ACADEMICS do not have it easy. On top of shouldering the enormous responsibility of educating the leaders of tomorrow, they have to meet the many key performance index (KPI) targets set by their respective universities.
WITH getting published seen as a fast track to gaining a professorship, it is no surprise that Malaysia has become a hunting ground for predatory journals.
In a paper titled “Predatory Publishing in Scopus: Evidence on Cross‑country Differences” published last month, Malaysia ranked fifth in “fraudulent publications”, amounting to 11.6% of predatory journal articles.
The survey conducted by two Czech Republic economists, Vit Machacek and Martin Srholec, analysed data from 172 countries in four fields of research between 2015 and 2017.
They mapped the infiltration of journals suspected of predatory practices into the citation database Scopus.
Prof Datuk Dr Abdul Wahab Mohammad said fraudulent journals started becoming a serious threat when these publications went online over a decade ago.
Predatory journal ranking debatable Pix for representational purpose only.
WHEN the research paper of two economists from the Czech Republic was published in an international journal Scientometrics on Feb 7, delineating the extent of how predatory journals across countries are making their mark in Scopus – a global citation database of scholarly works – pandemonium broke out in Malaysia.
This was because the nation was ranked fifth among 20 countries with the most number of academics cited in more than 300 predatory journals in Scopus.
Scopus is a respectable global citation database run by Dutch publisher Elsevier that uniquely combines a comprehensive, curated abstract and citation database with enriched data and linked scholarly content, covering life, social, physical and health sciences.
Publish or perish mentality driving academicians to questionable journals
Modified16 Feb 2021, 2:41 am
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Some Malaysian professors and lecturers are publishing their research in questionable scholarly journals that allow them to pay to be published and over time this will weaken the overall reputation of our universities, academicians say.
Malaysia was ranked as among the fifth-highest contributors in the world of countries surveyed by two Czech Republic economists Vit Machacek and Martin Srholec, who mapped the infiltration of so-called predatory scholarly journals into the citation database Scopus over a period of three years from 2015 to 2017.
The data was obtained from research involving 172 countries in four fields, namely health sciences, life sciences, physical sciences and social sciences and indicated that some academicians who are seeking ‘shortcuts’ to be promoted to associate professor and professor.