# Regional profile of questionable publishing

Taekho You1,2, Jinseo Park3, June Young Lee3, and Jinhyuk Yun${}^{4},*$

1\. Institute for Social Data Science, Pohang University of Science and
Technology, Korea
2\. Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana
University, USA
3\. Center for Global R&D Data Analysis, Korea Institute of Science and
Technology Information, Korea
4\. School of AI Convergence, Soongsil University, Korea
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
###### Abstract

Countries and authors in the academic periphery occasionally have been
criticized for contributing to the expansion of questionable publishing
because they share a major fraction of papers in questionable journals. On the
other side, topics preferred by mainstream journals sometimes necessitate
large-scale investigation, which is impossible for developing countries. Thus,
local journals, commonly low-impacted, are essential to sustain the regional
academia for such countries. In this study, we perform an in-depth analysis of
the distribution of questionable publications and journals with their
interplay with countries quantifying the influence of questionable
publications regarding academia’s inequality. We find that low-impact journals
play a vital role in the regional academic environment, whereas questionable
journals with equivalent impact publish papers from all over the world, both
geographically and academically. The business model of questionable journals
differs from that of regional journals, and may thus be detrimental to the
broader academic community.

Keywords— Questionable publishing, Country-wise analysis, Dominance of journal

##  1 Introduction

Questionable journals and publishers gradually expand their academic market
share and influence. They employ profit-driven models and recruit attract
researchers who require imminent outcomes. For instance, they exploit
insufficient peer review process (Bohannon, 2013) and it introduces problems
in academia, such as plagiarism (Owens and Nicoll, 2019) and misinformation
(Beall, 2016b). These problems will decrease academic credibility (West and
Bergstrom, 2021). To protect academia, academic stakeholders, including
governments, indexing services, and authors, have issued forewarnings against
their misconduct and provided warning lists (Beall, 2016a; Anderson, 2017;
Kakamad et al., 2019). Despite these efforts, an increasing number of authors
are involved in questionable publications.

A common prejudice of questionable publishing is a problem for less developed
countries because these countries share a substantial amount of publications
in questionable journals (Shen and Björk, 2015; Sterligov and Savina, 2016;
Macháček et al., 2017). Indeed, studies found that these countries have
occupied a major fraction of publications in questionable journals (Xia et
al., 2015; Nwagwu and Ojemeni, 2015) even though journals define themselves as
international journals. The governance that weakens standards on research
ethics is sometimes claimed as the origin of such phenomena, e.g.,
quantitative evaluation system simply counting the number of papers and less
penalty of malpractices, leading authors to be easily overcome by the
temptation to publish in questionable journals (Raghavan et al., 2014;
Omobowale et al., 2014; Quan et al., 2017; Demir, 2018; Kurt, 2018).

Another potential reason for publishing in questionable journals is a failure
to publish in a reputed journal (Demir, 2018), potentially attributed to the
social stratification in academia (Cole and Cole, 1974; Jones et al., 2008).
Studies find that academia is becoming more unequal, which brings
concentrating of citations and publications to the majority authors because of
bias on the minorities, e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, and country (Huang et
al., 2020; Nielsen and Andersen, 2021; Sekara et al., 2018; Kozlowski et al.,
2022). Such social stratification is also correlated with the economic scale
of countries because modern scientific practice requires a large amount of
investment making impossible to implement for the developing countries (Miao
et al., 2022); thus, authors in developed countries can produce more
publications than those in developing countries. Researchers located in
developing regions may be forced to choose questionable journals, even though
the academic impact of these journals is low (Moussa, 2021; Frandsen, 2017;
Oermann et al., 2019; You et al., 2022). In other words, there is a chance
that selecting these journals may be the best course of action in developing
countries before science and economics reach a certain degree of development;
therefore, the charges of contributions to questionable publications in these
countries may seem unfair on their viewpoint: publication in such questionable
journals may be a necessary evil to the sustainability of the local academic
community, reflected in a high share of specific countries (Xia et al., 2015;
Nwagwu and Ojemeni, 2015). On the other hand, it may be argued that
unquestioned regional journals are already faithfully serving their duty, and
therefore questionable journals will not be of much assistance to sustaining
local academia (Ofori-Adjei et al., 2006).

Neither approach may have a complete understanding of the role that
questionable journals play in academia. There are criticisms of questionable
journals, but this is because it is difficult to reject without solid evidence
that they are a necessary evil or that they supplement the limits of the
current journal system to some degree (Macháček and Srholec, 2021). To
comprehend the role of questionable journals in these two contradictory
perspectives, especially focusing on the local academia, we believe that it is
required to examine the relationship between the publication country and the
authors’ affiliated country, as opposed to the analysis of publication
frequency or publication rate by the country that has been conducted thus far.
If questionable journals serve the local academia, contributions from
neighboring nations should be abundant. In this study, we examine a paired
profile of questionable and unquestionable journals with comparable impacts.
We considered journals named in Beall’s list (Bea, ) as questionable and
unquestioned journals as a comparison set, which shows similar chracteristics
with each corresponding questionable journal, yet not accused by Bealls’s list
(You et al., 2022) (see Section 5 for details). We quantitatively determined
the regionality of journals dominated by a single country and compared the
regionality of questioned and unquestioned journals. Based on the findings, we
observe that questionable journals contributed from more various and non-
adjacent countries than unquestioned journals; therefore, questionable journal
plays a very limited role in sustaining local academia and expansion of such
journals will not help the healthy academia in developing countries.

##  2 Results

###  2.1 Overestimation of questionable contributions from less developed
countries

Figure 1: Country-specific publication statistics for questionable and
unquestionable journals. The diameter of the circle represents the country’s
total number of publications, whereas its hue represents the GDP in 2018.
Countries that published fewer than 100 papers are excluded from the
visualization. (A) Countries’ proportion of questionable and unquestionable
publications among their entire publications. Countries with a high GDP
publish a lower proportion of questionable journals, whereas countries with a
low GDP publish a greater proportion of questionable journals. (B) The number
of questionable and unquestioned publications by country. Countries with a
high GDP publish more in both questionable and unquestionable journals than
those with a low GDP. The majority of countries are arranged in a diagonal
line, indicating that they generate a comparable number of publications in
both questionable and unquestionable journals.

According to former studies (Sterligov and Savina, 2016; Macháček et al.,
2017), the incidence of questionable publications is higher in less developed
countries than in developed countries (Figure 1A). We discovered that 122
countries out of 177 publish less than 5% of their publications in
questionable journals. Meanwhile, low-GDP countries publish more than 10% of
their publication in questionable journals. These countries are mainly located
in Southeast and Middle Asia, and their GDPs are less than 5% of that of the
country with the highest GDP. The result is consistent with previous studies
indicating that less developed countries are producing an increasing number of
questionable publications.

We discovered, however, that the contribution of less developed nations to
questionable publishing seems to be overestimated. The Pearson correlation
between the number of publications in questionable journals and the GDP is
$0.76$ (Figure 1B), while the correlation between the rate of questionable
publications and the GDP is $-0.07$ (Figure 1A). Although the proportion is
low in comparison to the total number of published papers, the high-GDP
countries produce a larger number of questionable publications because they
produce more publications in total (Figure S1). Countries publishing more than
10% of their publications in questionable journals occupy 9% of entire
questionable publications but only 2% of all academic publications during the
same period. In contrast, the United States, the highest-GDP country, is
responsible for 20% of all scholarly publications and 9% of all questionable
publications. This finding suggests that low-GDP countries have a limited
impact on the growth of questionable publications. Meanwhile, despite a small
publication rate, countries with a high GDP produce more questionable
publications. According to previous studies (Beall, 2012; Memon, 2019), most
questionable journals employ the open-access model, which indicates that high-
GDP countries contribute more to growing questionable journals in terms of
both publication volume and profit. In conclusion, the disparity in the
denominator, i.e., the total number of publications in the country,
considerably contributes to the overestimation of questionable publishing in
countries with a low GDP.

Note that the majority of countries are distributed along the diagonal line
$y\sim x$ (Figure 1B). Even though we do not consider the country in the
filtering process for unquestioned journals, we discovered that the country
produces a similar number of questionable and unquestioned publications. The
result merely indicates that there is no disparity in the selection of
journals at the country level. Therefore, although authors from less developed
countries have a greater likelihood of publishing in questionable journals,
their contribution to such publications may not be significant, regarding
total impact.

###  2.2 Regional distribution of questionable journals associated with
neighboring countries.

Figure 2: Distribution of journals based on the proportion of publications
from three different definitions of neighboring countries. (A) The publication
rate of the primary country in the journal. Here, the primary country is the
first author’s country that has the largest share of a given journal. (B)
Publication proportion for geographical neighbors. (C) Publication proportion
for academic neighbors. To minimize noise, each figure is rendered using the
KDE plot.

According to the aforementioned observations, the impact of countries with a
high GDP is frequently overlooked in questionable publications regarding their
significant contributions. Nonetheless, another noteworthy aspect is the
location where journals are published (Figure S2). There is a strong
correlation between non-questionable journals and the GDP of the country of
publishing ($0.72$ for unquestioned journals and $0.75$ for other Scopus
journals). Thus, the greater a country’s economic strength, the more
scientific journals it publishes. However, the questionable journals have a
weaker Pearson correlation with the country’s GDP of only $0.30$.

Authors select journals based on their empirical and local information,
including academic reputation, the quantitative index, editor, personal
preference, and so on (Frank, 1994). In some instances, journals with an
international reputation are selected for academic disciplines or other
purposes, while in others, journals published in a specific region are chosen.
For example, research that concentrates on social issues within a country may
be better suited for publication in a domestic journal as opposed to an
international one, because their main readership will be domestic readers.
Thus, regional journals may exist to address significant concerns shared by
regional academic communities. Quantitative indicators are likely to be low
for these regional journals because their readership is less extensive than
that of international journals, which have potential readers from all over the
globe. Nonetheless, because these regional journals mainly tackle issues of
regional significance, they play a crucial role in the academic ecosystem of
the region, which is not reflected in a quantitative indicator.

From this perspective, the concept of regionality may provide additional
insight into the current trend of questionable publishing. If questionable
journals address significant issues in a certain region, these journals will
play an important role as new alternatives within the regional academic
community. This possibility can be inferred from the fact that questionable
journals have a larger market share in developing nations. To test this
hypothesis, we first calculate the proportion of the most-published countries
in a given journal. The simple calculation demonstrates that the majority of
questionable journals are not overwhelmed by a single country (Figure 2A).
Here, we define the primary country as the author’s country that has the
largest share of a given journal. Questionable journals have a lower share of
the primary country ($0.38$) than unquestionable ($0.47$) journals and other
Scopus journals ($0.51$) on average. To say the dominant country is the
country that publishes more than $60\%$ of papers in a single journal, only
$15\%$ of questionable journals have dominant country while $34\%$ of other
types of journals have one. This behavior can be understood by another
regionality reflected in the written language of papers from the primary
countries. We discovered that 148 unquestionable journals accept articles in
non-English, whereas only seven questionable journals do so. In other words,
while a significant proportion of unquestioned journals accept non-English
articles for publication in their respective local academia, questionable
journals with comparable quantitative metrics did not.

The difference between the primary and publishing countries is a possible
explanation for why questionable journals are less dominated by the primary
country. We analyze the primary country’s publication rate with its
relationship to the publishing country of the journal (Figure S3). 53% of all
journals display the same country of publication and primary country, whereas
47% do not. For journals with identical primary and publishing countries, the
publication share of primary countries is distributed nearly uniformly, with a
peak near 1. There are 30.7% of these journals where the primary country
generates more than 80% of all publications. In contrast, if the two countries
are dissimilar, the publication proportion of primary countries in a journal
is reduced. We discovered that only 22.3% of questionable journals are
published in their home country, suggesting that the primary country has a
lower publication rate in the remaining 77.7% of questionable journals. In
short, if the primary country is identical to the publishing country, the
primary country may dominate more. Since the primary country is different from
the publishing country of many questionable journals, the primary country’s
publication rate is low.

However, the relationship between the primary and publishing country cannot
completely explain regionality. For instance, a substantial number of journals
have high publication rates in primary countries that are not the same as the
publishing country. The rapid expansion of mega-publishers, to which an
increasing number of journals now belong, is one possible explanation for this
circumstance. Citation indexes commonly attribute the location of publishers
as the country of publication, although they are representative of a
particular regional academic community. As an illustration, the “Korean
Journal of Chemical Engineering” is the official publication of the “Korean
Institute of Chemical Engineers”; however, SJR lists its publishing country as
the United States because it is published by Springer New York. In addition,
the local academic community may encompass neighboring nations that share
their human resources and historical contexts. Therefore, we introduce a new
analysis using the neighboring nations. We consider two distinct definitions
of neighboring countries to gain a comprehensive understanding of regionality:
i) geographical neighbors and ii) academic neighbors (for details, see Section
5). Here, the five closest countries are selected as the neighboring countries
for a given country.

We first compare the share of the primary country and two types of neighboring
groups (Figure S4). Comparing them reveals that the total proportion of
neighboring countries (including the publishing country itself) increases when
the primary country is included in the neighboring countries, regardless of
whether it is the publishing country (Figure S4 A–B and D–E). For journals
with identical primary and publishing countries, 66.7% (76%) of all journals
are dominated by the publishing country and its geographical (academic)
neighbors (i.e., have a publication share greater than 60%). When the primary
country is not the publishing country, only 2.7% of journals have a primary
country among their geographical neighbors, while 70.8% of journals have a
primary country among their academic neighbors. According to these statistics,
geographical distance plays no significant role in publishing on a regional
scale. However, the relationship between the primary country and neighboring
countries changed the publication shares. For journals that neighboring
countries include the primary country, a publication share increases by 15.8%
(19.3%) on average. In contrast, the publication share of the neighboring
countries is lower by 24.3% (14.2%) than the primary country’s publication
rate when the primary country is not included in the neighboring countries
(Figures S4 C and F). In short, the profile of neighboring countries may
explain the extended regionality of journals, thereby can support the validity
of the analysis.

We then apply the concept of neighbors to illustrate the regional
characteristics of both questionable and unquestionable journals. Comparing
the publication share of geographical neighbors (Figure 2A and B),
unquestioned journals and other journals show similar distributions, which
displays a two-peaked distribution with the most frequent or rare publishing;
thus, in part, there are regional journals. In contrast, questionable journals
lack geographical characteristics. The majority of geographical counterparts
of questionable journals rarely publish in the journal. In other words,
various countries, not just the geographical neighbors, publish their papers
in questionable journals showing their international characteristics. This
trend also holds for the academic neighbors (Figure 2C) with a two-peaked
distribution at the maximum and moderate publication share for the
unquestionable journals, whereas the distribution for the questionable
journals is only single-peaked at the intermediate publication share. Our
observation of the primary country’s publication share suggests that there are
approximately two types of journals: regional journals with a large
contribution from the publishing and neighboring countries, and international
journals with a negligible contribution from these countries.

Figure 3: The rank-ordered average share of a country’s journal publications
based on the primary country’s publication rate. (A) The colorbar represents
the publication rate of the primary country in the journal. For journals that
the primary country’s share is high (red), the publication share of other
countries is low. For journals in which the primary country’s share is low
(blue), various countries with lower ranks publish more papers. (B) Publishing
preference distribution for each of the three groups. The first group
published more in journals with low shares of primary countries (left), while
the countries in the second group published comparable percentages in journals
with both high and low shares of main countries (center). The third group
publishes more in journals that have a large proportion of primary countries
(right). The error bars represent the standard error. (C) Countries clustered
by the distribution of journals’ primary countries share profiles. The
journals are divided into ten classes based on their share of the primary
country in (A) and estimate the portion of each class inside the country
(Figure S5). We then cluster the countries into three groups based on the
estimated portions by Ward’s method (Ward Jr, 1963). Note that we excluded
countries with fewer than 10 journals for the analysis.

A natural step forward is in-depth exploring the share of countries in a given
journal. We examined the journal’s regional dominance by examining the share
of publications by country’s rank in a given journal (Figure 3A). The decline
of share by rank is slight for journals in that the primary country’s
publication rate is low. For journals that have the primary country’s
publication rate of $20-30\%$, the top three countries publish more than
$10\%$, and even the twentieth-largest country can produce more than $1\%$ of
the journal’s total publications. When the primary country’s publication rate
increases, the publication share is concentrated on the highly ranked
countries. For journals that the primary country’s publication rate is
$80-90\%$, only the primary country produces more than $10\%$ and only the
five countries can produce more than $1\%$ of the journal’s total
publications. Therefore, the publication rate of the primary country can be
employed as a proxy for regionality.

To confirm if the proxy for regionality supports the hypothesis of regional
academia, we examine regional dominance, which is a comparative analysis of
the selected portion of journals by primary country. Specifically, we
calculated the number of journals from each country that is the primary
country of the journal (Figure S5 for the journal distribution). Using Ward’s
method (Ward Jr, 1963), we identified three country groups based on their
selection of journals, where 21, 31, and 12 countries consist of each group,
respectively. Group 1, comprising countries that publish predominantly in
international journals with a low proportion of primary country, was followed
by Group 2, comprising balanced publishing countries that publish in journals
with a low to high proportion of primary country, and Group 3, comprising
countries that publish predominantly in regional journals with a high
proportion of primary country (Figure 3B). In contrast to the classification
of many Asian countries as Group 3 (Figure 3C), European countries are
predominantly categorized into Group 1 and Group 2. Group 3 comprises
countries with the lower GDP, whereas Group 1 or Group 2 comprises countries
with the higher GDP. Group 1 and Group 2 countries have respective mean GDPs
$\simeq\$1.6\times 10^{12}$ and $\simeq\$1.1\times 10^{12}$, whereas Group 3
countries have an average GDP $\simeq\$5\times 10^{11}$. The fact that many
high-GDP nations are classified as Group 1 or Group 2 suggests that these
countries have a greater propensity to publish in international journals. In
the academia of these countries, regional journals might not hold significant
prominence for authors. In contrast, low-GDP nations depend on regional
journals, which suggests the endorsement, support, and even indispensability
of regional journals from the regional academia of such countries.

Figure 4: Heatmap comparing the primary country’s publication share to the
journal’s impact. The heatmaps depict the normalized frequency of
questionable, unquestionable, and other journals, along with the proportion of
the primary country, geographical neighbor, and academic neighbors, as well as
the impact of the journal. The red area denotes a dense concentration of
journals. The color bar represents the normalized density, which is normalized
by maximal density of each plot.

A common notion of international journals is their higher impact than regional
journals. As a logical step, we measured the share of the primary and
neighboring countries to its impact factor by the types of journals (Figure
4). We observed clear differences between questionable journals and other
types of journals. For the unquestioned and other journals, those with a low
share of primary and neighboring countries have a higher impact factor than
those with a high share, aligning with the common notion. We observe a tail
with a gradual decrease in journal impact by the share of the primary and
neighboring countries for the unquestioned journals and other Scopus journals,
however, questionable journals have a tiny number of journals in those tails.
The questionable journals exhibit a low share of the primary and neighboring
countries regardless of their journal impact. This observation is valid
regardless of the definition of neighbors, which differs questionable from
other types of journals. In closing, it is difficult to concur with the
hypothesis of questionable journals contributing to regional academia, given
the rarity of their function as regional journals.

##  3 Discussion

In this investigation, we have diagnosed questionable publications at the
journal-country level. The number of questionable publications is proportional
to a country’s GDP, but the total number of publications in countries with a
high GDP conceals its effect on the rise of questionable publications.
Compensating the size effect reveals the growing preference for questionable
publishing in countries with a high GDP. In contrast to the growing number of
dubious publications, they may represent a minority region of academia.
However, our analysis reveals that their behavioral patterns differ from the
other journals: authors from a greater variety of countries publish their
papers in questionable journals, and this behavior is unrelated to
geographical and academic collaboration proximity. The location of a
questionable journal indicates which country profits from global research
funding, while the number of questionable publications in a country indicates
who paid for (Eykens et al., 2019). Our analysis of neighboring countries
connects the two main agents of publishing.

We have shown an overestimation of less developed countries to contribute to
the increase of questionable journals and publishers. In terms of publication
rate, developing countries have a greater volume of questionable publications;
yet, because their absolute number of publications is low, their impact on the
rise of questionable journals and publishers is limited. This also implies
that less developed countries may have been unaware of publishing in
questionable journals. Meantime, the country-by-country trend reveals positive
correlations with GDP. The comparison demonstrates that questionable
publishing is currently gradually permeating developed countries with a high
GDP.

Our analysis demonstrates clearly that the questionable journals publish a
small proportion of articles from the primary country, as well as from their
geographical and academic neighbors. In contrast, the main contributor of
unquestioned journals is from the primary and neighboring countries. This
trend is also valid for all Scopus journals other than questionable journals.
This implies that questionable journals are not even beneficial for the minor
regional academia. Given these factors, it seems inappropriate to state that
questionable journals are one of the many ways in which they could be
beneficial, i.e. a necessary evil that exists for the benefit of the
academia’s minors.

##  4 Limitations of the Study

The list of questionable journals, such as Beall’s list and Cabells’ Predatory
Reports have different criteria for selecting questionable publishing; thus,
it has inherent limitations for defining criteria. For example, Beall’s list
is criticized for its negative outlook on open access (Krawczyk and Kulczycki,
2021). In addition, there are potentially questionable but non-listed
questionable journals, yet we neglected them in the analysis. The publishing
country of some questionable journals is purposefully misplaced for various
reasons (Demir, 2018), but the main result, that is the low percentage of the
primary country’s publishing, is independent of its declared publication
location. Since this study focused on the massive behavior of questionable
publishing, individual behavior, e.g., government policy for each country or
greedy authors which use salami slicing or citation cartel (Kojaku et al.,
2021), remains as further study.

We utilized a controlled experiment to examine questionable publishing of
unquestioned journals at a comparable position in academia. One clear
advantage of a controlled experiment is that one can compensate for the bias
from the population. However, one should note that the Scopus dataset cannot
cover all scientific publishing; therefore, the comparative analysis, with all
Scopus journals, even can have potential bias (Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2016). To
surmount such a bias, we also presented the result of all other Scopus
journals regardless of their academic positions and found that it shows
similar collective behaviors with the unquestioned journals. In addition, to
reduce selection bias, we restrict the interpretation to collective behavior
rather than individual differences between journals. For instance, when
comparing the publication rate of a questionable journal to that of an
unquestioned journal, the result may vary depending on the degree of overall
regionality of such journals. Consequently, the comparison can distinguish
between questionable and unquestionable journals, at least in a collective
manner.

##  5 Methods

###  5.1 Data

In this study, we compare the country information of authors and journals with
each country’s gross domestic product (GDP) by analyzing a pan-academia scale
scholarly publication data. We begin by comparing the quantity of questionable
and unquestioned publications at the country level. We first extracted
20,864,247 papers, 6,971,029 authors, and 27,938 journals from January 2019
dump of Scopus CUSTOM XML DATA. We then considered data dating from 2010 to
2018 and having affiliation information, which the author’s data contains
906,610 affiliations with 177 countries. To reduce the possibility of error,
we excluded journals that published less than 30 publications during the
timeframe.

###  5.2 Selection of questionable and unquestioned journals

To identify the questionable and unquestioned journals, we employ the pre-
complied list from our own previous study based on Beall’s list (You et al.,
2022). In total, we found 766 questionable journals in the Scopus, which were
cross-checked with their ISSN and name. We consider only the questionable
journals that publish more than 30 articles per year avoiding potential bias
in the number of papers.

The unquestioned journals, comparative journals with a similar journal impact
and publication volume in the same subject area classification, were also
selected from our previous study (You et al., 2022). Unquestioned journals are
selected based on the similarity with each questionable journals. First, we
limit the candidate journals that belong to the same subject area (ASJC in
Scopus). Second, we divide journals into three groups according to the number
of annual publications, and limit the candidate journals that belong to the
same group. Last, we choose the unquestioned journal that has a similar
journal impact factor. As a result, we yield 1,293 unquestioned journals since
one questionable journal belongs to multiple subject areas. We should note
that the purpose of the comparison focuses on figuring out the overall
patterns of questionable journals and publishers rather than revealing
differences between two individual journals. To compare the tendencies of
general journals without considering journal impact, we used another set
called other journals, which consisted of all 25,879 Scopus journals not
included in the two above sets.

###  5.3 Allocating countries to journals

When deriving country profiles for both journals and papers, it is essential
to assign the correct country to each. We assume that the first author plays
the most significant role in the publication; therefore, we consider the paper
to belong to the first author’s country. Since a single author may have
multiple affiliations, we set the sum of the author’s countries as given equal
weight as one: as an illustrative example, $2/3$ of country A and $1/3$ of
country B are assigned to the paper if the first author has two affiliations
with country A and one affiliation with country B. Some papers have equally
contributing first authors, yet we consider a single author who appears first
in the author list to be the first author regardless of their contribution
markups. Additionally, the corresponding author may play a central role in the
publication process. We found that $91.3\%$ of papers list the same country
for both the first and corresponding authors; thus, considering the
corresponding author as the first author should not significantly change the
results. In the meantime, we employ the country of the journals belonging to
as listed in the Scimago Journal & Country Ranking (SCImago, ); we hereafter
call it as “publishing country”.

To define neighboring countries for a given country, we construct two types of
networks: i) by the geographical distance and ii) by academic distance as the
inverse number of co-authored papers between countries. The geographical
distance between two countries is measured by the haversine distance between
their respective centroids (Google Developers, ). We also count the number of
co-authored papers as the number of papers whose affiliations include both
countries. Here, we consider papers with two or more authors solely to exclude
the case that a single author has multiple affiliations with different
countries. We then select five topologically, geographically, and academically
nearest countries as the neighboring countries regarding a given publishing
country.

## Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the MSIT (Ministry of Science and ICT),
Republic of Korea, under the Innovative Human Resource Development for Local
Intellectualization support program (IITP-2022-RS-2022-00156360) supervised by
the IITP (Institute for Information & Communications Technology Planning &
Evaluation). This work was also supported by the National Research Foundation
of Korea (NRF) funded by the Korean government (grant No. NRF-2022R1C1C2004277
(T.Y.) and 2022R1A2C1091324 (J.Y.)). The Korea Institute of Science and
Technology Information (KISTI) also supported this research with grant No.
K-23-L03-C01 (J.P.) and by providing KREONET, a high-speed Internet
connection.

## Author contributions

All authors designed the experiment, collected the data, and wrote the
manuscript. T.Y. analyzed the results. All authors reviewed, edited, and
approved the manuscript.

## Declaration of Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplemental Information for

Regional profile of questionable publishing

Taekho You, Jinseo Park, June Young Lee, Jinhyuk Yun∗

∗Corresponding author. Email<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
This PDF file includes:

Supplementary text
Figures. S1 to S8

##  Section S1 Trend by year

The comparison of the publication rate between questionable journals and
unquestioned journals exhibits the changes of the publication trend (Figures
S6–S8). In 2010, the difference of publication rate between questionable
journals and unquestioned journals shows a negative correlation with GDP
(Figure S6A) with a negative scaling exponent -0.017. Low GDP countries have
positive difference, which means they produces more publications in
questionable journals rather than other similar journals. High GDP countries
shows less difference than low GDP countries. In 2018, the trend changes that
a positive correlation with GDP (Figure S6B) with exponent 0.002. When
compared to 2010, low GDP countries produces less questionable publication.
Only one country exhibits high number of questionable publications rather than
other similar journals, while seven countries show difference more than 0.1.

While the rate does not reflect the number of publications in the country, the
Normalized Revealed Comparative Advantage (NRCA) considers both the number of
publications in country and in journals (Yu et al., 2009). The NRCA computes
the preference of questionable (or unquestioned) publishing of a country
compared to the expected number of publications with a randomized assignment.
The NRCA is calculated as
$\mbox{NRCA}_{j}^{i}=(R_{j}^{i}-R_{t}^{i}R_{j}/R)/R$, where $R_{j}^{i}$
denotes the number of publications in group $i$ of country $j$, $R^{i}$
denotes the sum of publications in group $i$, $R_{j}$ denotes the sum of
publications in country $j$, and $R$ is the number of publications. We assign
a group $i$ to questionable, unquestioned, and other journals. We compute the
NRCA difference of questionable journals and unquestioned journals by country.
When the difference is more (less) than 0, the country prefer to publish in
questionable (unquestioned) journals. We found that GDP and the preference are
strongly correlated in both 2010 (-0.94) and 2018 (-0.72). The NRCA
differences in 2010 show a two types of trends (Figure S6C). When GDP is lower
than $\$10^{11}$, countries shows no preferences. When GDP is higher than
$\$10^{11}$, it shows a rapid decrease in NRCA difference. However, NRCA
differences increased for high GDP countries in 2018 (Figure S6D). Inset in
Figure S6D displays the amount of increase in NRCA differences, which clearly
shows the preference of questionable publishing grows for high GDP countries.
Moreover, we found countries that have a positive value, which means a
preference on questionable publishing even though their GDP is high. In
conclusion, the change of publication trend support the previous work that
publishing in questionable journals are broadening its area from the countries
in academic periphery to the academic center (Bagues et al., 2019; Marina and
Sterligov, 2021).

Figure S1: The proportion of publications by country compared to GDP. GDP and
proportion of publications are strongly correlated (0.967 in 2010 and 0.972 in
2018). The solid regression line displays the fitted model of $y\sim x^{1.2}$,
where $x$ is GDP and $y$ is % of publications. Top 10 countries produces more
than 60% of publications each year. Figure S2: The number of journals in the
country, plotted by their GDP. The Pearson correlation between the number of
questionable journals and other journals in Scopus is 0.339, while the
correlation between unquestioned journals and other journals is 0.987. The
Pearson correlation between the number of journals and GDP is 0.30 for
questionable journals, 0.72 for unquestioned journals and 0.75 for other
journals. Figure S3: The primary country’s publication rate in relation to the
publishing country of the journal. Figure S4: Changes of country’s proportion
with neighbors in the journal. Two types of neighbors, i.e., (A-C) geographic
neighbors and (D-F) co-work neighbors, are used to measure the change of
dominant country’s proportion of publications, for the case of the two
countries are same (A,D) and different (B,C,E,F). When two countries are
different, we split whether the dominant country is a neighbor of journal’s
country (B,E) or not (C,F) (A) Geographical neighbors where the dominant
country and journal’s country are same. (B) Geographical neighbors where the
dominant country and journal’s country are different, but the dominant country
is a neighbor of journal’s country. (C) Geographical neighbors where the
dominant country and journal’s country are different, but the dominant country
is not a neighbor of journal’s country. (D) Co-work neighbors where the
dominant country and journal’s country are same. (E) Co-work neighbors where
the dominant country and journal’s country are different, but the dominant
country is a neighbor of journal’s country. (F) Co-work neighbors where the
dominant country and journal’s country are different, but the dominant country
is not a neighbor of journal’s country.  Figure S5: Journal distribution of
primary country. The journals are divided into ten groups by the primary
country’s share of publications. In each country, the proportion of journals
is displayed from [0,10]% (left) to [90,100]% (right) share of the primary
country. The inset shows the journal distribution of European countries.
Figure S6: The publication trend changes by country. The difference of
publications between questionable journals and unquestioned journals are
computed (A,B) by their size and (C,D) by normalized revealed comparative
advantage (NRCA). The changes are displayed by year of (A,C) 2010 and (B,D)
2018. In (A,B), fitted line displays the scaling relation between GDP and the
differences. See also Figures S7, S8 for the annual distribution. (A) The
difference of publication size between questionable journals and unquestioned
journals in 2010. (B) The difference of publication size between questionable
journals and unquestioned journals in 2018. (C) The NRCA difference between
questionable journals and unquestioned journals in 2010. (D) The NRCA
difference between questionable journals and unquestioned journals in 2018.
Inset displays the increase of NRCA from 2010 to 2018 of the countries that
their GDP is higher than $\$10^{11}$ Figure S7: Publication rate difference
between questionable publishing and its comparative journals in country.
Figure S8: NRCA difference between questionable publishing and its comparative
journals in country.