Hyderabad: Some of the Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) students are falling for low quality paid journals for publishing their works, as according to an academic rule, PhD scholars are supposed to have at least one of their works published in any journal and a couple of papers presented at conferences.
After a careful scrutiny and analysis, 4,305 journals were removed from the current University Grants Commission’s Approved List of Journals on May 2, 2018 because of poor quality and insufficient information provided by the journals. Prof. Vinod Pavarala, a research guide and who also teaches Research Methodologies at the University of Hyderabad, stated that “There are also instances where Fake journals or predatory journals write to people asking them to publish their papers, when scholars attend some conferences, whereas a top journal will never come and ask people to publish papers. Many of us just ignore, some people who are inexperienced in the field might get tempted to get their paper published, and also there are all kinds of pressures on scholars to get their papers published.”
Experts say there are many problems with the predatory or the fake journals like they do not peer-review manuscripts and are more focussed on article processing fees. As a result, even sub-standard manuscripts and even those that contain plagiarised content and falsified data get published for a fee. Lack of awareness regarding status of these fake journals is also a problem.
