Predatory journals: Perception, impact and use of Beall's list by the scientific community-A bibliometric big data study

Georg Richtig; Marina Berger; Max Koeller; Markus Richtig; Erika Richtig; Jörg Scheffel; Marcus Maurer; Frank Siebenhaar

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0287547

Predatory journals: Perception, impact and use of Beall's list by the scientific community-A bibliometric big data study

PLoS One. 2023 Jul 7;18(7):e0287547. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287547. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Georg Richtig^{1

2

3

4}, Marina Berger⁵, Max Koeller⁶, Markus Richtig⁵, Erika Richtig⁵, Jörg Scheffel^{3

4}, Marcus Maurer^{3

4}, Frank Siebenhaar^{3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Otto Loewi Research Center, Pharmacology Section, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria.
² Division of Oncology, Division of Oncology, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria.
³ Institute of Allergology, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
⁴ Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology ITMP, Allergology and Immunology, Berlin, Germany.
⁵ Department of Dermatology, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria.
⁶ Diagnostic and Research Institute of Pathology, Medical University Graz, Graz, Austria.

Abstract

Beall's list is widely used to identify potentially predatory journals. With this study, we aim to investigate the impact of Beall's list on the perception of listed journals as well as on the publication and citation behavior of the scientific community. We performed comprehensive bibliometric analyses of data extracted from the ISSN database, PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), Crossref, Scopus and Web of Science. Citation analysis was performed by data extracted from the Crossref Cited-by database. At the time of analysis, Beall's list consisted of 1,289 standalone journals and 1,162 publishers, which corresponds to 21,735 individual journals. Of these, 3,206 (38.8%) were located in the United States, 2,484 in India (30.0%), and 585 in United Kingdom (7.1%). The majority of journals were listed in the ISSN database (n = 8,266), Crossref (n = 5,155), PubMed (n = 1,139), Scopus (n = 570), DOAJ (n = 224), PMC (n = 135) or Web of Science (n = 50). The number of articles published by journals on Beall's list as well as on the DOAJ continuously increased from 2011 to 2017. In 2018, the number of articles published by journals on Beall's list decreased. Journals on Beall's list were more often cited when listed in Web of Science (CI 95% 5.5 to 21.5; OR = 10.7) and PMC (CI 95% 6.3 to 14.1; OR = 9.4). It seems that the importance of Beall's list for the scientific community is overestimated. In contrast, journals are more likely to be selected for publication or citation when indexed by commonly used and renowned databases. Thus, the providers of these databases must be aware of their impact and verify that good publication practice standards are being applied by the journals listed.

Copyright: © 2023 Richtig et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Bibliometrics
Big Data*
Databases, Factual
Perception
Periodicals as Topic*

Grants and funding

Georg Richtig received funding from the Austrian Science Fund FWF (W1241) and the Medical University Graz through the PhD Program Molecular Fundamentals of Inflammation (DK-MOLIN). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.