Learning, Teaching and Leadership

A while back I wrote Avoiding Predatory Journals and Questionable Conferences: A Resource Guide. As I started digging into the research on the topic, I found that that the people who fall prey to these scams, basically fall into three categories. Here’s an excerpt from the report:

Those who contribute to predatory or parasitic publications or events seem to fall into three main categories: (a) those who are too naïve to know; (b) those who know, but do not mind; and (c) those pseudo-scientists who are masquerading as legitimate scholars or researchers, but are essentially quacks or charlatans themselves (Beall n.d., 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 a, b, c; Grove, 2017; McCrostie 2016, 2017; Nicholl & Chinn, 2015; Nolfi, Lockhart & Redgate, 2015;Ruben, 2016; Vinny, Vishnu & Lal, 2016; Xia, Harmon, Connolly, Donnelly, Anderson, & Howard, 2015):

The Naïve Contributor ultimately recognizes that their contribution will bring them little benefit and their reputation may even be damaged.

The Cognizant Contributor has a more symbiotic relationship with the parasitical publication or conference because they perceive some benefit to their own advancement.

Like the Cognizant Contributor, the Pseudo-Scientist also receives (or at least perceives) benefit because questionable conferences or publications give them a venue to proclaim their own expertise, unproven results or absurd theories. (p. 10).

Here’s an infographic:

The full report contains a full reference list and much more content. You can check it out here: Avoiding Predatory Journals and Questionable Conferences: A Resource Guide

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Sarah Elaine Eaton is a faculty member in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.

Opinions are my own and do not represent those of the Werklund School of Education or the University of Calgary.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2018 at 7:01 am and is filed under education, research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.