With experience, I have been in a close contact with the scholarly research arena. Academic research popularly known as scholarly research has witnessed an increasing attention throught the academic parlance. The quality of the research has been correlated with its capacity to earn influence i.e. fetching more and more citations to its credit. This leads to the creation of a performance measure known as Impact Factor of the journal which published the research. Having ample scratching on the issues of the academic research performance, I reached on one conclusion that if the research is not cited or citable, it does not hold any value in academic parlance.
IS IT DONE THE WRIGHT WAY?
Not absolutely, although there are some evaluating agencies like Thomson Reuters undertaking the assignments of calculating the journals’ impact factor which has gained a series of recognitions still there is no way outside to help the quality of scholarly works. The irony is that the journals having 3-5 years of standing are alone considered for impact calculation. Rest of the research journals are either research deficient and forced to shut the research publishing or engaged in the practices which are not for the construction of the scholarly ideas instead distorting the whole idea of scholarly pursuits.
The later grouping of the research journals have developed their own ways and means to get a through in building their journal’s revenue tag instead of accepting only quality scholarly works for publishing. The latest way is the fabrication of their own impact factors leading to authors confusions and in general they succeed in getting the so called research papers for the sake of their revenues and sometimes they get quality scholarly work also which after its publication loses all its quality of being a scholarly works. These mushroomed research journals have created an environment amongst the academic world leading to distrust amongst the researchers even for those journals who are although newer but have proper infrastructure and editorial support for establishing a quality based scholarly publishing.
THE CURSE OF PLAGIARISM
Another issue if that of plagiarism, majority of these so-called research journals don’t have plagiarism checking methods. They use to issue acceptances to authors without checking the originality of their works. Sometimes, the submitted work is not compatible with the subject coverage of the journal still it gets ways of its acceptance because of the revenue concerns of these journals. After publishing, this type of work don’t get place in reading sources i.e. university libraries, research databases etc., just visible on the URL where it got posted by paying some sum of money and that’s all.
UN-JUSTIFIED SWIFT PUBLISHING
For checking the compatibility and quality of the submitted works, it demands a time period right from its categorization, plagiarism check, grammatical compatibility, editorial review and the conclusions for the presence of scholarly evidences in the work. What these journals are doing is summing all these activities in an attractive period of time (without performing these jobs in actual) sometimes in less than a week and sometimes even in back editions for extra payment.
WAY AHEAD
Academic research community specifically PhD candidates and other research scholars (easy prey to these journals) should be apprised of these types of publishing mal-practices distorting the very purpose of the whole scholarly idea. None of PhD. programme has a formal subject course on academic plagiarism which is the need of hour. It deserves a lecture at least in the whole duration of the research courses. The research submission should not be influenced from the impact factor instead the past published work’s visibility and readership in world libraries should the yardstick for forming the decision to submit the scholarly ideas for publication.
