Research Predators and Parasites: Slamming the Door

Over the course of the last decade, a veritable flood of predatory and parasitic journals have swept over the academic research community.

In a study published by The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery(JBJS), investigators from McMaster University in Toronto, University of Birmingham Medical School and the Royal College of Surgeon in Ireland – Medical University of Bahrain, found 225 potentially predatory journals in Orthopedics.

By definition, a journal which intentionally deceives authors and readers about their peer review functions, impact factors, organizational affiliations or editorial board memberships and then charges authors to publish their work, is a predatory journal

In OTW’s December 3, 2018 article “Predators and Parasites in Orthopedic Research” we described how Jeffrey Beall (University of Colorado), John Bohannon (Science Journal) and John H. McCool (Precision Scientific Editing) uncovered the various ways these pecuniary and dangerous journals operate. In addition to hiding their true nature, they threaten any responsible librarian, researcher or academic institution that attempts to shine a light on their practices with litigation.

The person who coined the term “Predatory Journal” and compiled the first list of them, former University of Colorado librarian, Jeffrey Beall, lost his job as a result of threats from these journals.

The Federal Trade Commission has successfully sued these journals for their predatory practices and a court granted an injunction against one of the largest purveyors of these journals, OMICS from India.

JBJS, PubMed and the NIH

JBJS’s article about these predatory journals, which brought this issue home to the orthopedic community did, however, likely overstate the ability of these journals to be indexed.

One of the more surprising conclusions in the JBJSarticle was a statement that 20 of these predatory journals were indexed by PubMed.

Not so.

We spoke with Joyce Backus who is the Associate Director for Library Operations at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institute of Health (NIH) about the JBJSarticle. The National Library of Medicine, by the way, is the world’s largest medical library.

She told OTW, “Our staff checked the list in this article, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30399085, and of the 20 journals listed in table 3 as being “indexed” in PubMed, 2 of them are currently in PubMed Central, therefore displaying in PubMed and none are in MEDLINE.”

“We can’t tell from the article why the authors reported the other 18 as “indexed” in PubMed, as they aren’t. Articles do appear in PubMed that are submitted by grantees in response to the public access policy, even when we don’t index the journal. Therefore, sometimes a journal title may look like it’s “indexed” when it’s not. The NIH Guide Notice mentioned above recommends authors carefully consider the journals where they submit articles.”

Here is the table that Ms. Backus provided to OTWwhich summarizes the staff’s review of the JBJSarticle.

Backus told us that the folks at NLM are drafting a letter to the editor at JBJSregarding this error.

We also spoke to one of the authors of the JBJSarticle, Michelle Ghert, M.D., FRCSC with McMaster University. She told us, “We found them [the journals listed on Table 3 of the study article] on PubMed. I suspect the journals were indexed through some papers on PMC which is a back door to PubMed. Also, those journals that are no longer listed on PubMed could have been de-listed since we conducted the study—which was almost 2 years ago.”

NIH’s Role in Tackling Predatory Journals

As the largest repository of clinical studies and research papers in the world via the National Library of Medicine, PubMed, MEDLINE, etc. and as the largest licenser of medical journals, the NIH occupies a unique and powerful position in the global medical research community.

No surprise, NIH has joined the fight to warn authors away from predatory and parasitic journals. According to Backus, “NIH has published a Guide notice, ‘Statement on Article Publication Resulting from NIH Funded Research’ which provides researchers with recommendations to identify credible journals, including consulting with their librarian, and encourages publishers to follow established industry best practices.”

As Backus explained to OTW, the National Library of Medicine understands the research community’s concerns regarding low-quality journals and the pressure to publish. “Some ways that NLM is addressing these concerns is by encouraging transparency and by making conflict of interest statements available in PubMed. Furthermore, NLM is making it clear when the data supporting the PubMed article is available and increasing the transparency of clinical trials through registration and reporting of results in ClinicalTrials.gov, regardless of whether there is a resulting publication.”

The NIH also provides additional help via a web portal which has a research and training program under the title, Rigor and Reproducibility.

Are Predatory Journals Inevitable?

There are, according to some estimates, 30,000 predatory journals trolling for academic content and gullible authors who will pay to be published.

The fact that academic publishing is literally a matter of economic survival for researchers—most notably young, talented post-docs—is the reason these publishers proliferate.

Simple fact: more than half of all medical research funding in the United States comes from NIH by way of peer-reviewed published research.

In 2018, that amounted to about $37 billion to fund medical research.

All of it was distributed on the basis of peer-reviewed, published research.

Paula Stephan, Ph.D., professor of economics, Georgia State University and a research associate National Bureau of Economic Research,described the economic determinism of peer-review publishing in general and NIH funding in particular this way:

“At medical schools in the United States it is important for faculty to find funding because many people at medical schools—even if they have a position that says they are tenured—they don’t have a salary guarantee. Unless a faculty member brings in money, they will financially be in a crisis”

Most funded grants, she points out, are for 3-5 years. Faculty salaries are part of the grant—as are funds for graduate students, postdocs, equipment and materials. Faculty who are being paid from “soft money” positions support themselves entirely off grants.

“There are very short term grants which means that faculty are always in the process of writing or renewing grants.”

An “innovation” at medical schools, says Stephan, is that they hire faculty then tell them that they will lose their salary after a year or two and, financially, will have to fund their own salary and the salaries of their research labs completely from fund raising.

“As you can imagine,” says Dr. Stephan, “this has great disincentives for taking risk.”

Avoiding Risk in Order to Eat

This bias towards risk aversion, says Stephan, affects both the scientists submitting grant proposals and the NIH reviewers who score these proposals.

“Scientists avoid risk by only submitting proposals that they see as sure bets. But even the ‘sure bets’ only have about a 20% chance of being funded. Why? Because the only way you’re going to eat is by getting funding.”

“It’s not so much ego, it’s literally feeding yourself. This is particularly important for scientists on soft money and its estimated that 35% of all the investigators NIH funds are completely on soft money.”

“And, if you are a reviewer, you really have a preference for sure bets. It’s astonishing. Roger Kornberg, a Nobel laureate, says that if the work you propose to do isn’t virtually certain of success then it won’t be funded.”

Young, Fresh, Smart Scientists Need Not Apply

Stephan is not optimistic. “It’s pretty clear that if most scientists are risk averse, there will be little transformative research. Incremental research yields results, but in order to realize substantial gains, scientists need to do transformative work.”

“In the United States, much more than any other country, the people who actually do the research are graduate students and postdocs. These young researchers have fresh ideas, they’re flexible, they’re temporary and they are cheap.”

Unfortunately, because of the increasingly conservative and risk-averse funding system, the number of new investigators who receive funding has fallen sharply and more concerning—particularly if you are a young, fresh, smart scientist with great ideas—your odds of progressing to a tenured faculty position has fallen dramatically.

“We have a very large group of disenchanted young researchers in the United States many of whom are international. In the biological sciences in 1973, five to six years after you came out, you had a fifty-five percent chance of being a tenured track professor. Today you have a twelve percent chance.”

Post-Script

At the end of the day, patient outcomes are directly tied to the health of the biomedical research system. Orthopedic physicians require reliable, unbiased, innovative and reproducible research. Predatory journals are merely a symptom of larger systemic issues. What can be done? One suggestion that we think deserves serious consideration is the concept of a Research Co-op. For more information on this idea, read our “Systemic Bias in Research” article from May 2017.