Research On The Characteristics Of Predatory Journals From A Comparative Perspective

The rapid development of the Internet era has led to the innovation of various scientific and technological achievements,as well as the digitization of traditional publishing modes.Academic publishing has gradually evolved to online publishing,ushering in the Open Access publishing mode.This mode of publishing by authors with fees can not only greatly reduce publishing costs,but also make use of the Internet for academic exchange and publishing,which makes academic dissemination no longer subject to the traditional conditions such as cost,region and time,and greatly improves the efficiency of information dissemination.Due to the lack of perfect standardization system and interest-driven,some illegal elements are taking advantage of the open access publishing mode to gain profits by taking unfair actions,which has caused the emergence of a batch of low-quality problem journals.Jeffrey Beall reveals this phenomenon on his blog,naming the Predatory Journal.The number of predatory journals has increased rapidly in a short period of time,which has attracted wide attention in the academic circles.Publishing articles in predatory journals will not only waste the author's time,experience and money,but also seriously affect the academic ecological environment,which is not conducive to the healthy development of open access.Therefore,it is necessary to study the characteristics of predatory journals.Only by fully understanding their characteristics,can predatory journals be effectively identified.On the basis of reading and combing a large number of related documents,this paper identifies the characteristics of predatory periodicals by combining descriptive analysis with differential analysis.This study uses the list of predatory journals created by Jeffrey Beall as the data source,carries out research on the journals in the list,and conducts analysis on the overall status and characteristics of the predatory journals.Then,from a comparative perspective,the differences between predatory journals in Beall list and regular open access journals in DOAJ Open Access Journal Network Platform are analyzed.From the journal's own dimension,author dimension and influence dimension,APC,audit duration,editorial board information,author information,journal evaluation index and altmetric Attention Score are selected for data collection.Using the difference analysis function in SPSS,the results show that predatory journals are characterized by lower APC levels(concentrated in US$50),more distribution in developing countries(concentrated in India),lack of editor details,and greater influence on certain social media(blogs,Wikipedia,etc.)than regular open access journals.Finally,according to the characteristics of predatory journals,this paper puts forward corresponding identification methods to help all sectors of society effectively avoid the trap of predatory journals.In the subsequent studies,the predatory journals can be further studied by enlarging the sample size and other methods to examine more in-depth characteristics of the predatory journals.