Publish or Perish in Russian Social Sciences: Co-Authorship Patterns in Non-Problematic and Predatory Journals

Publication-based metrics have caused a number of strategic responses regarding scientists’ publication practices, including involvement in questionable research practices. One of such practices is the fictitious co-authorship that allows authors easily to increase the number of publications. This study examines the changes in publishing behavior in the Russian social sciences from 2014 to 2017 by comparing co-authorship patterns in non-predatory and predatory journals. We examined the proportion of solo articles and co-authorship articles, the types of co-authorships (institutional and national), and the number of authors per article. The results show that in the social sciences the two sets of articles are significantly different. The papers in predatory journals are more often published in co-authorship, and if in the early years of publication pressure such articles were written by authors from the same university, then papers with authors from different universities and regions began to appear more often. Predatory papers also demonstrate the prevalence of the certain number of authors per article — in non-predatory journals, articles written by five or more authors appear very rarely, while in predatory journals such publications dominate. This transition signals that paper mills have started to dominate in predatory business serving as broker between authors willing to have indexed publications.