Drapieżne czasopisma są legitymizowane przez artykuły w czasopismach z impact factor
Predatory journals are legitimized by articles in impact-factor journals

Summary/Abstract: One of the most fundamental issues in academia today is understanding the differences between legitimate and predatory publishing. While decision-makers and managers consider journals indexed in popular citation indexes such as Web of Science or Scopus as legitimate, they use two blacklists (Beall’s and Cabell’s), one of which has not been updated for a few years, to identify predatory journals. The main aim of our study is to reveal the contribution of the journals accepted as legitimate by the authorities to the visibility of blacklisted journals. For this purpose, 65 blacklisted journals in social sciences and 2,338 Web-of-Science-indexed journals that cited these blacklisted journals were examined in-depth, in terms of index coverages, subject categories, impact factors and self-citation patterns. We have analysed 3,234 unique cited papers from blacklisted journals and 5,964 unique citing papers (6,750 citations of cited papers) from Web of Science journals. We found that 13% of the blacklisted papers were cited by WoS journals and 37% of the citations were from impact-factor journals. As a result, although the impact factor is used by decision-makers to determine the levels of the journals, it is demonstrated that there is no significant relationship between the impact factor and the number of citations to blacklisted journals.

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