Progressive and degenerative journals: on the growth and appraisal of knowledge in scholarly publishing

The unequal knowledge production and dissemination structure divides the world's academic system into a dominating mainstream circuit and a peripherical one, favoring the influence of certain communities in science and constituting the source of structural epistemic injustices. Several local and international initiatives have recently emerged to reduce regional inequalities and build alternative transnational publishing circuits. This paper studies alternative Journal Indexing Systems (JIS) and journal representation in alternative and traditional indexes. To do so, it focuses on the African publishing environment. First, it revises and compares the quality criteria of each database to explore the subjective nature of research quality. Then, the paper develops a methodology to compare journal coverage in different JIS and applies it to study African Journals Online, Scopus, and the Web of Science. It shows the coverage of the databases of African journals and their relative coverage in terms of countries, research areas, language, and geospatial focus. The results show the need for a situated notion of research quality and the biases of mainstream and alternative databases toward specific countries, research areas, and languages. The results presented here contribute to the ongoing conversation about diversity and inclusion in science and describe the current situation concerning the representation of African journals in three JIS. They can also be used to assess the limitations of our current bibliometric analysis and find ways to incorporate more inclusive data.

Both qualitative and quantitative-oriented journals play a key role in the cultivation and dissemination of social work knowledge. Editors and peer reviewers support this role –ostensibly – by serving as a form of quality control. Though the published literature is in some ways validated by prepublication peer review, errors, omissions, and even cases of outright fraud are inevitably published, contaminating the professional literature. Publishers and journal editors have a series of tools at their disposal to respond, such as errata, corrigenda, and expressions of concern. In extreme cases (e.g., fraud, research misconduct, plagiarism), a paper may be retracted and removed from the published record altogether. When appraising journals or publishers, the presence of retractions is not necessarily problematic – in moderation, this may indicate a robust ability to self-correct. However, when retractions are scarce or altogether absent, it may signify suboptimal mechanisms for self-correction within both journals and the broader scientific community. The preliminary analysis presented here suggests this latter scenario is likely the case for the discipline of social work – where retractions are effectively absent at ten leading journals. This is curious, given the notable increases in retractions across the biomedical and social sciences over the past few decades. Reasons for this absence are explored and recommendations to enhance the integrity of social work research and journals are discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on tools editors and peer reviewers can employ now.

The list of questionable journals serves to stratify academic journals, distinguishing between good and bad journals, thereby providing a basis for academic information filtering and research evaluation. The formulation of such lists has been a topic of controversy in the literature, with limited attention paid to whether the criteria used to stratify journals in these lists can be trusted. In this study, we take the example of the warning journal list published by the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and categorize the journals based on their warning levels and warning years. Then, we compare them to determine if there are differences in key academic indicators, thereby analyzing whether the journal lists effectively identify academic journals with quality risks. Our study found that the patterns of differences in key academic indicators among different journal stratums were not consistent, and the same inconsistency was observed during the mobility between stratums. Furthermore, citation metrics such as Journal Impact Factor and Journal Citation Indicator may not have been considered as criteria for stratifying journals in the warning journal list, but this lack of detailed explanation from the creators. This indicates that the list of questionable journals needs to be more scientifically evaluated, and there is a greater need for sharing detailed criteria and data. Our study also provides recommendations for institutions in the future when formulating lists of questionable journals.