Shaukat Ali Jawaid
The younger generation of healthcare professionals including the young researchers are in a hurry, are very impatient and always ready to use any available short cut for progress. Little do they realize that it does not pay in the long run? They need to try to walk on the stairs rather than using the Swings because if they go up fast, there are chances that they will come back with greater force and might hurt themselves seriously.
Those joining the teaching institutions after postgraduate do need some research publications for selection and promotion in their academic career. Hence, first of all most of them try to gather some data and come up with prevalence studies which may not be so bad but most often these are not quality studies. Done under compulsion just for the sake of selection or promotion most often does not guarantee quality research. They need to develop critical thinking, identify some problem and then try to find some indigenous cost effective solution. This of course requires some time but since some of them are in a hurry, they resort to short cut and are trapped by Paper Mills or predatory journals.
Predatory journals are flourishing in India and Pakistan. The modus operandi they adopt is to have title similar to some well-known journal and then trap the authors who are keen to get quick publications. At the same time, some Paper Mills are also working overtime and they sell authorship which is promoted through social media since we do not have any regulatory mechanism in place to check and punish these characters involved in unethical scientific publication practices. Chargers for being listed as Frist, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth author vary. What is most surprising is the fact that they enjoy patronage of some senior healthcare professionals, those in regulatory bodies and others close to those who have access to the power corridors.
Hence, first they never get caught and if they do, they always find some who come to their rescue. All those authors who get their manuscripts published in these predatory journals who have no peer review system are not innocent and they are fully aware of the fact that they are involved in unethical practices. They wish to avoid peer review which plays a vital role in improving the quality of manuscripts before they are accepted for publications.
Criminal silence of the regulatory bodies on this important issue can have serious repercussions for the country. Functioning of these regulatory bodies leaves much to be desired, at times their slow working even creates problems for those journals who uphold professional ethics, practice peer review and are engaged in ethical scientific publishing. They need to be encouraged, facilitated so that the researchers could get their research published in time and do not have to wait for too long. Their inefficiency also helps promote these predatory journals which is a menace, intellectual corruption and needs to be eliminated at all cost.
Agree