The results showed that the self-citation rates increased and was very much higher than those of the leading journals in the JCR category. Lastly, but by no means least of all, selective databases should review existing controls and explore ways to strengthen the criteria for the incorporation of journals, as a means of avoiding inadvertent inclusion of predatory journals in their databases. The physicist Ahmed Hindawi and his wife, the mathematician Nagwa Abdel-Mottaleb, started their publishing house in their home country Egypt in 1997; 10 years later they converted Hindawi to open access. However, since these journals are all the top journals by Impact Factor in their respective subject categories it is not possible to know whether the differences observed between the two groups are meaningful, a wider sample is necessary to draw definitive conclusions. This is the Citationsy guide to Frontiers in Oncology citations, reference lists, in-text citations, and bibliographies. The increase in APCs was qualified as hyperinflation by Khoo (2019) and was not exclusive to MDPI, as in his study, which covered 319 journals of the four-largest APC-funded open-access publishersHindawi, Frontiers, MDPI, and BioMed Central Ltd. (BMC)between 2012 and 2018, he found overall APC rises in all of them ranging between 17% and 220% and, likewise, observed a rise in the number of articles per journal. Intra-MDPI citation rate 2018 and 2019 (top 10 citing journals). (, Fong A. E., Wilhite A. W., Hickman C., Lee Y. A Cross-Sectional Comparison, Predatory Open Access: A Longitudinal Study of Article Volumes and Market Charateristics, Is It Such a Big Deal? However, this solution could only work in the medium to long term. 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). There were 53 MDPI-indexed journals in the JCR (2018), 20 of which were ranked Q1, 25 were ranked Q2, and only 8 were ranked Q3 (see Table 1). 2018). 2019). The journal Sustainability has the largest Editorial Board with 1,145 members, while the journal Metabolites has a mere 62 Editorial Board members. 1. The impact score (IS), also denoted as Journal impact score (JIS), of an academic journal is a measure of the yearly . It is difficult however to contextualize the analysis of APC in JCR-indexed MDPI journals for two reasons. 2019), the term predatory journal is undoubtedly the most extensive in academia and appropriately describes this malpractice (Manca et al. Predatory Journals Are Infiltrating Citation Databases, Potential Predatory and Legitimate Biomedical Journals: Can You Tell the Difference? Universities, professional associations, ). Assistant Field Chief Editor. Read through past issues of the journal Think. 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). 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. 2020). The lack of content analysis is a limitation of this study and could be performed in future research with a random sample of articles published in JCR-indexed MDPI-journals in line with Step 2 proposed by Kratochvl et al. because it is used as a proxy for both quality and integrity. Poor Peer Review Practices. Peer review is a system of safeguards which, despite its limitations, fulfils its function reasonably well of ensuring that false research, of low quality, with serious flaws or inaccurate information is not disseminated, thereby avoiding misinformation (Elmore and Weston 2020; Siler 2020). 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. 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. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (, Improving universities activities in academic startup support through public interventions: The effectiveness of the German programme EXISTleverage of potentials, Changing conceptualization of innovation in the European Union and its impact on universities: Critical junctures and evolving institutional demands, Gender diversity and publication activityan analysis of STEM in the UK, Assessing the variety of collaborative practices in translational research: An analysis of scientists ego-networks, Early career academic's odyssey: A narrative study of her professional identity construction. are all necessary, although not sufficient conditions for proper identification of a predatory journal. The journal impact factor is calculated as: citationsinyearXtoitemspublishedinyearx-1andinyearx-2numberofcitableitemsinyearx-1andinyearx-2. Better Service The first relevant fact of their analysis is that some journals use very similar names to other journals with established reputations, which can be one of the characteristics of predatory journals, with which they could be seen to prey upon those less well informed on the subject of predatory journals (Xia et al. 2020). (2019) and COPE (2019). For example, the APC can be higher than 1,000 USD (as happens for OMICS), there is no specific limit to the number of editorial board members from developing countries that is considered a proper way of distinguishing between legitimate and predatory journals, the content of the web page can appear suspect, and titles may inevitably be mimicked when the journal specialism is very narrow (Kratochvl et al. We will only update links and add notes to this list. 's (2019) definition. Wikipedia lists various controversies about Frontiers articles and resignations of editors. (2019) state that predatory journals prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and that their behaviour includes deviation from best editorial and publication practices. With respect to the formal criterion of the composition of the Editorial Board, it has not been possible to evaluate whether all the members who form part of these boards are in fact aware of their roles, due to their very high numbers (16,223 individuals), which could be approached in future research. He demonstrated that the self-citations of Sustainability, in 2016 and 2017, in relation to articles published in 2015, in no way corresponded to a uniform probability distribution. The didactic explanation of Broome was as follows: The speed to publication for reputable journals is certainly longer with time from submission to first decision by the editor ranging from 4 to 12 weeks for most journals and varies even by article. Similar pernicious effects can be expected from citation stacking when journals cite each other to raise their impact factors (Heneberg 2016). Frederic was setting up a new, online, open access, peer reviewed . The increase in the number of published articles between 2018 and 2019 ranged from 554.91% in Medicina to 18.3% in the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (IJGI). BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. (, Shu F., Mongeon P., Haustein S., Siler K., Alperin J. P., Larivire V. (, Xia J., Harmon J. L., Connolly K. G., Donnelly R. M., Anderson M. R., Howard H. A. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals betray both traits through a steady increase in number of their published articles (sometimes to several hundred in just one regular issue) and special issues. 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). 2020). However, they've done a pretty good job maintaining reputation, though it certainly differs per-journal. MDPI founder and current president is Shu-Kun Lin, Ph.D (https://www.mdpi.com/about/team). Its average APC amounts to 1,138USD (OMICS 2020). Even so, the identification of predatory journals is still a crucial aspect in the maintenance of quality and scientific integrity. The alarming increase in the number of predatory journals (from 1,800 to 8,000 over the period 20104) and the exponential growth (from 53,000 to 420,000 between 2010 and 2014) of the articles that they publish (Shen and Bjork 2015) have rendered futile any effort to keep white and blacklists updated. 2018), MEDLINE, or Embase (Hayden 2020) with the appearance of legitimate scientific journals. 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. a year Country of Publication: England Publisher: Certainly, the number of special issues published or scheduled in 1 year reveals no quality-related information, although the fact that the number of special issues in JCR-indexed MDPI-journals is so much higher than the number of ordinary issues per year coupled with their constant increase since 2018 inevitably awakens suspicions of a lucrative business aim. Stop This Waste of People, Animals and Money, Analysis of Citation Patterns and Impact of Predatory Sources in the Nursing Literature, Ingreasing Awareness about Predatory Publishers, Journal of the American Psychiatric New Association, Readers Beware! 2020). 1088 Email Press 2425 Publishers (2020), e.g. 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). All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License. mimicking names. Scope. As a consequence of the new context generated by the proliferation of predatory journals, it becomes necessary to review the evaluation policies (Beall 2016). A review of content output in the leading journals was not conducted. 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. Second, only limited insights are possible because not all the journals in the control group are in the framework of gold open access (which would allow a direct comparison). Frontiers in Oncology is a broad-scope, multidisciplinary journal covering all areas of cancer research to advance our knowledge of cancer epidemiology to improve diagnosis, therapeutics and management strategies. Cortegiani et al. 2020b). Hence, specific recommendations are given to researchers, educational institutions and prestigious databases advising them to review their working relations with those sorts of journals. 2019), which clearly manipulate the metrics. 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. Frontiers in Oncology. Logically, this step requires expert knowledge in each scientific field that prevents a global analysis of the 53 journals under analysis. JCR-indexed MDPI-journals (edition 2018, released 2019) were selected for the analysis (53 out of 218). For example, Sustainability published a total of 7,414 articles in 2019, with peer-review periods of between 13.94 and 17.75days from submission to first review, while Vaccines published 226 articles in 2019 with peer-review periods ranging between 14.61 and 26.04days. More specifically, in general terms, the average time from submission to first decision from MDPI-journals was 19days, both in 2019 and 2018 (MDPI 2020), despite the increase in the number of both journals (15 new journals from 2018) and articles which were published (a 64.1% increase compared to 2018). 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). 10 Point checklist to identify predatory publishers. Frontiers is merely a symptom of an utterly rotten scholarly publishing system, which is beyond repair. Shedding further light on MDPI-journal citing sources, the top 10 MDPI journals for citations listed on the WOS were analysed and intra-MDPI citation levels were identified with other MDPI-journals. 2020; Siler 2020). These lists very soon become outdated and incomplete, especially if the resources to keep them updated are scarce. The MDPI, with its headquarters in Basel (Switzerland), formerly known as Molecular Diversity Preservation International (https://www.mdpi.com/about/history) that launched its first two journals (Molecules and Mathematical and Computational Applications) in 1996, operates a gold open- access framework. Based on a series of . ), rather than professional editors (as with the journals of Nature Research). This is an especially important aspect when the external appearance of the predatory journals, such as the OMICS journals, has reached such a level of sophistication that they totally or partially comply with the formal criteria that serve to differentiate between predatory and legitimate journals. Level 1 corresponds to journals, which meet at least the following basic scientific criteria: external peer review, academic editorial board and international or national authorship (https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/OmKriterier.action). Note: When a JCR-indexed journal is ranked in more than one category, 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 category where the MDPI-journal is ranked. Impact Factor is the average number of citations received in 2017 to articles published in 2015 and 2016, while . Cancers/CA-A Cancer Journal for Clinicians . 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. 2020). Predatory journals, harmful to academia and science, . In addition, publication in a predatory journal implies the possible squandering of valuable resources: people, animals, and money, as Moher et al. Selective databases, such as Scopus, PubMed, and Journal Citation Reports (JCRs), form an index of journals, a sort of whitelist that is used for the purposes of assessing researchers and taking decisions on grant funding (Cortegiani et al. (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. 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'. 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. The number of articles published during 2019 appeared to have no effect on the average duration of peer review. Aurora, United States. 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. 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. As such a single proxy was used in the form of the non-MDPI leading journal. 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. Moreover, in January 2020, the number of special issues scheduled for 2020 with respect to those in 2019 skyrocketed in all the journals under study to levels as surprisingly high as 788 special issues in Sustainability, 830 in Applied Sciences, and 846 in Materials. A further relevant aspect worth focussing upon is the size of the Journal Editorial Board. (, Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Check. Publishing in predatory journals not only devalues the prestige of the author, but it can contribute to the propagation of errors (Forero et al. The list of criteria was created after considering which information could be objectively collected and compared across journals and which may fit the suggestion by the above sources that predatory journals do not follow best publication practices. As shown in Figure 1, the number of articles published in 2019 in each journal varied highly, ranging from 226 in Vaccines to 7,414 in Sustainability. Likewise, Cabells blacklist and whitelist, now referred to as predatory journals and analytics https://blog.cabells.com/2020/06/08/announcement/, listed more than 12,000 predatory journals in October 2019 (https://blog.cabells.com/2019/10/02/the-journal-blacklist-surpasses-the-12000-journals-listed-mark/). It is therefore essential to define the concept not to solely rely on specific criteria. (2020), the effect of self-citation and citation cartels may be halted by the use of JIF-without self-cites metric, a simple action that reduces the penalty faced by journals that decide not to manipulate so, in sum, ethical editors are not penalized and manipulative editors are not advantaged (Wilhite et al. Jcr-Indexed MDPI-journals ( edition 2018, released 2019 ), rather than professional editors ( as with the appearance Legitimate. 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