How Questionable Are Predatory Social Science Journals

Beginning in about 2011, scientists have witnessed a proliferation of new scientific journals that continues to the present day. At first glance this appears to be a good thing. New subdisciplines within several of the sciences have created the need for new, specialized journals. Many of the extant research journals either cannot or will not expand the number of manuscripts they accept for publication (Markowitz, Powell, & Hancock, 2014). Each academic year, freshly minted Ph.D.s become college professors, often at institutions where they are expected to conduct publishable research. Not knowing what to expect, they submit papers to journals that have 80 to 90 percent rejection rates. Worse yet, some of these journals take months to reject manuscript submissions. After one or two experiences of this sort, authors can become thoroughly frustrated. They may turn to new journals that do not have a wellestablished track record. Some of these new journals provide fast reviews and have high acceptance rates. Problem solved? Not according to a blog written by Jeffrey Beall, who has been tracking these journals since 2011. He maintains an annual list (only 18 in 2011, but 923 by 2016) of journals he considers to be "predatory." According to Beall, these journals engage in a number of practices that he believes are questionable. Among others, he claims that they sometimes charge publication fees that seem high, list "impact factors" that are spurious, make extraordinary claims about the quality of their journals, have marginally qualified persons on their editorial boards, name persons to editorial boards without their knowledge, republish papers that have already been published elsewhere, falsely claim that their journal is indexed by a legitimate indexing service, publish papers that are nothing more than opinions by laypeople or obvious pseudoscience, and hide the identity of the editor and/or the editor's qualifications (Beall, 2016). But what about the fast reviews and the high acceptance rates? Beall claims that it is possible to have a very fast review if the reviewer simply skims the paper, or if it is not read at all. If the reviewer fails to find anything wrong with the paper, the publisher is eager to publish it because each published paper is a revenue source. If it is true that manuscripts in predatory journals receive only superficial reviewing then we should find that they are given a stamp of approval even if they contain significant weaknesses. These weaknesses were operationalized as five criteria: (1) spelling and grammatical errors, (2) statistical errors, (3) quality of methods, (4) review of the literature, and (5) Overall Contribution to Science (OCS). The main purpose of the present study was to test hypotheses related to these criteria that were derived from Beall's argument. This was accomplished by obtaining reviews of predatory and non-predatory articles. We predicted that there would be significantly fewer spelling, grammatical, obvious statistical and methodological errors in non-predatory articles than in predatory articles. Furthermore, we predicted that the quantity and quality of the scientific literature cited and referenced in non-predatory articles would be better. We also predicted that the Overall Contribution to Science (OCS) ratings that we assigned would be significantly higher for the non-predatory articles. We also obtained ratings from some of the authors of the papers that we evaluated, relating to their experience with the journals in which they published. In addition, we obtained ratings from authors of papers that we did not evaluate, but which were published in similar predatory and non-predatory journals. Because Beall's criticism of predatory journals did not include authors' subjective evaluations of journals, we did not make strong predictions about the outcome of any of these ratings. However, if the term "predator" means taking advantage of "prey", it might be expected that these authors might not be satisfied with their experience with the predatory journals. …