Abstract

The current debate in the academic community is on the criteria for predatory journals. Researchers are perplexed about what constitutes a predatory journal. The purpose of this study is to investigate how South Korean researchers discover and evaluate predatory journals. In order to achieve this, we collected 2,484 statements, comprising posts and comments, from Korean researcher communities, namely the Biological Research Information Center (BRIC), Hibrain.net, Phdkim.net, and the Scholarly Ecosystem Against Fake Publication Environment (SAFE). We divided the data into three primary categories—journals, publishers, and researchers—for the topic analysis. For each statement, we assigned 11 in-depth subtopic tags based on these categories. Six main points of contention emerged from the combinations of these sub-topic tags: (1) researchers’ confusion about predatory journals and discussions about research performance; (2)(3) researchers’ positive and negative perceptions of predatory journals; (4) researchers’ evaluation criteria for journal quality and problems associated with the quality of Korean journals; (5) changes in publishing brought about by the introduction of open access (OA) and associated issues; and (6) discussions on broader issues within the academic ecosystem. By using a qualitative approach to examine how South Korean researchers view predatory journals, this study aims to advance basic knowledge of the discourse around them in the communities of domestic researchers.