Report: “Assessing Journal Quality and Legitimacy: An Investigation into the Experience and Views of Researchers and Intermediaries – with Special Reference to the Health Sector and Predatory Publishing”

The report linked to below (open access version) was recently published by CIBER Research and Cabells.

Title

Assessing Journal Quality and Legitimacy: An Investigation into the Experience and Views of Researchers and Intermediaries – with Special Reference to the Health Sector and Predatory Publishing
88 pages; PDF.

From the Executive Summary

CIBER Research were tasked to investigate how researchers in the health domain wentabout selecting journals to publish their papers, what tools they used to help them and what their perceptions of new scholarly communications trends were, especially in regard to predatory journals. This was achieved through a mixture of questionnaire surveys and qualitative interviews, both of which were addressed at researchers themselves, and those who support their research, such as librarians and research managers. More broadly we also interviewed industry experts and players.

Separate surveys were compiled and disseminated to the two different audiences and interviews were held through a mixture of online, face to face and email exchanges. The investigation was global excluding North America and focussed on nominated target countries/regionsincluding China, India, the Middle East (MENA) and North Europe. The surveys resulted in atotal of 546 responses whilst 61 people were interviewed. We also undertook a substantial literature survey of the topic which is appended as a supplementary report.

We discovered that researchers are essentially self-sufficient in the way they go about journal selection, relying mostly on their own experience, although they will consult other researchers if needs be and use tools such as Web of Science and Scopus. Intermediaries were developing an increasing range of services to support researchers in their publishing endeavours, including training events and websites. They also provide databases, but in interviewswere less supportive of those and more supportive of education and training.Librarians felt on the whole that researchers need to understand how to recognise predatory journals and that it was better to use the criteria explained in Think, Check, Submit. There is clear mismatch between what intermediaries say and what researchers do or believe.

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Filed under: Interviews, Journal Articles, News, Open Access, Publishing, Scholarly Communications