Russian economic science on the international market of “predatory” publications

Abstract

The problem of “predatory” publishing has received well-deserved attention both in the scientific community and among the S&T managers. Previous studies have shown that this problem has a permanent and global scale and is particularly acute in certain scientific areas, including economic sciences. This research compiled a list of 45 sources, excluded from the Scopus database due to their violation of scientific ethics. Starting from 2015 Russian economists annually publish at least 1,000 papers in “toxic” sources, and on average for the period 2010–2019, almost every third publication of economics with the Russian affiliation was published in “predatory” journals. By the absolute number of “trash” publications during this period, Russia was the second only to India. In the formed “black” sources list, there are several journals with a clear focus on Russian economists — the share of their publications in the portfolio has exceeded 50%. The estimations show that the scale of the annual damage caused by the publication in “predatory” publications of Russian economists is comparable to the annual scientific budget of a fairly large economic university.