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[In Depth] In India, elite institutes in shady journals

ScienceNOW - Fetched: December 22nd, 2016, 3:00pm UTC

India is home to a flourishing underworld of open-access journals that masquerade as legitimate scientific publications but publish papers with little or no peer review, while charging authors hefty fees. Many observers assumed that such bottom feeders were mostly attracting papers from institutions in academia's outer orbits. But a new analysis has found that many of the papers in predatory journals are coming from top-flight Indian research institutions, including some belonging to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and the Indian Institutes of Technology. The finding, in the 9 December issue of Current Science, has turned the spotlight on an academic culture in India that tends to prize quantity of publications over quality when evaluating researchers. Author: Priyanka Pulla

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