Intensified pressure to publish is a hallmark of a rapidly evolving higher education field where the faculty of any hue cannot avoid the ‘publish or perish’ treadmill. Growing need to publish more and to do so fast have resulted in the proliferation of pseudo scholarly publications many regards as ‘predatory’. This article provides a systematic review of research studies on so-called ‘predatory’ publishing, a new but fast-growing area of research, with a particular focus on the awareness of prospective authors about so-called ‘predatory’ publishing, the profile of authors publishing in ‘predatory’ journals and the causal factors encouraging authors to publish in such outlets. It synthetizes the results of research studies on the topic to identify gaps and trends in the existing knowledgebase to guide further research. Results indicate so-called ‘predatory’ articles are authored by scholars from all fields and levels of academic experience rather than by inexperienced scholars only and ‘predatory’ contributions are not limited to developing countries, suggesting geographical location and author experience fail to explain the author profile of ‘predatory’ articles. Findings of this review suggest causal factors include research evaluation policies and publication pressure that emerge from the research environment in which scholars operate authors’ limited capacity to publish in ‘legitimate’ journals and conventions of so-called ‘predatory’ publishers. This indicates meaningful action might address all these factors in combination, rather than focus on them in isolation.

The systematic review of the research reported in this paper was conducted within the context of efforts to understand and combat predatory publishing, a new but fast‐growing area of research. It synthesizes the trends observed in knowledge production in predatory publishing, with a particular focus on the volume and distribution over time within different journals. It also looks at the composition of the predatory publishing literature in terms of the type of study, methods, topics, field of study, and contexts where research was conducted. Data were extracted from ERIC, Web of Science, and Scopus and identified 228 articles for evaluation published in 171 journals. The results demonstrate that the literature on predatory publishing is new but fast growing, with 88.6% of studies published since 2016. Only 37.3% reported empirical research, and the majority of these were quantitative studies with weak statistical tests. Medical journals carried the most articles. We conclude that scholarship on predatory publishing is in the early stages of development, and it is thinly distributed across journals, fields, and research contexts. It was surprising to find no studies in leading higher education journals, and this study reveals a research area that is still developing.

No abstract