Predatory Journals and Perished Articles; a Letter to Editor

In recent years, academic publishing has been faced with many destructive phenomena. “Predatory publishers” (or journals) are one challenge for scholarly publishing. This term was introduced to academic societies for the first time by Jeffrey Beall in 2010 (1). A predatory journal is a journal which publishes papers without peer review, or by an unfair review process and charging publication fees (2). According to Beall’s definition, questionable peer review process and unknown location of the real controlling entity are among the most important criteria for detecting predatory journals (3). In 2016, Beall announced that the number of predatory publisher was growing (4) from 18 in 2011 to 923 in 2016 (figure 1). These statistics convince researchers of the need for more research into dealing with predatory journals. Predatory journals have little or no peer review, thus they will be a repository for false principles and bogus research (1). These bogus researches may be dangerous in some domains such as medical sciences, especially emergency medicine. In some countries, the number of published papers are more important than their quality (5). In this situation, predatory authors will publish bogus papers in such journals. Unwary researchers may use published papers in predatory journals for their research and it will lead to establishing their own research based on such previous bogus research. By mining the most recent Beall’s list of predatory journals (6), we found that there are 56/1080 (5%) predatory medical journals in his list. It is necessary to state that many fraudulent journals have general domains and publish papers in the medical science domain as well, so we can find many predatory journals and bogus research related to emergency medicine. However, some predatory journals have reputable indexing and their published papers will be indexed in scientific databases.