User:Charles R Greathouse IV/Junk

This page is devoted to the problem of predatory and other particularly low-quality publishing with an eye toward evaluating and mitigating its impact on the OEIS. In addition to papers, websites, etc. on the topic of predatory publishing itself, the scope of this page extends to best practices for publishers (ethically, as relates to the main topic); 'sting' operations, generally papers, designed to determine the legitimacy of various journals or publishers; best practices for distinguishing 'good' from 'bad' publishers/journals/sources; corruption, misconduct (including plagiarism), and retractions; and other issues that naturally relate these.

Resources

• Scholarly Open Access: Jeffrey Beall's page collecting lists of predatory open access publishers and standalone journals. This was generally considered the standard resource until Jeffrey took down the website (probably due to legal threats or action). A mirror, with some attempt to update after the closing of the site, can be found at beallslist.net.
• Stop Predatory Journals: A full attempt to replace Beall's site, with regular (?) updates.
• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association: Gold OA advocacy organization and trade association.
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): An organization promulgating best practice standards in publication ethics.
• Directory of Open Access Journals
• GVSU Open Access Journal Quality Indicators: A list of criteria for quality in open access journals. The positive indicators are relatively easy to meet, even for journals generally considered junk/predatory, making this a conservative source.
• Think Check Submit
• Math retractions on Retraction Watch
• FTC on predatory publishers
• NIH on predatory publishers

Papers

• Christian Greiffenhagen, Checking correctness in mathematical peer review, Social Studies of Science 0:0 (2023).
• Christian Greiffenhagen, Judging importance before checking correctness: quick opinions in mathematical peer review, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 0:0 (2023).
• Alexandre Scanff, Florian Naudet, Ioana Cristea, David Moher, Dorothy V M Bishop, Clara Locher, ‘Nepotistic journals’: a survey of biomedical journals, 2021 preprint
• Vít Macháček & Martin Srholec, Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences, Scientometrics (2021).
• Jon Pines, Image integrity and standards, Open Biology 10 (2020). Published 24 June 2020. (Editorial; discusses new integrity standards for Open Biology.)
• Bhushan Patwardhan and Gautam R. Desiraju, Assessing research: the slippery slope, Current Science 118:12 (Jun 25 2020), pp. 1869–1870.
• Michaela Strinzel, Anna Severin, Katrin Milzow, and Matthias Egger, Blacklists and Whitelists To Tackle Predatory Publishing: a Cross-Sectional Comparison and Thematic Analysis, mBio Jun 2019, 10 (3) e00411-19; DOI: 10.1128/mBio.00411-19
• Anna Severin & Nicola Low, Readers beware! Predatory journals are infiltrating citation databases, International Journal of Public Health 64 (2019), pp. 1123–1124.
• Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva and Panagiotis Tsigaris, What Value Do Journal Whitelists and Blacklists Have in Academia?, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 44, Issue 6 (November 2018), pp. 781–792.
• Elisabeth M. Bik, Arturo Casadevall, and Ferric C. Fang, The prevalence of inappropriate image duplication in biomedical research publications, mBio Jun 2016, 7 (3).
• Margaret Ray, An expanded approach to evaluating open access journals, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 47:4 (2016), pp. 307-327.
• Peter G. Beninger, Jeffrey Beall, and Sandra E. Shumway, Debasing the currency of science: The growing menace of predatory open access journals. Journal of Shellfish Research 35:1 (2016), pp. 1-5.
• Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella, Beyond Beall's list: better understanding predatory publishers, College & Research Libraries News 76:3 (2015), pp. 132-135.
• Robert E. Bartholomew, Science for sale: the rise of predatory journals, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 107:10 (2014), pp. 384-385.
• Walt Crawford, Journals, 'journals' and wannabes: investigating the list, Cites & Insights 14:7 (July 2014), pp. 1-45.
• Sarah Beaubien and Max Eckard, Addressing faculty publishing concerns with open access journal quality indicators, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 2:2 (2014), 12 pp.
• Nicholas J.L. Brown, Alan D. Sokal, and Harris L. Friedman, The complex dynamics of wishful thinking: The critical positivity ratio, American Psychologist 68 (2013), pp. 801-813.
• Mehrdad Jalalian and Hamidreza Mahboobi, New corruption detected: Bogus impact factors compiled by fake organizations, Electronic Physician 5:3 (2013), pp. 685-686.
• John Bohannon, Who's afraid of peer review?, Science 342:6154 (2013), pp. 60-65.
• Cyril Labbé, Ike Antkare one of the great stars in the scientific firmament, International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics Newsletter, 2010, 6 (2), pp. 48-52. <hal-00713564>
• Jeffrey Shallit, Science, pseudoscience, and the three stages of truth. Unpublished, 2005.
• Alan D. Sokal, What the social text affair does and does not prove (1997). In Noretta Koertge, ed, A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science, Oxford University Press (1998).
• Alan D. Sokal, A physicist experiments with cultural studies, Lingua Franca (1996).
• Jim Schnabel, Puck in the laboratory: the construction and deconstruction of hoaxlike deception in science, Science, Technology, & Human Values 19:4 (1994), pp. 459-492.

Articles

• Holly Else and Richard Van Noorden, The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science, Nature online (Mar 23 2021), News Feature.
• Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Hundreds of ‘predatory’ journals indexed on leading scholarly database, Nature online (Feb 09 2021), News.
• Helen Shen, Meet this super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers, Nature online (May 13 2020), News Feature.
• Иностранные хищные журналы в Scopus и WoS: переводной плагиат и российские недобросовестные авторы (2020 paper on plagiarism by translation written in Russian)
• Agnes Grudniewicz et al. (many authors), Predatory journals: no definition, no defence, Nature online (Dec 11 2019), Comments.
• Jennifer Byrne, We need to talk about systematic fraud, Nature online (Feb 06 2019), World View.
• James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose, Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship, Areo October 2, 2018.
• Gary Lewis, I got a hoax academic paper about how UK politicians wipe their bums published, Jul 20, 2018
• Jenn Ganton, Illegitimate journals scam even senior scientists, Nature online (Sep 07 2017), Column: World View.
• David Moher et al., Stop this waste of people, animals and money,
• Beryl Lieff Benderly, Avoiding fake journals and judging the work in real ones, Science blog entry (Oct 13, 2015).
• Carl Straumsheim, 'Predatory' publishing up, Inside Higher Ed (2105).
• Richard Van Noorden, Open-access website gets tough, Nature online (Aug 06 2014), News.
• Richard Van Noorden, Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers, Nature online (Feb 24 2014, updated Feb 25 2014), News.
• Jocelyn Kaiser, U.S. Government Accuses Open Access Publisher of Trademark Infringement Science online (May 09 2013).
• Karen Coyle, Predatory Publishers – Peer to Peer Review, Library Journal (April 4, 2013).
• Declan Butler, Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing, Nature online (Mar 27 2013), News Feature.
• Paul Boghossian, What the Sokal Hoax ought to teach us, Times Literary Supplement (1996).

Hoaxlike Papers

The title for this section follows Schnabel 1994 (q.v.). These papers are stings, deceptions, or the like, generally designed to expose junk of the sort discussed on this page. For obvious reasons it seems inappropriate to comingle them with the other papers.

• Daniel T. Baldassarre, What’s the Deal with Birds?, Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews (2020), 9 pp.
• Gerry Jay Louis, Testing inter-hemispheric social priming theory in a sample of professional politicians – a brief report
• David Mazières and Eddie Kohler, Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List, International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, accepted for publication (2014).
  • See Jeffrey Beall's blog entry (archived), including its acceptance email, acceptance letter, and peer reviewer's report (rating its "Appropriateness to publish in IJACT" as "Excellent").
• Alan Sokal, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Social Text #46/47 (spring/summer 1996), pp. 217-252.

Websites

• Joerg Arndt, Fake conferences and junk journals, BEWARE! (Nov 24 2013). Discussion of fake conferences and journals, focusing on spam for fake conferences and their associated journals.
• Christopher S. Baird, Is there a difference between mainstream science and alternative science? (Sep 1 2015)
• Brian Dunning, White Hat Journal Hoaxes, Skeptoid Podcast #543, Nov 1, 2016
• Brian Dunning, Are You Following a Crank?, Skeptoid Podcast #581, Jul 25, 2017
• Jeffrey Shallit blog entries: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] (2009–2019)
• Stuart Shieber, What percentage of open-access journals charge publication fees?, May 29, 2009
• Wikipedia articles: Predatory open access publishing, Who's Afraid of Peer Review?, Sokal affair, Bogdanov affair