Predatory Journals on Twitter: The Lack of Community Engagement

Scientific journals disseminate research findings not only via the usual editorial processes, but also by actively engaging with communities on social media platforms such as Twitter. While such an outreach is associated with direct benefits for journals (greater readership, higher citation counts), visibility may not be beneficial to predatory journals whose guiding principle lies in questionable practices. One may thus assume that predatory journals shun community engagement as opposed to serious journals. To test this hypothesis, this paper compares the Twitter interactions of predatory journals’ accounts with that of ‘serious’ (non-predatory) medical-clinical journals. It indeed finds that the median predatory journal hardly ever mentions, retweets or replies to other users, while the median non-predatory journal interacts with distinct, unique users roughly once in three Tweets. The effect size is moderate, but statistically significant. This paper thus suggests that (the absence of) community engagement could possibly serve as yet another indicator distinguishing predatory outlets from their ‘serious’ counterparts, at least as an additional marker in case one is in severe doubt.