Citation Analysis of Potential Predatory Journals Removed From the UGC-CARE List

Citation Analysis of Potential Predatory Journals Removed From the UGC-CARE List

Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 10
DOI: 10.4018/IJPSS.297200
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Abstract

Keeping into consideration importance of citation analysis as a method of journal evaluation criteria study is initiated to highlight impact of journals which were removed by UGC presuming that journals are receiving citation attention as they are published by reputed publishers. The study aims to raise the awareness of increasing prevalence of citations to the journal articles considered as low quality by UGC. It demonstrated that many articles from the removed journals are deeply interwoven in the scientific literature and are cited by authors which later on publish in reputed publication outlet. Thus, the decision considering journal as low quality is not sufficient rather a proper mechanism should framed regarding citing low quality literature. Furthermore, declaring a journal as low quality or removing it from a country listing of white journals cannot change the entire landscape of scientific communication unless a collective effort at international level is initiated to curb the problem of low quality research and duplicated efforts.
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Introduction

Open Access was introduced as a noble thought to herald the revolution in scholarly communication. However, it was polluted with the unacceptable practices, including predatory publishing. Predatory publishers publish the fraudulent journals exploiting the open -access model in which the author is paying. They publish the low quality journals by setting up the websites resembling the legitimate ones. Predatory publishers lack honesty and transparency, deceiving the scholars especially the inexperienced ones (Beall, 2012). These unethical publishers have been exploiting the open –access (OA) model by generating fraud, scam, unscholarly and false journals. The peer review mechanism has also been corrupted and takes place either to a low extent or does not exist at all. These journals have been considered as polluting the scientific work as they contaminate the work of legitimate journals (Frandsen, 2017). Keeping into consideration these issues in 2010, Beall created a list of journals declaring them as “potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers” that would deceive the researchers (Culley, 2017). In order to create the list he developed the criteria on the basis of two documents that were published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers; Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (Beall, 2015). Not only have the researchers been advised not to publish in such journals, but have also been prohibited to cite them. Journal of Threatened Taxa (JoTT) has published certain guidelines regarding the citation of work from predatory journals. It discourages citation of work published in journals from any of the known predatory publishers or stand-alone predatory/deceptive journals. It does not consider work published in predatory journals as scientifically valid, authors are advised not to reproduce the content of such work as a whole or in part in JoTT as all such frauds will be considered scientific misconducts of the form ‘plagiarism’. Such accusations will be objectively analyzed and penalized appropriately as stated in an earlier JoTT Editorial on policy. Consequently; JoTT discourages citing the predatory journals, as the work is not considered valid (Raghavan et al., 2015).Citing predatory journals is considered objectionable by (Gasparyan et al., 2015) and should be avoided which is also the responsibility of authors. Despite of the warnings given JoTT has noted an increasing number of references to predatory journals in works that have been submitted to it (Raghavan et al. 2015). Therefore, citation analysis has been used to measure the impact of journal by determining the number of times a work has been cited (Lowry, Humpherys, Malwitz, & Nix, 2007). A citation shows the relationship between the part or whole of the cited document and a part or whole of the citing document. Thus, it is an acknowledgement which one document receives from another (Smith, 1981). Scientific citations protect the integrity of bibliographic records and acts as a tool which guides the scholars across the number of published sources. The correct and valid citations add to the quality of reference lists which allows stakeholders of science communication to judge the papers and published articles justly (Gasparyan et al., 2015). One of the toughest tasks of UGC is to counter the rise of low quality journals as India is leading in publishing such journals. In view of this UGC created a white list of journals for guidance of scholars based on the following criteria. The journals that were already indexed by Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Indian Citation Index were included in the approved list. The journals that are recommended by universities and the Members of UGC Standing Committee and Language found the place in whitelist. Besides this, the journals recommended by universities or Standing Committee were further analyzed based on certain criteria and ranked on score points of 1-10 and the journals that received a minimum of 6 points got incorporated in the list. But some time later UGC along with Standing Committee on notification on journals found some fraudulent journals in the list. Also they received the complaints about the sub-standard journals that were incorporated in the list. Hence, after analyzing those journals they were removed from the approved list declaring them as black list or low quality journals (Ravindranath, 2017). On analyzing 4305 journals that were removed by UGC from the approved list we found that many of the journals belonged to reputed publishers like Sage, Emerald, and Elsevier etc. Taking into consideration the importance of citation analysis as a method of journal evaluation criteria the study is initiated to highlight the impact of the removed journals on the scientific literature.

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