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The question is pretty simple:

Are HR/interviewers/recruiters outside of academia who parses through your CV/resume, aware of which journals are predatory (say, from Beall's List) and which are not (say, IEEE, ACM, Springer) when they see one in a prospective candidate's CV?

To understand better, take the scenario of a multinational company recruiting candidates and many of them have a Publications section in their CV. In that case, does it affect the profile of that candidate who has majority publications in journals flagged to be predatory in nature?

Would love to know from the people of the industry or the ones who transitioned from academia to industry.

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    Picking this apart ... Neither HR nor recruiters typically will any idea of journal quality, and they probably shouldn't. Their jobs are to provide high level filtering and connecting. If the position is an entry level research position, the hiring manager might have some idea about journal quality but it really might not matter. However if the hiring process involves senior researchers, say for instance you're applying for something beyond entry level or if the position is highly competitive, then you can count on them knowing what's what. Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 14:31
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    Some interviewers/companies will care about the contents of your publications and may be expected to distinguish between good and bad journals. Some interviewers/companies won't have any interest in your publications regardless of where they're published. A third group may be impressed by the fact that you've published, without caring about the contents - but I suspect the weight this carries in any decision will be fairly small once you control for other factors e.g. academic background and employment history.
    – avid
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 17:32

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This is a pure academic view, but from someone who has worked with industry and has long associations with industry researchers in major computing-related companies.

Some companies will care, since they do research that is comparable (often superior) to what happens in academia. Google, Siemens, and IBM come to mind here. So, if you are looking for a research position at such companies, they will know the publishing industry quite well. And they are active producers of papers as well.

Other companies will not know or care, but those probably don't care much about publications in any case. If they are just interested in the minimal amount of research that goes in to the next product, rather than long term thinking, then they likely hire people with other, more immediately useful, skills.

And, for some positions at the same large institutions I mentioned above, there will be little reason to care. But those aren't really research positions.

Expect that the research organizations within such large multinationals are just as sophisticated as is academia.

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  • Understood, and what about roles other than "Research Engineer" or alike? Consider an SDE Role, does it still affect, the sole idea I am trying to reflect in this question(or what I have a notion about...) is that when having a Publications section in my CV trying to apply for such roles, it shows that the candidate has a scientific attitude and what I see today is that any organization respects candidates who take an effort in Research which in recent times proves quite valuable of an asset for such companies in my field of Tech.
    – aryashah2k
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 13:15
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    That depends on individual factors. Most software development is part of product development, I'd guess, with some devoted to research support. And, if you are in a product development organization, then other things might be frowned on - especially for someone new in the organization.
    – Buffy
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 14:25
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    @aryashah2k: As Buffy points out things can vary dramatically. As far as the connection between research and software positions go, you often see research scientists, research scientists who can program, though typically not at a production grade, and software development professionals. The first two would tend to keep an eye on what's the latest in PNAS or Nature or IEEE, and the hiring managers would care about journal publications there. The latter would be judged more on publications at GitHub. Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 15:22
  • Alright, so publications at Github implies the source code behind my research made open source?
    – aryashah2k
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 17:22
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    @aryashah2k: Not quite. I'm saying that it's common for software development professionals, both working and budding, to have projects at GitHub. When they do, it's realistic to expect those projects to be scrutinized heavily by a potential employer, things like documentation, architecture and organization, code quality, sophistication, adherence to recognized good practices, etc. If a candidate presents well in this sense, it can give him or her a leg up over the competition. All of this drifts from your original question about predatory journals though. Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 17:50

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