| Abstract: |
In recent years the academic world has experienced a mushrooming of journals
that falsely pretend to be legitimate academic outlets. We study this
phenomenon using information from 46,000 researchers seeking promotion in
Italian academia. About 5% of them have published in journals included in the
blacklist of `potential, possible, or probable predatory journals' elaborated
by the scholarly librarian Jeffrey Beall. Data from a survey that we conducted
among these researchers confirms that at least one third of these journals do
not provide peer review or they engage in some other type of irregular
editorial practice. We identify two factors that may have spurred publications
in dubious journals. First, some of these journals have managed to be included
in citation indexes such as Scopus that many institutions consider as a
guarantee of quality. Second, we show that authors who publish in these
journals are more likely to receive a positive evaluation when (randomly
selected) scientific evaluators lack research expertise. Overall, our analysis
suggests that the proliferation of `predatory' journals may reflect the
existence of severe information asymmetries in scientific evaluations. |