A new study revealed that India has topped the list of predatory publishers in the world, with 27.1% of the publishers of fake scientific journals belonging to the country.
The BMC Medical journal highlighted the various facets of this area of e-business, including information on extent and regional distribution.
The study has noted that predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 articles in 2010 to an estimated number of 420,000 articles in 2014, published by nearly 8,000 active journals.
"We have reported the estimated geographical spread of predatory article authorship in terms of absolute numbers per year of articles, which is highly skewed with India at the top. The distribution is highly skewed, with 27% publishing in India," the authors said in the study.
North America (17.5%), Asia, excluding India (11.6%), Europe (8.8%), Africa (5.5%), Australia (1.7%), South America (0.5%), and Middle East (0.5%) were the other regions that were also brought under the study.
As much as 26.8% was dubbed as "difficult to determine".
Furthermore, the study also revealed that based on a sample of 262 "papers" that were published in the fake journals, a whopping 35% of corresponding authors were from India, followed by Nigeria with 8% and the United States with 6%.
The phrase "predatory publishers" was coined by Jeffrey Beall. These journals are also referred to as pseudo-journals.
