Hundreds of ‘predatory’ journals indexed on leading scholarly database

The widely used academic database Scopus hosts papers from more than 300 potentially ‘predatory’ journals that have questionable publishing practices, an analysis has found.  Their presence on Scopus and other popular research databases raises concerns that poor-quality studies could mislead scientists and pollute the scientific literature. Scopus has stopped adding content from most of the flagged titles for re-evaluation. But an analysis titled Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences published in Scientometrics highlights how poor-quality science is infiltrating literature. The authors of this study conclude that Scopus needs to find a way to fact-check whether the journal adheres to the declared editorial practices, including most prominently how the peer-review process is performed in practice.