It’s commonly assumed that scholars want to avoid submitting their work to so-called predatory academic journals, which typically charge authors a fee while offering little in the way of editing and research quality control. A recent study of one university’s business school, however, found that many of its professors had repeatedly published in journals with such reputations, and actually appear to have improved their pay and prestige by doing so.
Derek Pyne, an associate professor of economics at Thompson Rivers University, in British Columbia, conducted the study partly by tracking down where his business school’s 38 faculty members had been published. He also took into account their compensation and how often each had received one of the school’s awards for research excellence.
He judged the quality of the journals in which their articles had been published using a ranking system maintained by the Australian Business Deans Council and a list of predatory journals formerly published by Jeffrey Beall, an associate professor of library science at the University of Colorado at Denver.
The Thompson Rivers business school has “few incentives not to publish in predatory journals,” Mr. Pyne concludes in an article on his findings in last month’s Journal of Scholarly Publishing. Every faculty member promoted to full professor had been previously published in a predatory journal, and publication in such journals was positively correlated with income and the number of research awards received. In fact, it was being published in highly ranked journals that appeared to carry a price in terms of income, probably because meeting such journals’ standards consumed time that faculty members could have used to earn extra income from teaching, his article says.
Moreover, Mr. Pyne found, the faculty members most likely to have had articles published in predatory journals were those who had been best positioned to know better. All of the school’s full professors had been published in predatory journals, compared with more than two-thirds of associate and a tenth of assistant professors. Three-fourths of full-time, tenure-track professors with research responsibilities had had at least two articles published in predatory journals. Those who had crossed that line had done so, on average, just over four times.
Faculty members most likely to have had articles published in predatory journals were those who had been best positioned to know better.
The article cites research on business schools in the United States as suggesting that Thompson Rivers is hardly alone.
The Chronicle asked Mr. Pyne about his study and its findings. Following is an edited and condensed version of that interview.
Q. Are you suggesting that a substantial share of the faculty population actually aims for publication in predatory journals?
A. If they have a lot of publications in predatory journals it is unlikely they are being fooled. I don’t know, however, if they purposely write articles for predatory journals or if just they just end up having trouble getting them published elsewhere and then submit to predatory journals.
Q. You found that faculty members suffered the most professionally for publishing in the most prestigious journals in their field. How did that play out?
A. When you consider the time it takes to write an article for a top journal and get published, in hindsight I am not too surprised. They have a lot of other ways of making money. A lot of people do distance teaching — in fact, the highest paid person at TRU is normally not the president but a senior lecturer in the business department who does a lot of open-learning teaching. There’s also the traditional, extra overload teaching. It’s hard to do all of that if you do research at the same time, especially if you are aiming at top journals.
Q. What made traditional professors with research responsibilities the biggest violators? Is it simply because they are expected to publish more, or were other forces at work?
A. They are the only ones expected to publish, and so they are the only ones rewarded for publication. If you are a sessional [part-time] instructor, or a teaching-only [full-time] lecturer, there is not really a big reward to publishing, period. I don’t think they have any incentive to rack up publications.
Q. Your study suggests that faculty members had incentives to publish in predatory journals. How?
A. Basically, you get rewarded for quantity, and with nonpredatory journals it is harder to get quantity. If you want to do extra things, like teaching in China, you don’t really have as much time for research. Your incentives are to do open-learning teaching because you get paid extra for that. You don’t get paid extra for getting in a top publication.
Q. How have your fellow faculty members responded to your findings? Have you been persona non grata for raising this issue?
A. People in other faculties, like arts and sciences, and in the library, have been quite supportive. People in the business school tend not to talk about it. I think it is difficult for them to talk about because, if they do say anything negative to me, it is sort of admitting that they might be one of the people with the predatory publications.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
