Pepperdine Libraries subscribes to a large amount of print and electronic content. By setting your Google Scholar preferences (as shown below), you will be better able to access these resources available to you as you search in Google Scholar.
While it's great to be able to see so much of Pepperdine content using the familiar Google search interface, Google Scholar does contain sites that mix reputable publishers with predatory journal publishers so be warned. This makes searching in Google Scholar more complicated than just searching within the Pepperdine Libraries research databases. Predatory journal are excluded when searching the library databases.
What does this mean for you and doing research? If using Google Scholar, use the instructions below to set preferences to recognize Pepperdine level access to resources and become educated about predatory publishers.
Open access is an important step forward in the evolution of scholarly scientific communication. As with most things, a number of people are using this positive development for their own self-interested purposes. In the realm of open access journals, this comes in the form of "predatory" publishers of open access journals.
“Predatory” refers to the fact that these entities prey on academicians for financial profit via article processing charges for open access articles, without meeting scholarly publishing standards. from: Clark J, Smith R. Firm action needed on predatory journals [Electronic version]. BMJ 2015;350:h210. Accessed February 14th 2017. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jocalyn_Clark/publication/271022726_Firm_action_needed_on_predatory_journals/links/56f8f0cc08ae81582bf40ff0.pdf. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h210
"... such journals do not provide the peer review that is the hallmark of traditional scholarly publishing. "...
"Identifying such journals is important for authors, researchers, peer reviewers, and editors, because scientific work that is not properly vetted should not contribute to the scientific record." p. 285
Although predatory journals may claim to conduct peer review and mimic the structure of legitimate journals, they publish all or most submitted material without external peer review and do not follow standard policies advocated by organizations such as the WAME (World Association of Medical Editors), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), and the Council of Science Editors (CSE) regarding issues such as archiving of journal content, management of potential conflicts of interest, handling of errata, and transparency of journal processes and policies including fees.
A common practice among predatory publishers is sending frequent e-mails to large numbers of individuals soliciting manuscript submission and promising rapid publication for author fees that may be lower than those of legitimate author-pays journals. In the most egregious cases, they collect publication fees but the promised published articles never appear on the journal website.
from: Laine, C., & Winker, M. A. (2017). Identifying predatory or pseudo-journals. Biochemia Medica, 27(2), 285-291. doi:10.11613/BM.2017.031
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