Disturbance of questionable publishing to academia

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes the impact of questionable publications on academia, revealing their inflated citation metrics and proposing a new metric to detect self-favoring citations, ultimately aiding policy development.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid journal-publisher metric to identify self-favoring citations and compares the influence of questionable publications with their unaccused counterparts.

Findings

Questionable publications have inflated citation impacts.

They are less disruptive and influential than their counterparts.

Suspicious publishers show inflated citation metrics.

Abstract

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.