Disturbance of questionable publishing to academia

• DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2022.101294
• Publication Date: 2022-05-06T05:34:42Z
• Authors: Taekho You; Jinseo Park; June Young Lee; Jinhyuk Yun; Woo-Sung Jung
• Keywords: Controlled experiment; FOS: Computer and information sciences; 0301 basic medicine; PREDATORY JOURNALS; Physics - Physics and Society; 0303 health sciences; FOS: Physical sciences; CITATION; Computer Science - Digital Libraries; SCIENCE; Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Citation impact; CENTRALITY; 03 medical and health sciences; Greedy publishing; Science of science; Digital Libraries (cs.DL); Predatory

16 pages of main text including 4 figures + 42 pages of supplementary information including 38 supplementary figures<br/>Questionable publications have been accused of "greedy" practices; however, their influence on academia has not been gauged. Here, we probe the impact of questionable publications through a systematic and comprehensive analysis with various participants from academia and compare the results with those of their unaccused counterparts using billions of citation records, including liaisons, i.e., journals and publishers, and prosumers, i.e., authors. Questionable publications attribute publisher-level self-citations to their journals while limiting journal-level self-citations; yet, conventional journal-level metrics are unable to detect these publisher-level self-citations. We propose a hybrid journal-publisher metric for detecting self-favouring citations among QJs from publishers. Additionally, we demonstrate that the questionable publications were less disruptive and influential than their counterparts. Our findings indicate an inflated citation impact of suspicious academic publishers. The findings provide a basis for actionable policy-making against questionable publications.<br/>