Understanding How Predatory Journals Prey on International Students and Young Scholars

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Programming development concerns in education abroad

Proposal

There has been a precipitous rise in predatory academic journals in recent years. These scam journals prey on young academics and ESL or international students by promising easy publications in English, but for a price, costing anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand US dollars. Peer-review is merely an illusion for these publications because if the fee is paid, the article will be published regardless of quality or accuracy.

There was an attempt to publicize these suspicious operations. Jeffrey Beall, from the University of Colorado, compiled a list of predatory journals and publishers beginning in 2008. However, he pulled the list in early 2017 because of outside pressure. One issue was that a majority of the inclusions were based in emerging nations. Critics argued that Western elites were unjustly gatekeeping science and research, leaving out other parts of the world. The open source movement, too, protested the blacklist, as newly established journals have been formed with missions to democratize research. They contend that differing standards did not equate to scam or predatory and that these labels have stifled the movement.

Many of the studies related to these scam publications have focused on the practice in hard sciences. There has been little research in this area pertaining to the field of education or to international students. In this roundtable discussion, I will present preliminary research from a study on predatory journals in the field of education. Using an original dataset of education-focused predatory journals, I have analyzed and compared their tiles and descriptions with an original dataset of well-known education journals. Further, I have tested how these scam tiles can confused for reputable, quality journals in the field by chronicling search results when these publications are “Googled.”

The results show that these suspected predatory journals have titles that are almost indistinguishable from their legitimate peers, using common signifiers such as “international,” “educational,” and “research.” Likewise, the journal descriptions from these scam publications promise similar benefits and missions as known publications, even promising to abstract in popular indexes, such as Google Scholar. Furthermore, when searching for these titles on Google, the results from the first page often yield legitimate journals, as the predatory journal titles have mimicked well-known titles. These misleading practices prey on ESL scholars, young academics, and international students.

While these findings are only preliminary, they can help our field begin to understand this phenomenon. There is no easy solution to the problem, and it will only get worse in this competitive environment. In the roundtable discussion, I will share my results and show some examples from the process. I hope to gain perspective from the attendees and other presenters in terms of how to teach our ESL and international students how to identify these predatory practices.

Author

• Ryan Michael Allen, Chapman University