ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, VARIJANTA
PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s repository of millions of abstracts and citations, has long been one of the most highly regarded sources for searching biomedical literature. For some members of the scientific community, the presence of predatory journals, publications that tend to churn out low-quality content and engage in unethical publishing practices—has been a pressing concern.
“If a predatory journal is confined on its website, which is often of low-quality, the chance that patients or scholars will read and cite these articles is very low,” says Andrea Manca, a professor of physiology at the University of Sassari in Italy. “The problem is that when they are displayed in the most popular biomedical database that we have, there are many [people] who think if a journal is on PubMed, then it is fine—which is not true, unfortunately.”
This was the case for Susanta Pahari, a professor ...
