This week we are pleased to feature a guest post from Dr. Salim Moussa, Assistant Professor of Marketing at ISEAH at the University of Gafsa in Tunisia. Dr. Moussa has recently published insightful research on the impact predatory journals have had on the discipline of marketing and, together with Cabells’ Simon Linacre, has some cautionary words for his fellow researchers in that area.
Academic journals are important to marketing scholars for two main reasons: (a) journals are the primary medium through which they transmit/receive scholarly knowledge; and (b) tenure, promotion, and grant decisions depend mostly on the journals in which they have published. Selecting the right journal to which one would like to submit a manuscript is thus a crucial decision. Furthermore, the overabundance of academic marketing journals -and the increasing “Publish or Perish” pressure – makes this decision even more difficult.
The “market” of marketing journals is extremely broad, with Cabells’ Journalytics indexing 965 publication venues that that are associated with “marketing” in their aims and scope. While monitoring the market of marketing journals for the last ten years, I have noticed that a new type of journal has tapped into it: open access (OA) journals.
The first time I have ever heard about OA journals was during a dinner in an international marketing conference held in April 2015 in my country, Tunisia. Many of the colleagues at the dinner table were enthusiastic about having secured publications in a “new” marketing journal published by “IBIMA”. Back in my hometown (Gafsa), I took a quick look at IBIMA Publishing’s website. The thing that I remember the most from that visit is that IBIMA’s website looked odd to me. Then a few years later, while conducting some research on marketing journals, I noticed some puzzling results for a particular journal. Investigating the case of that journal, I came to realize that a scam journal was brandjacking the identity of the flagship journal of the UK-based Academy of Marketing’s, Journal of Marketing Management.
Undertaking this research, terms such“Predatory publishers”, “Beall’s List”, and “Think, Check, Submit” were new discoveries for me. This was also the trigger point of a painful yet insightful research experience that lasted an entire year (from May 2019 to May 2020).
Beall’s list was no longer available (shutdown in January 2017), and I had no access to Cabells’ Predatory Reports. Freely available lists were either outdated or too specialized (mainly Science, Technology, and Medicine) to be useful. So, I searched for journals that have titles that are identical or confusingly similar to those of well-known, prestigious, non-predatory marketing journals. Using this procedure, I identified 12 journals and then visited the websites of each of these 12 journals to collect information about both the publisher and the journal; that is, is the journal OA or not, its Article Processing Charges, whether the journal had an editor in chief or not, the names of its review board members and their affiliations (if any), the journal’s ISSNs, etc. I even emailed an eminent marketing scholar that I was stunned to see his name included in the editorial board of a suspicious journal.
With one journal discarded, I had a list of 11 suspicious journals (Journal A to Journal K).
Having identified the 11 publishers of these 11 journals, I then consulted three freely available and up-to-date lists of predatory publishers: the Dolos List, the Kscien List, and the Stop Predatory Journals List. The aim of consulting these lists was to check whether I was wrong or right in qualifying these publishers as predatory. The verdict was unequivocal; each of the 11 publishers were listed in all three of them. These three lists, however, provided no reasons for the inclusion of a particular publisher or a particular journal.
To double-check the list, I used the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high-quality, OA, peer-reviewed journals. None of the 11 journals were indexed in it. To triple-check the list, I used both the 2019 Journal Quality List of the Australian Business Deans Council and the 2018 Academic Journal Guide by the Chartered Association of Business Schools. None of the 11 journals were ranked in these two lists either.
To be brief, the one year of endeavor resulted in a paper I submitted to the prestigious academic journal, Scientometrics, published by Springer Nature, and my paper was accepted and published online in late October 2020. In that paper, I reported the findings of a study that examined the extent of citations received by articles published in ten predatory marketing journals (as one of the 11 journals under scrutiny was an “empty journal”; that is, with no archives). The results indicated that some of these journals received quite a few citations with a median of 490 citations, with one journal receiving 6,296 citations (see also Case Study below).
I entitled the article “Citation contagion: A citation analysis of selected predatory marketing journals.” Some people may or may not like the framing in terms of “contagion” and “contamination” (especially in these COVID times), but I wanted the title to be striking enough to attract more readership. Those who read the article may see it as a call for marketing researchers to “not submit their (possibly interesting) knowledge products to any journal before checking that the publication outlet they are submitting to is a non-predatory journal.” Assuming that the number of citations an article receives signals its quality, the findings in my study indicate that some of the articles published in these predatory journals deserved better publication venues. I believe that most of the authors of these articles were well-intentioned and did not know that the journals they were submitting to were predatory.
A few months earlier and having no access to Cabells databases, I read each of the posts in their blog trying identify marketing journals that were indexed in Predatory Reports. Together with Cabells, our message to the marketing research community is that 10 of the 11 journals that I have investigated were already listed (or under-review for inclusion) in Predatory Reports. I believe my study has revealed only the tip of the iceberg. Predatory Reports now indexes 140 journals related to the subject of Marketing (which represents 1% of the total number of journals listed in Predatory Reports). Before submitting your papers to an OA marketing journal, you can use Predatory Reports to verify that it is legitimate.
Case Study
The study completed by Dr. Moussa provides an excellent primer on how to research and identify predatory journals (writes Simon Linacre). As such, it is instructive to look at one of the journals highlighted in Dr. Moussa’s article in more detail.
Dr. Moussa rightly suspected that the British Journal of Marketing Studies looked suspicious due to its familiar-sounding title. This is a well-used strategy by predatory publishers to deceive authors who do not make themselves familiar with the original journal. In this case, the British Journal of Marketing Studies sounds similar to a number of potential journals in this subject discipline.
As Dr. Moussa also points out, a questionable journal’s website will often fail to stand up to a critical eye. For example, the picture below shows the “offices” of BJMS – a small terraced house in Southern England, which seems an unlikely location for an international publishing house. This journal’s website also contains a number of other tells that while not singularly defining of predatory publishers, certainly provide indicators: prominent phone numbers, reference to an ‘Impact Factor’ (not from Clarivate), fake indexation in databases (eg DOAJ), no editor contact details, and/or fake editor identity.
What is really interesting about Dr. Moussa’s piece is his investigation of citation activity. We can see from the data below that ‘Journal I’ (which is the British Journal of Marketing Studies) that both total citations and the most citations received by a single article are significant, and represent what is known as ‘citation leakage’ where citations are made to and from predatory journals. As articles in these journals are unlikely to have had any peer review, publication ethics checks or proof checks, their content is unreliable and skews citation data for reputable research and journals.
- Predatory journal: Journal I (BJMS)
- Total number of citations received: 1,331
- Number of citations received by the most cited article: 99
- The most cited article was published in: 2014
- Number of citations received from SSCI-indexed journals: 3
- Number of citations received from FT50 listed journals: 0
It is a familiar refrain from The Source, but it bears repeating – as an author you should do due diligence on where you publish your work and ‘research your research’. Using your skills as a researcher for publication and not just what you want to publish will save a huge amount of pain in the future, both for avoiding the bad journals and choosing the good ones.