INANE Conference: Monday PM 8/4/25
Speakers:
- Roger Carpenter, Associate Professor and Director PHD Program, Director of Honors Program at West Virginia University
- Heather Carter-Templeton, Chairperson of the Adult Health Department, Director of Evaluation, and Associate Professor at West Virginia University School of Nursing
- Marilyn Oermann, Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Educator, Professor & Director of Evaluation and Educational Research at Duke University School of Nursing
Abstract: Predatory publishing has unfavorable impacts on nursing literature. Many faculty have communicated challenges associated with evaluating the quality of journals for submission of their manuscripts. There is an increased need for articulating clear expectations regarding faculty members’ need to assess the quality of publishers and journals as they engage in scholarship activities to support retention, promotion, and tenure. In this presentation, the speakers share the experiences of one school of nursing that provided clarity regarding the assessment of journal quality for faculty in their promotion and tenure guidelines.
Summary of presentation:
Speaker: Roger Carpenter
- This talk is a report of a publication published in 2023 in the Journal of Professional Nursing
- FRPT: Faculty Retention, Promotion, and Tenure
- APT: Academic Promotion & Tenure
- FRPT & APT are both referring to the same thing
- History of this project: A prior review of FRPT guidelines in schools of nursing did not reveal guidelines for faculty to avoid publishing in predatory journals or what would be considered a predatory publication regarding whether a researcher’s work can count towards tenure/promotion. Then, people were talking about this issue at INANE 2022. Therefore, these researchers from WVU took this need to the dean at West Virginia University, who convened a special task force to develop guidelines for the school.
Speaker: Marilyn Oermann
- There is NO standard definition of a predatory journal. Sometimes people call journals “predatory” but they are actually just low quality. Sometimes new journals do not meet all qualifications of what we would expect for an established journal, but that does not mean they are predatory.
- Characteristics of Predatory Journals (across different fields)
- #1 Deceptive journal operations & not transparent (e.g. with fees, with where they are indexed, etc.)
- #2 Do not adhere to publishing and editorial standards (e.g. no peer review or low-quality peer review)
- #3 Fake impact factors (e.g. impact factors from other organizations you have never heard of, etc.)
- Characteristics of Predatory Journals (in some fields)
- Misleading information on indexes the journal is in
- Ex. predatory nursing journals are not indexed in MEDLINE, CINAHL, Web of Science
- This is very important because if your article is accepted and published by this journal can only be found by a Google search or searching on the actual journal website, then if the journal closes down, your work is no longer searchable at all.
- The problem can then perpetuate if the article is then cited by another article, and that is how these articles spread
- Misleading information on indexes the journal is in
- Citations to Articles in Predatory Journals
- Oermann, et al. (2021) found 814 articles in nursing journals cited at least 1 article published in a predatory journal
- This is highly problematic, especially if a clinician uses that data to inform practice
- Most of the literature on this topic has not been empirical; therefore, this team undertook a scoping review of all research that has ever been done in the health field on predatory journals. Most of the articles were in medicine. Primarily they found studies that someone had done in different fields to look at predatory journals
- Barker (2023) takes a different stance than some by asserting that you can cite an article published in a predatory journal in a review IF you assess the quality of the research yourself, because sometimes good science is published in a predatory journal by no fault of the science, but that the author didn’t realize or wanted to publish quickly
- Many nursing schools state that their faculty should not publish in predatory journals, but there are usually no guidelines for what constitutes a “predatory” journal.
- If you realize after the fact that you published in a predatory journal, it is extremely unlikely that you will ever be able to get that work back.
- The speaker feels we have done a very good job of educating faculty and schools of nursing on the dangers of predatory journals, but we can do more to educate students and new graduates.
Speaker: Heather Carter-Templeton
- Spoke about how West Virginia University (WVU) advanced scholarship and Journal Quality Standards at the WVU School of Nursing
- The predatory publication task force process included:
- Reviewing literature on journal quality and scholarship standards
- Reviewing journal directories and databases
- Then the committee developed publications for promotion in rank/and or tenure guidelines, incorporated into existing FRPT
- It is not being used as a model for other universities
- Implications for the School of Nursing
- Strengthened the scholarly integrity and promotion processes
- Supported faculty in navigating publishing within reputable sources
- Reinforces mission and values of WVU SON
Discussion: Roger Carpenter
- This project was the first to publish these types of guidelines
- Including people most affected by the guidelines that were being developed (instead of just administrators), generated large buy-in from the faculty.
- Responses to their paper included:
- 8 papers have so far cited their paper
- 6 of the papers that they could obtain supported the work of this paper. One major point they made was “just because something is not predatory, does not mean it is high quality” and these speakers AGREE!
- Warning: AI tools meant to “identify” predatory journals can be incorrect!
Question & Answer:
- Thoughts on H-index?
- H-index is generated from the Web of Science, therefore, a predatory publication will not show up
- Since there is no agreed upon definition of predatory, how does MEDLINE/CINAHL etc. decide what journals to index?
- There are very specific criteria for a journal to be indexed in those databases, and you can look that up at each database’s website. Also, MEDLINE is very hard to get indexed in, so it’s unlikely that a predatory journal could get in.
- MEDLINE is a subset of what is in PubMed. Several years ago at an INANE conference, someone from the National Library of Medicine, told us that if something received federal funding, it had to be indexed in PubMed. How frequent are predatory journals in PUBMED?
- PubMed is a search engine that picks up things beyond MEDLINE, including books and articles deposited in PubMed Central, where articles that received federal funding are deposited. Journals that are indexed in PubMed Central still have to meet criteria to get indexed there, but the criteria are not as rigourous as those in MEDLINE.
- Other audience members shared personal experiences with this issue from the editor and author sides.
Your INANE 2025 reporter is Melissa Anne DuBois, BSN, RNC-OB, PhD Student.
Content for this post was obtained from the INANE 2025 website, the conference guidebook, internet searches, speaker submitted bios, and live reporting from each session. Any errors in content are purely accidental and not intended to offend. If you notice an error you would like corrected, please contact Melissa Anne at melissadubois2 at gmail dot com and she will be happy to make corrections.