International Information & Library Review

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Peruvian Scientific Production Affected by

Predatory Journals

Carlos Sotomayor-Beltran & Guillermo W. Zarate Segura

To cite this article: Carlos Sotomayor-Beltran & Guillermo W. Zarate Segura (2021): Peruvian
Scientific Production Affected by Predatory Journals, International Information & Library Review,
DOI: 10.1080/10572317.2020.1869902

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Published online: 11 Jan 2021.

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INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION & LIBRARY REVIEW
https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2020.1869902

Peruvian Scientific Production Affected by Predatory Journals

Carlos Sotomayor-Beltran and Guillermo W. Zarate Segura
Facultad de Ciencias e Ingenier
ıa, Universidad de Ciencias y Humanidades, Lima, Peru

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The following study presents the output of predatory publications in the Peruvian universities Questionable; publications;
that were included in the SCImago Institutions Rankings of 2020 during the period 2015–2019. researchers; Peru; predatory
The universities considered in this work are ones of the most established and prominent in this journals; Scopus
Latin American nation. Due to a relatively new University Law, enacted in 2014, and a National
Council of Science, Technology and Technological Innovation, a research culture is starting to
build-up in this country, which is reflected in its growing scientific production. However in this
study, by using data from the Beall’s list, Stop Predatory Journals list and the citation database
Scopus, we have observed that predatory publications are infiltrating the Peruvian scientific
production. Our analysis reveals that the growth of questionable publications is exponential.
Financial incentives and also promotion and tenure are quite possibly the key factors as to why
the rise of predatory publications is occurring in Peru. On the other hand, we indicate that the
growth of predatory publications can bring about the emergence of rogue researchers and
also in the long run the damage of universities’ reputations. This is the first study to present an
output of questionable publications in Peru and it is expected that serves the competent
authorities for research as well as inexperienced and young researchers to avoid further the
spread of this bad publication practices.

Introduction their papers in their journals, which are also

Research is nowadays an essential activity at
Peruvian universities thanks to the University
Law 30220 enacted in 2014 (MINEDU, 2014).
Since then, a gradual build-up of the number of
papers per year at these higher education institu-
tions has been observed. A quick check at the
SCImago Journal & Country Rank (https://www.
scimagojr.com/countryrank.php) can attest to this
progressive increment. Even though this growing
scientific production in the past years can be
considered as a laudable achievement for this
Latin American nation, a heads-up regarding this
continuing trend is needed.
Several studies have indicated that developing
countries are the ones where predatory publish-
ing occurs the most (e.g., Balehegn, 2017; Demir,
2018; Frandsen, 2017; Kurt, 2018, Matumba
et al., 2019; Rich, 2016; Xia et al., 2015). To put
it simply, predatory publishers are those who
charge fees to authors in exchange for publishing
known as predatory (Beall, 2012, 2015, 2016). A
major trait of predatory journals (also regarded
as fraudulent, fake and questionable) is that the
peer-review process is minimal or in some cases
non-existent; hence, articles published in such
journals are considered as pseudo-science. Other
up-to-date features that define predatory journals
are for example deceitful editorial practices and
aggressive solicitation (Grudniewicz et al., 2019).
In Iran, a work by Erfanmanesh and Pourhossein
(2017) has indicated that in the year 2014, 1,449
out of 21,897 articles appeared in predatory jour-
nals. A relevant finding of this investigation was
that most of the contribution to this predatory
publications was from the top 10 Iranian univer-
sities. A study (Mounton & Valentine, 2017) on
the number of papers published in predatory
journals in South Africa during the 10-year
period of 2005–2014 has revealed that out of
116,373 papers investigated, 4,246 were published
in questionable journals. The database used for

CONTACT Carlos Sotomayor-Beltran csotomayor@uch.edu.pe Facultad de Ciencias e Ingenier
ıa, Universidad de Ciencias y Humanidades,
Lima, Peru
ß 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 C. SOTOMAYOR-BELTRAN AND G. W. ZARATE SEGURA
this South African study was the one that con-
sisted of publications that have been submitted
for funding to the Department of Higher
Education and Training, which has raised con-
cerns because, evidently, part of the allocated
funds have served to subsidized fraudulent publi-
cations. In this regards, Resnik (2019) has indi-
cated the diverse type of resources (e.g., money
and time) that are involved in the production of
questionable publications. A broader research by
Demir (2018) has shown that in 2017, India,
Nigeria and Turkey among 146 countries had the
highest number of articles published in question-
able journals. The aforementioned work consid-
ered 832 journals from the Beall’s list (a known
blacklist of questionable journals) and detected a
total of 24,840 papers published in these ones.
Peru, a developing economy (United Nations,
2020), besides having its University Law 30220
has also the National Council of Science,
Technology and Technological Innovation
(CONCYTEC), which strives to promote the
growth of research in the country. Among its
many policies to foster research, a classification
system for Peruvian researchers has been recently
put forward (CONCYTEC, 2019). One of the
mandatory requirements to be a registered
researcher in Peru is to keep a permanent scien-
tific production in well-known curated citation
databases such as Scopus and Web of Science
(WoS). As most of the research occurring in
Peru is at its universities, the population of certi-
fied researchers is made up mainly of academic
personnel. Being a faculty member and a certified
researcher has several benefits, for instance,
access to funding, promotion, tenure and finan-
cial incentives. Not properly overseeing those
benefits can be counterproductive because they
can steer academics to engage in questionable
practices. Cobey et al. (2019) and Ferris and
Winker (2017) have reported, for example, that
one of the main drives among researchers for
publishing in predatory journals is to be consid-
ered for promotion and/or tenure. Regarding
financial incentives, Hedding (2019) and Muller
(2017) have warned against rewards per paper
published in South Africa, where cash over qual-
ity is a priority among some researchers.
In the light of the above, the current work
reports our analysis about predatory publications
during the 2015–2019 period at Peruvian univer-
sities that were included in the SCImago
Institutions Rankings (SIR) of 2020. These higher
education institutions are well established and
ones of the most prominent in the country. The
repercussions these deceptive publishing practices
can have based on our results are also discussed.
To the best of our knowledge this is the first
study that presents output of predatory publica-
tions in the scientific production of Peru.
Methodology
For our study we have considered those articles
published at the Peruvian universities that were
included in the SIR (https://www.scimagoir.com/)
of 2020. The SIR is an international ranking
where academic and research institutions are
classified according to their research perform-
ance. The SIR utilizes data exclusively from
Scopus to elaborate its rankings; hence, titles only
from this database were used for this work.
Scopus is an abstract and citation database with
titles that have been rigorously selected and eval-
uated to ensure their quality (Baas et al., 2020).
To have a reliable source of predatory journals’
names, we have used the Beall’s and the Stop
Predatory Journals lists (https://beallslist.net/ and
https://predatoryjournals.com/, respectively), as
suggested by Sotomayor-Beltran (2020). Both
webpages are based on the original list, created
by the American librarian Jeffrey Beall, which
was taken down in 2017 (Silver, 2017). One of
the main reasons for closing down his blog,
where his list was published, was due to the legal
threats posed by some publishers which were
starting to be seen by many academics and
research institutions worldwide as predatory. The
Beall’s and the Stop Predatory Journals lists are
meticulously maintained by independent scholars,
who are inspired by Beall in denouncing the sus-
picious practices of this type of publishers. By
choosing these two lists, we have strived to make
more robust our study and not to be biased by
one of them.
In the SIR of 2020 there are a total of 9 Peruvian
universities considered: The Universidad Peruana
 INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION & LIBRARY REVIEW 3

Table 1. Number and percentage of predatory publications over the period 2015–2019 of the Peruvian universities included in
the SCImago Institutions Rankings of 2020.
Total predatory % of predatory Total predatory % of predatory
Total publications publicactions publications (Stop publications (Stop
University publications (Beall’s list) (Beall’s list) Predatory Journals) Predatory Journals)
UPCH 2115 5 0.2 4 0.2
UNMSM 1903 12 0.6 8 0.4
UPC 1061 4 0.4 4 0.4
USMP 527 2 0.4 – –
PUCP 2078 11 0.5 11 0.5
UNI 488 9 1.8 7 1.7
UNSA 524 4 0.8 2 0.4

Cayetano Heredia (UPCH), the Universidad
Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM), the
Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC),
the Universidad San Martin de Porres (USMP), the
Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP),
the Universidad Nacional Agraria la Molina
(UNALM), the Universidad Cientifica del Sur
(UCSUR), the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria
(UNI), and the Universidad Nacional de San
Agustin de Arequipa (UNSA). Data of the number
of publications of each selected university between
2015 and 2019 was downloaded from the Scopus
website as .csv files. The names of the predatory
journals were retrieved from the Beall’s and the
Stop Predatory Journals lists websites by using the
Beautiful Soup library from the programming lan-
guage Python. This computational tool allows easily
to extract and to handle data from webpages
(Mitchell, 2018). Once both lists (the Beall’s and the
Stop Predatory Journals lists with 1,478 and 1,317
titles, respectively) were accordingly structured, the
names in the predatory lists were matched against
the names of the journals in the Scopus .csv files.
By employing the described computational method,
we have spared hours or days that would have
taken us to manually carry out the comparison
between the lists looking for potential matches.
Finally, once predatory journals were identified, we
proceeded to search for them in the Directory of
Open Access Journals (DOAJ; https://doaj.org/).
The DOAJ is basically a list of peer-reviewed open
access journals that meet the highest standards of
quality. None of the identified predatory journals
were in the DOAJ.
Results
Table 1 shows the number of papers published in
7 Peruvian universities, which were included in
the SIR of 2020, during the 2015–2019 period.
Two of them, the UNALM and the UCSUR, are
not shown in Table 1 and will be not further
analyzed because they do not present any preda-
tory publication during the period under study.
Overall, the percentages of articles in the fraudu-
lent journals in both lists for the 7 universities
are quite small, being the UNI the institution
with the highest percentages (1.8% and 1.7% of
predatory publications in the Beall’s and Stop
Predatory Journals lists, respectively) and the
UPCH the institution with the lowest ones (0.2%
of predatory publications in both Beall’s and Stop
Predatory Journals lists). At first glance, these
results can be quite reassuring; however, when
looking at the time-wise distribution of predatory
publications in these higher education institu-
tions, the outlook is one of concern.
Figure 1 presents the yearly distribution
(2015–2019) of the number of papers published
in predatory journals listed in the Beall’s list for
the 7 universities considered in Table 1. In 2015
there were no questionable articles published in
any institution. In 2016 and 2017 the number of
predatory publications in the Scopus scientific
production for both years was of 5 (0.4% and
0.3%, respectively). Starting in 2018 there was an
increment with respect to the past year, a total of
8 (0.4%) publications, and this amount just
became higher by 2019, a total of 29 (1.2%) ques-
tionable publications. Over the 2015–2019 period,
a total of 47 (0.5%) papers were identified in 18
predatory journals.
On the other hand, in Figure 2 we can see the
time-wise distribution of predatory publications
based on the Stop Predatory Journals list. In this
case, it can be noticed that only 6 institutions
have papers in questionable journals during the
2015–2019 period. This is because for the USMP,
4 C. SOTOMAYOR-BELTRAN AND G. W. ZARATE SEGURA
Figure 1. Number of predatory publications, based in the
Beall’s list, of the Peruvian universities included in the
SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) of 2020.
there was not a predatory publication identified
in the Stop Predatory Journals list during this
time. Similarly to the Beall’s list case (Figure 1),
there was not a detection of predatory publica-
tions in 2015 using the Stop Predatory Journals
list. In addition, the number of questionable pub-
lications of the UPC and the PUCP identified in
the Stop Predatory Journals list over the five-year
period is equal to the ones identified in the
Beall’s list (Figure 1). Using the Stop Predatory
Journals list, a total of 36 (0.4%) articles were
identified in 13 predatory journals. These 36
articles are included within the 47 questionable
articles identified using the Beall’s list.
It is relevant to point out that in Figures 1 and
2, for the year 2019 nearly all the Peruvian
universities considered in this study, with the
exception of the UPC for both cases and the
USMP for the case of the Stop Predatory Journals
list, have at least an article published in a ques-
tionable journal. Regarding the areas of science
where most predatory publications appear in our
study, we have observed that Medicine and
Engineering stand out. In Figure 3, we present a
temporal analysis of the observed growth of the
number of papers in predatory journals identified
in both lists. The potential growing trend in both
cases is clearly exponential.
Discussion and conclusion
This research is the first study to show the output
of predatory journals in Peruvian universities. It
has been shown that nearly all of the higher edu-
cation institutions, which were included in the
Figure 2. Number of predatory publications, based in the Stop
Predatory Journals list, of the Peruvian universities included in
the SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) of 2020.
SIR of 2020, have articles published in fraudulent
journals over the 2015–2019 period. Even though
the observed percentages of predatory publica-
tions are quite small, the growth of the number
of questionable publications that is occurring in a
yearly basis is potentially exponential (Figure 3).
This result goes in agreement with a large-scale
study by Perlin et al. (2018), where also an expo-
nential increase of predatory publications was
seen in another Latin American nation, Brazil,
during the 2000–2015 period. Despite it is to
soon to assert that the trend for the Peruvian
case is actually exponential, and very likely a fol-
low-up study is needed in three or four years
time to confirm this, we do observe that the sub-
stantial increase of questionable publications is
occurring at a much faster pace during the
2015–2019 period than the overall Peruvian
scholarly publishing rate according to Scopus
over this same period.
One of the crucial factors to which the
growing trend of questionable publications in
Peru can be attributed to is the bonuses that the
faculty members can earn by showing a regular
scientific production on a yearly basis, as it is
blatantly the case in South Africa (Hedding,
2019). Moreover, article 86 of the University Law
30220 states that professors and lecturers, at uni-
versities with considerable research duties, can
receive a special compensation of 50% on top of
their salary (MINEDU, 2014). These financial
incentives intend to foster research and are
indeed very appealing; however, it should be
scrutinized first in which type of journals
researchers are publishing their articles before

Figure 3. Exponential growing trend (black-dashed line) of the number of predatory publications in the Peruvian universities
included in the SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) of 2020.
giving such a reward. For instance, bonuses could
be awarded based on the quartile of journal, if
this happens to be indexed either in Scopus or
WoS. Researchers publishing in Q4 journals
could receive a minimal financial incentive or
none, whereas those who publish in Q1 journals
could be awarded sizeable bonuses. This is espe-
cially important in developing economies like
Peru, where salaries among the main part of the
academic personnel are low and hence they are
on the lookout for opportunities to increase
these. Furthermore, this situation is exacerbated
considering that research and development are
not still ones of the highest priorities of the
Peruvian government (Ciocca & Delgado, 2017).
The output of predatory publications presented
in this work was made possible using the Beall’s
and Stop Predatory Journals lists, and also data
from Scopus. Even though Baas et al. (2019) have
argued for this database to be a whitelist for
research policies evaluations, bibliometric studies
and university rankings, Cortegiani et al. (2020)
and Severin and Low (2019) have expressed with
great concern that predatory journals have
already infiltrated this and other well-known
databases (e.g., PubMed). The penetration of
these questionable journals has been further con-
firmed by the results presented in our study,
where articles published in journals indexed in
INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION & LIBRARY REVIEW 5
Scopus were identified in the Beall’s and Stop
Predatory Journals lists. The ramifications of the
inclusion of some fraudulent journals in this
database are many. For instance, inexperienced
and young researchers who come across preda-
tory publications indexed in Scopus could mis-
takenly believe that the standards these papers
present are the norm, when this is not the case.
Another appalling consequence is that some uni-
versities, especially in developing countries, who
attempt to enter international rankings, such as
the SIR, may ask their faculty members for faster
publications routes and in doing so they may
unwittingly fall prey of fraudulent journals, which
in the long run if not properly regulated could
destroy the scientific reputation of some of these
higher education institutions and also comprom-
ise the scientific production of the country.
Shehata and Elgllab (2018) have shown that a
group of Arab scholars have published in preda-
tory journals without being aware that they were
actually predatory. One more repercussion has
been indicated by Eriksson and Helgesson (2017),
who have informed about the rise of rogue schol-
ars who constantly publish in predatory journals.
In a developing country like Peru where a
research culture is beginning to establish, inex-
perienced and young researchers could wrongly
believe that these rogue scholars, who publish in
6 C. SOTOMAYOR-BELTRAN AND G. W. ZARATE SEGURA
predatory journals indexed in well-know citation
databases, are experts in their field of research
when this might not be the case. At this point we
would like to indicate that the possibility of a
reputable journal ending up in a predatory jour-
nal list is not completely ruled out. Thus, it
remains in the hands of the authors that once
identified a journal to send their work, to look
not only for it in these lists but also too look for
the traits that characterize a predatory journal; a
thorough listing of such traits have been provided
by Cobey et al. (2018).
As it has been previously mentioned, there
are regulations to validate researchers in Peru
(CONCYTEC, 2019), being a core requisite
their scientific production. Our results have
shown that this scientific production is being
slowly affected by predatory publications;
hence, here we suggest that some of these regu-
lations are slightly modified to consider not
only the number of publications in well-know
citation databases but also to focus on the
quality of the journals where articles are being
published (Beall, 2015, 2016). In this regard,
the Leiden Manifesto (Hicks et al., 2015)
acknowledges that qualitative evaluation is key
for research evaluation.
What can be done to help the population of
Peruvian inexperienced and young researchers
to avoid publishing in predatory journals?
Sotomayor-Beltran (2020) has already provided
several approaches to deal with this problem
(e.g., awareness campaigns and the use of
online tools such as the Think.Check.Submit
website). In addition to the aforementioned
work, a council of research authorities from
Peruvian universities could produce a blacklist
of predatory journals and this could be further
distributed among Peruvian scholars. The
University Law 30220 and the regulations by
CONCYTEC have the very best of intentions to
promote research in the country; however, our
results indicate that there is room for a bit of
improvement in regard to how the scientific
production should be assessed. A follow-up
study further down the road will reflect if add-
itional measures were taken in order to avoid
the spread of questionable publications in the
Peruvian research culture.
ORCID
Carlos Sotomayor-Beltran http://orcid.org/0000-0001-
6096-9225
Guillermo W. Zarate Segura http://orcid.org/0000-0001-
9763-1885
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