| the problem comes from scientometrics. you have to pump up your numbers as a researcher if you ever want to get that grant, or that promotion or that tenure position. there was a time when there were far less journals and articles published per year. people spent a lot more time on an article and it shows. read an article today and you are left with nothing. back in the day (and by that I mean before about 2010) you had everything you needed to understand the subject and form your ideas. today is about tonnes of references (and not the useful kind either!) and inventing catchy acronyms. but now that scientometrics is so important everyone is chasing the numbers and not the quality. you need that high impact factor up, that h-index, the influence score and the citations up. and since you have no chance to spend more time to increase the quality of your article, the next best thing is to increase the quantity you push into the grind. these predatory publications are precisely the answer to this artificially increased demand. yet people continue to be surprised. think about it for a second: consider how many PhDs are awarded each year, they have to go somewhere and most of them want to go up. hence the increased demand. PhD courses are a huge business for universities, and this business drives the publishing industry. mix into this the fact that in academia, you have to change your research subject about every three years to keep it real for the grant masters with the big project money, you get to this disaster today. try to build a bibliography today on a new subject and you will find tonnes of articles and then try to find the ones where you can actually understand where the science on that subject is at. i don't know what the solution is, but counting scienctometric indices is not it. |