Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines why Nigerian academics are patronizing predatory publishers and the implications of this for scholarly communication in Nigeria. The study pursued a qualitative method of face-to-face interviews to collect data from twenty-five academics from five universities in South West Nigeria. Five research questions guided the collection and analysis of data. The results confirmed that Nigerian academics are patronizing predatory journals. These journals are characterized by rapid publication, article-processing fees, a lack of peer review, and aggressive advertisement that cajoles authors into publishing with them. The reasons why Nigerian academics patronize predatory journals include desperation at the thought of missing out on promotion, long waits for reviews from reputable journals, deficient information literacy, and inadequate knowledge of the journals in their specific subject area. The findings also confirmed that younger, newly recruited, and inexperienced Nigerian academics are those most likely to patronize predatory journals. The implications of this practice are that Nigerian academics will concentrate less on conducting quality research and that researchers elsewhere in the world will lose trust in the ability of Nigerian academics to conduct quality research. The study ends with recommendations for ameliorating the situation: measures such as putting a solid orientation and mentorship program in place for younger academics, formulating institutional policies for scholarly publication, and creating standard accredited lists of journals that restrict where Nigerian academics can publish.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | MetaresearchResearch integrity Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | Scholarly communicationResearch integrity Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | medium |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.101 | 0.466 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.035 | 0.103 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.225 | 0.164 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".