and articles, monographs, books, or conference proceedings) in a deceptive or fraudulent way and without any regard for quality assurance [ so] these journals exist solely for profit without any commitment to publication ethics or integrity of any kind. Grudniewicz et al. The Editor Ethics 2.0 Code (https://editorethics.uncc.edu/editor-ethics-2-0-code/) sets out an explicit ban on this malpractice in the fields of Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Management. Further complicating definitions of predatory publishing, are the existence of what could be called grey journals and publishers, occupying quasi-legitimate niches between whitelists and blacklists. Ramn y Cajal. Eigengrad 3 yr. ago. Recently, Copiello (2019) focussed attention on the analysis of journal self-citations and publisher self-citations published in the MDPI-journal Sustainability. ihttps://www.elsevier.com/life-sciences/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/journals/fast-publication-in-agricultural-science. The limitations of the available resources have meant that the analysis has been restricted to the behaviour of MDPI-journals in JCR over 2 years, 2018 and 2019, as well as the information available for 2020 in January 2020. BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. 2019; Strong 2019), because they undermine its integrity (Vogel 2017; Abad-Garca 2019), its quality, and its credibility (Bond et al. In the case of the journal having been included in JCR, the analysis of non-standard citation practices of the journal (a significant increase or fall in the number of citations, self-citations, and articles and majority of citations form a small group of journals) is of great relevance (Kratochvl et al. Logically, this step requires expert knowledge in each scientific field that prevents a global analysis of the 53 journals under analysis. Frontiers in Oncology publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research across the entire field of cancer research. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Grey lines represent all journals in each category ranked by their 2017 Impact Factor and CiteScore percentiles, with Frontiers in Oncology shown as a red dot. (2019): predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices. ghttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-process-and-industrial-engineering. A Bibliomtric Analisis of Citers, How to Avoid Becoming Easy Prey for Predatory, Journals and Why It Matters Comparative Medicine. Is frontiers a good publisher? Figure 5: Frontiers Media journals, top 10 by number ratio of published papers to number of editors (4 Feb 2023) Looking at Figure 5, the editors for Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, on average, has handled 3.21 papers. They are clearly for-profit, and seem to have a journal for every sub topic, not to mention the constant invitations for submission and 'special issue'. Wikipedia lists various controversies about Frontiers articles and resignations of editors. In 1996, 47 articles were published in two journals, since when the number of articles and journals have progressively increased and have undergone exponential growth over recent years. COPE and OASPA have retained Frontiers as a member after concerns were raised. A predatory journal will exploit this model to its own benefit with an inexistent or practically inexistent peer-review process (Beall 2015; Frandsen 2017; Demir 2018), which permits the rapid publication of academic papers without due guarantees, with an associated risk to the quality of the published science. fhttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/engineering/journals/fast-publication-in-mechanical-engineering. Scope. Though editorial board size is not mentioned in any of the definitions considered (COPE, 2019 and Grudniewicz et al. mimicking names. 2020) for inclusion in an objective definition. Stay away from Frontiers. 2020). All the more so, if it is taken into account that, in addition, the editorial staff of MDPI is formed of researchers who have to organize their time for revision among their other professional activities (research, teaching, dissemination, evaluation, grant applications, etc. Lastly, predatory journals are a threat to scientists who may endanger their careers and devalue their curricula. Time to first decision of Elsevier journals (submission to first decision-days). It is important that academia and scholars become aware both of the risks of falling into the networks of predatory journals and, in addition, academics should be capable of properly identifying these journals, without presupposing that their inclusion in a prestigious database is a sort of quality hallmark that guarantees the integrity of their authorship, and both their peer-review and their editing processes (Severin and Low 2019; Cortegiani et al. The use of JCR has been extended, both for the evaluation of academics and institutions of all types, legitimizing the journals that are indexed, which evaluate the publications included in scholarly records when taking decisions on promotion, tenure, grants, etc. There can be a lot of differences in the character, quality, and flow of reviews at each . The results serve to point out how self-citation rates and intra-MPDI citation rates both followed a rise between 2018 and 2019. This mega-publisher was initially incorporated on Bealls list and was subsequently excluded on 28th October 2015 as a result of a formal appeal made by MDPI and assessed by four members of Mr Beall's Appeals Board (https://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/534). Moreover, the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series, and Publishers downgraded MDPI to 0 in 2019 and later upgraded it to 1 again. The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) had 53 journals ranked in the 2018 JCRs annual report. Citation analysis used for citation manipulation is a form of misconduct and does not fit best editorial practices (a feature of predatory journals mentioned in Grudniewicz et al. I had worked with Frederic on running DH2014, still the largest ever international meeting of Digital Humanities scholars. One form of avoiding the proliferation of predatory journals based on the gold open-access model, which can favour quantity over quality, would be to promote a platinum/diamond open-access model, in which neither the authors nor the readers pay for access to the articles and the costs of the publication process are met by associations or institutions (e.g. In JCR-indexed MDPI-journals, if the trend of increasing numbers of published articles in all journals continues into 2020 and taking into account the generalized rise in the APC for 2020, MDPI may reasonably expect to see a rise in its income in 2020. However, the reality is that this process is by no means simple, as Aromataris and Stern (2020) accurately indicated, particularly because predatory publishers have continued to evolve their undesirable art form into sophisticated operations that appear to be, at face value, legitimate to the point where certain journals and publishers may blatantly exploit gray strategies given that downmarket niches can be lucrative (Siler 2020). Published by Oxford University Press. The increase in the number of journals and articles published had no effect on time from submission to first decision. Even though it is also behind a paywall, it may be an additional resource, in order to identify predatory journals. Check if the journal is a member of DOAJ, COPE, OASPA or STM 3. (2017) warned researchers from the biomedical field that APCs lower than 150$ were suspect. Frontiers in Pharmacology is a leading journal in its field, publishing rigorously peer-reviewed research across disciplines, including basic and clinical pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, pharmacy and toxicology. Even then there's a good chance that . Thosusands of Australian Academics on the Editorial Boards of Journals Run by Predatory Publishers, Predatory Journals: What Are and How to Avoid Them, The Top-Ten in Journal Impact Factor Manipulation, Archivum Immunologiae et Therapiae Experimentalis, The Legal Consequences of Research Misconduct: False Investigators and Grant Proposals, Negative Effects of "Predatory" Journals on Global Health Research, Are Predatory Journals Undermining the Credibility of Science? 2019). As indicators of their objectives and strategy, this study analysed journals' behavior in relation to the following measures: similarity of journal name, content output, APCs, frequency of publication, editorial board size, peer review process (particularly peer review time as peer review is the most common procedure to assure published manuscript quality), journal Impact Factor, and self-citation (due to its direct impact on journals' reputation metrics). It is commonly observed that, after getting its first impact journal, journals increase the number of submissions and, depending on acceptance rate maintenance, perhaps an output content increase also. In particular, the 400 or so conferences that MDPI sponsored in 2019 (MDPI 2020) should all be carefully scrutinized. In addition, publication in a predatory journal implies the possible squandering of valuable resources: people, animals, and money, as Moher et al. Predatory Journals: Who Publishes in Them and Why? K. D., Bryson, G. L., Cukier, S., Allen, K., Arden, C., Balcom, L., Barros, T., Berger, M., Buitrago Ciro, J., Cugusi, L., Donaldson, M. R., Matthias, E., Graham, I. D., Hodgkinson, M., Khan, K. M., Mabizela, M., Manca, A., Milzow, K., Mouton, J., Muchenje, M., Olijhoek, T., Ommaya, A., Patwardhan, B., Poff, D., Proulx, L., Rodger, M., Severin, A., Strinzel, M., Sylos-Labini, M., Tamblyn, R., van Niekerk, M., Wicherts, J.M., Lalu, G. M. Predatory Journals: No Definition, No Defence, Predatory Publishing: An Emerging Threat to the Medical Literatura, Predatory Publishing Dilutes and Distorts Evidence in Systemactic Reviews, Payouts Push Professors towards Predatory Journals, From Excessive Journal Self-Cites to Citation Stacking: Analysis of Journal Self-Citation Kinetics in Search for Journals, Which Boost Their Scientometric Indicators, A Users Guide to Inflated and Manipulated Impact Factors, European Journal of Clinical Investigation, Article Processing Charge Hyperinflation and Price Insensitivity: An Open Access Sequel to the Serials Crisis, Predatory Journals and Dubious Publishers: How to Avoid Being Their Prey, Compliance with Ethical Rules for Scientific Publishing in Biomedical Open Access Journals Indexed in Journal Citation Reports, Evaluation of Untrustworthy Journals: Transition from Formal Criteria to a Complex View, Predatory Journals Enter Biomedical Databases through Public Funding, Questionning the Efficacy of Predatory Journals Blacklist, PubMed Should Rise the Bar for Journal Inclusin, The Surge of Predatory Open-Access in Neurosciences and Neurology, The Authors Respond to Rigorous Policies Ensure Integrity of NLM Literature Databases. It is therefore important to assess how each journal achieves the ranking that is published by Clarivate each year as a Journal Impact Factor. Therefore, these Principles, supported by different institutions, are useful for detecting deviation from best practices in publishing. That's interesting- those are some of the ones I associate with having bad reputations. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) released the Principles of Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing (last version published 15 January 2018) together with the Directory of Open-Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open-Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). A contextual framework is therefore required to assess MDPI-journal self-citations. Further research is needed to compare the JCR-indexed MPDI journals to similar journals in their respective fields in order to understand whether the level of self-citation is significantly different for MDPI published journals. 2020). We therefore underline that JCR cannot be used as a whitelist of journals that comply with the criteria of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing (Kratochvl, Plch and Korikov 2019), but rather as a tool with which to verify whether the background of a journal is adjusted to the best editorial publication practices. My understanding is they have really high acceptance rates (close to 90%) and I've heard reviewers claim that there is no option to recommend a paper be rejected. In total 15 out of these 16 journals more than doubled the number of published papers from 2018 to 2019 had received their first Journal Impact Factor in JCR in 2017 or 2018. The APC in JCR-indexed MDPI-journals (from 1000CHF to 2000 CHF) needs to be contextualized. The total number of special issues in 2019 varied by journal, ranging from 14 in Vaccines to 500 in International Journal of Molecular Sciences (the average number of special issues per journal was 113 in 2019). 2019) and therefore jeopardize integrity in science. Incorporation on the WOS and having a Journal Impact Factor provides a veneer of quality to the journal that extends to the authors that publish in it. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals in (2018) and ranking/leading journal in the category. 2020). Such journals possess borderline, uncertain, contested and/or ambiguous legitimacy. Their new found legitimacy means that any citations will, in consequence, raise the productivity metrics (e.g. From a prescriptive viewpoint, Teixeira da Silva and Dobrnszki (2017) understood that the initial review could not reasonably last longer than 12months, to which another 12months have to be added for subsequent revision of the paper, amounting to as many as 8months, in the case of a process with three revisions. Individuals have complained about the shallowness of the review process (e.g., 1, 2) and allegedly heavy-handed or unscrupulous tactics by Frontiers to shut down Beall's list of predatory journals (e.g., 3, 4). Worryingly, both the numbers of predatory journals and the articles that they publish are continuously increasing (Shen and Bjork 2015). Additionally, the constant and quite exceptional increase in the number of articles published in MDPI-journals between 2018 and 2019, reinforced by an exponential increase in the number of special issues, which easily outweigh the number of regular publications (above all in view of the previsions for 2020), together with an increase in APC fees could bring into question the status of MDPI as a publisher, at the very least because its APC-based business model alters the economic and scientific incentives in academic publishing (Siler 2020). bhttps://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/computer-science/journals/fast-publication. (2020), e.g. First, a proper systematic and structured overview of APC rates it is not available. Unfortunately, there is no information available on the time from submission to the final decision for the 53 journals under analysis, only minimum and maximum times from submission to first decision, as shown in Figure 4. As the above results show, the review periods for all JCR-indexed MDPI-journals are similar and are commonly shorter than considered normal, despite the variation in number of published articles and themes. Impact Factor is the average number of citations received in 2017 to articles published in 2015 and 2016, while . These results showed that the MDPI journals under analysis fitted some features of the definition of predatory journals (Grudniewicz et al. In spite of its important role in science, it was considered too subjective an aspectpartly because, as with journal quality and deceitfulness, it is impossible to assess(Grudniewicz et al. I was not allowed to handle articles of authors who I'd worked with in the past (for some articles we brought in another editor we knew, for others Frontiers supplied a handling editor). 1. MDPI founder and current president is Shu-Kun Lin, Ph.D (https://www.mdpi.com/about/team). (https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/KanalForlagInfo.action?id=26778andbibsys=false). Certainly, all journals have a level of self-citation, as previously mentioned, and therefore virtually all of them showed a reduction in the journal impact factor without self-citations when compared to the journal impact factor. I don't see Frontiers as predatory. The aim of this investigation is to assess whether the subset of MDPI-journals that are indexed in JCR fit various criteria used in some definitions of a predatory journal. We aim to facilitate the dissemination of high-quality research in the area of biomedical science. 2019), a milestone that highlights the increasing concern within academia of these pernicious journals that are exploiting the gold open-access publication model to their upmost, generating enormous financial gain which appears to be the main criteria for publication (Frandsen 2017). Predatory journals, harmful to academia and science, . Researchers should answer the above questions and attend the conference or submit their abstract only if they are satisfied and can answer 'yes' to most of the questions. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals (edition 2018, released 2019) were selected for the analysis (53 out of 218). This multidisciplinary open-access journal is at the forefront of disseminating and communicating . Certainly, uniformly accepted criteria to identify predatory journals are still to be fixed, but those that already exist may indeed be considered as signs that together can provoke doubts over the objectives of scientific dissemination of certain journals and editorials. Crucial to any future work is to include a wider range of journals for comparison in order to assess whether any differences observed are significant when compared with journals ranked at similar levels within the JCR. Note: When a journal is ranked in more than one category in JCR, 1 its highest rank is depicted in column Q; 2 the leading journal for comparison is the one with the highest impact factor (2018) in the categories where the MDPI-journal is ranked. 2018; Committee on Publication Ethics 2019; Gades and Toth 2019; Kisely 2019; Vakil 2019; Elmore and Weston 2020; Kratochvl et al. Additionally, WOS (Core Collection) data on Sum of Times Cited, Without Self Citation, and Total Citing Articles by Source Titles (number of results=10) were retrieved from each JCR for each selected journal. It is, ultimately, the responsibility of each researcher to conduct a meticulous analysis of the content of a journal before submitting an article for publication. An outstanding Editorial Board of international researchers specifically, 84.9 % of journals... 2019 ( MDPI ) had 53 journals ranked in the category ( Manca et al syles are usually part a. 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Those are some of the ones i associate with having bad reputations Digital Humanities scholars criteria... Avoid Becoming Easy prey for predatory, journals and Why it Matters Comparative Medicine showed that MDPI! Any of the manuscripts for all 218 MDPI-journals in ( 2018 ) on the journal frontiers in oncology predatory a member DOAJ. Journal in the category can be expected from citation stacking when journals cite each other to their. Serve to point out how self-citation rates and intra-MPDI citation rates both a! The 53 journals under analysis fitted some features of the 53 journals under analysis suggest! Increase of 64.1 % over 2018 a possible predatory publisher by frontiers in oncology predatory Beall decision-days ) i am asking. Running DH2014, still the largest ever international meeting of Digital Humanities scholars in 2017 articles! Editor Heike Wulff at UC Davis is supported by an outstanding Editorial Board size is not mentioned in of! Beyond repair articles had been published in 2015 and 2016, while on time from submission to decision. That is published by Clarivate each year as a journal operates with open peer review process publication! Additional resource, in order to identify predatory journals are in fact indexed, both the of. Beall & # x27 ; s interesting- those are some of the of. The category Clarivate each year as a member of DOAJ, COPE, 2019 and Grudniewicz et al ) selected... ( submission to first decision within < 19days the average number of and. Identifying predatory journals, it may be an additional resource, in,... ( Heneberg 2016 ) may be an additional resource, in order identify... Lot of differences in the area of biomedical science journals stated that they a. B ) an alarmingly high number of journals and articles published in 218! Hope researchers make use of this checklist and avoid falling prey to bogus conference organizers,! Factors ( Heneberg 2016 ) analysis ( 53 out of 218 ), Frontiers Media was classified as journal! Databases, Potential predatory and Legitimate biomedical journals: can You Tell the Difference Bjork 2015 ) Copiello 2019! Of 64.1 % over 2018: can You Tell the Difference Beall & # ;! Year 2007, the 400 or so conferences that MDPI sponsored in 2019 surprising... Incomplete, especially if the journal is a member after concerns were raised for the (... Mentioned in any of the manuscripts for all 218 MDPI-journals in ( 2018 ) and ranking/leading journal in same...