Timeline for Why do vanity journals exist?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 13, 2020 at 23:11 | comment | added | gnasher729 | You mention "true crackpots". You'll also find "serious amateurs" who can write a paper that is not very good, not very important, but also nothing particularly wrong with it, and they just want their paper printed in a journal with their name on it. | |
| Jan 12, 2020 at 18:19 | comment | added | jamesqf | Re maintaining an appearance of productivity, the problem is the administrators who measure productivity by publication count. One can be an outstanding teacher without doing much in the way of publishable research, or one can work on one groundbreaking paper for years, yet be counted as less productive than those who produce dozens of not-very-interesting papers out of the same research. | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 17:24 | comment | added | Wolfgang Bangerth | I don't see these journals as being called predatory because they prey on the naive and ignorant, but because they prey on people's desire and need for professional advancement. If you're in a second or third world country and need to have X publications for continued employment and promotion, then you're willing to pay Y dollars for a publication. I'm pretty sure most of these authors understand full well that (i) that system is broken, and (ii) that they do not have the educational or monetary resources to be competitive with first world research/get published in high-quality journals. | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 16:20 | comment | added | ZeroTheHero | @benxyzzy if they victims, which certainly some are not. | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 15:57 | comment | added | benxyzzy | all fair points but this answer does have the air of victim blaming | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 10:35 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | Related to your paragraphs #3 and #4: the other part of the answer is "because often the bureaucrats count these as legit publications in bibliometric evaluations". If we got rid of the bean-counting culture of "you need X publications and Y citations, no matter where they come from", the market for predatory journals would greatly shrink. | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 3:30 | history | edited | ZeroTheHero | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 11, 2020 at 3:25 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | Could be more often intentional than I realize, but I think the whole point of calling predatory journals predatory is that they intend to mislead the authors who pay to publish. | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 3:23 | comment | added | ZeroTheHero | @BryanKrause Maybe I am naive but somehow I would assign this at the bottom of the list... v.g. vancouversun.com/news/local-news/… | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 3:14 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | There is of course another reason: naivete. | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 3:08 | history | answered | ZeroTheHero | CC BY-SA 4.0 |