Citation patterns between impact-factor and questionable journals

Abstract One of the most fundamental issues in academia today is understanding differences between legitimate and questionable publishing. While decision-makers managers consider journals indexed popular citation indexes such as Web Science or Scopus legitimate, they use two lists (Beall’s Cabell’s), one which has not been updated for a few years, to identify so-called predatory journals. The main aim our study reveal contribution accepted by authorities visibility For this purpose, 65 from social sciences 2338 Web-of-Science-indexed that cited these were examined in-depth terms index coverages, subject categories, impact factors self-citation patterns. We have analysed 3234 unique papers 5964 citing (6750 citations papers) found 13% WoS 37% impact-factor findings show neither factor nor size good predictor number