Predatory authors
A preliminary proposal of qualitative indicators for the management of good practices in scientific journals
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5380/atoz.v15.99036Keywords:
Predatory authorship, ; Qualitative indicators, Scientific productivism, Management of scientific journals, Ethics, Integrity in ScienceAbstract
Introduction: In recent decades, integrity in academic publishing has been questioned by unethical practices, such as plagiarism and data manipulation, often motivated by scientific productivism. This has led to the need to analyze the presence of ethical elements and rules of good scientific practice in the editorial policy of scientific journals, especially with regard to so-called predatory journals. However, another phenomenon emerges, equally worrying and related to predatory journals, although more difficult to detect predatory authors. Consequently, this work aims to outline the characteristic practices of predatory authors in scientific publication and to elaborate a preliminary proposal of qualitative indicators for their identification. Method: The study uses a critical review of the literature,, based on Web of Science and Google Scholar, and combining the following expressions: “predatory authorship”, “predatory journals”, “predatory publishing”, “ethics” and “research integrity”, between 2013 and 2024, resulting in a corpus of 36 articles, which were analyzed thematically. Results: As a result, a table of qualitative indicators of predatory authorship was prepared from elements related to Academic Productivism, Inappropriate Authorships for Strategic Purposes, Citation Manipulation, Manipulation of Academic Reputation, Misuse of AI, and Motivations for Authorship Practices predatory, as well as the specifying elements and examples of situations that characterize it. Conclusions: It is concluded that this model contributes to the quality management of scientific journals and the maintenance of trust in science and in the academic community.
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