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AsianScientist (Jan. 5, 2021) – In an advisory printed on its web site on December 31, 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has recognized 65 ‘risky’ worldwide journals its scientists ought to keep away from. The preliminary tally, harking back to Beall’s List of potential predatory journals and publishers, consists of periodicals from main publishers reminiscent of Wolters Kluwer, John Wiley & Sons, Springer Nature and MDPI.
“The purpose of this list is to remind scientific researchers to choose their publishing platform carefully, and remind publishing institutions to strengthen the quality management of their journals,” the nationwide analysis institute stated in its advisory.
CAS stated that the journals had been chosen based mostly on each qualitative and quantitative standards. The indicators, chosen after ‘expert consultation,’ embody the variety of articles printed in every journal; how ‘internationalized’ its authors are; publication charges; and rejection, retraction and self-citation charges. Each journal is then assigned to one in every of three warning classes akin to its stage of threat: low, medium or excessive.
While most establishments do maintain their very own threat lists of doubtful publications, an inventory issued by China’s nationwide analysis institute is uniquely impactful, stated Ms. Tao Tao, a US-based impartial marketing consultant on Chinese educational publications.
The CAS checklist “could be the most influential, and referred to by many,” she wrote in a LinkedIn publish. “Institutions may use it to make their own rules for funding […] authors will try to avoid submitting to these if they could.”
The CAS checklist comes amid a government-led push for native researchers to publish extra of their work in Chinese journals. While China overtook the US to turn into the world’s prime scientific nation in 2020, producing virtually a fifth of all peer-reviewed papers printed between 2016 and 2018, many of those ended up in worldwide publications. Improving the requirements of home-grown journals has turn into a nationwide precedence in recent times, with authorities committing in 2019 to spend multiple billion yuan (~US$145 million) on some 280 native publications over 5 years.
Meanwhile, the significance of worldwide journals can be waning, marked by the Science Citation Index (SCI)’s de-prioritization in China. Covering greater than 9,000 publications worldwide and ceaselessly used as a barometer of worldwide journal high quality, the SCI has lengthy been one of the vital essential analysis indicators within the nation.
Last yr, the Chinese Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology launched a doc saying it might be lowering its ‘excessive reliance’ on the SCI for tutorial promotions, job provides and allocation of analysis funding. All eight journals deemed to be of highest threat on the CAS checklist are SCI-indexed.
For native researchers like Professor Wei Guo of the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry at CAS, the fear is that the checklist’s obscure standards and the dearth of differentiation between listed publications and predatory journals may trigger irreparable reputational harm, he stated.
Predatory journals and publishers, like these on Beall’s List, are entities that settle for articles for publication, together with their authors’ charges, with out performing requisite high quality checks for plagiarism, reproducibility or moral points. The eponymous checklist, first created by American librarian Jeffrey Beall in 2008, was a outstanding journal watchdog website with over 1,000 entries of predatory outfits and a big following earlier than its closure in 2017.
“We do not know what the ‘warning level’ stands for, and how to distinguish the listed journals from those so-called ‘predatory journals,” Guo instructed Asian Scientist Magazine. “Chinese researchers would become more reluctant to submit to these journals, even if some of them were once considered to be reputable in their own fields, such as Materials, Sensors and Molecules. I think it is unfair.”
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Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences; Photo: Shutterstock.
Disclaimer: This article doesn’t essentially replicate the views of AsianScientist or its workers.
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