gms | German Medical Science

Background/research question: The phenomenon of daily unsolicited emails inviting/urging/pushing the recipient to submit a manuscript to (often unknown) dental journals can be seen as an unwanted and annoying side effect of open access. An overall analysis of the journals in question, the publishers, and related characteristics remains a desideratum, however.

Methods: Between January 2017 and October 2019 we created a list containing the titles of all dental journals that were mentioned in these emails. We then searched the websites of the publishers of the email-related journals to identify additional pertinent titles. Subsequently, we documented the following features: publishing companies and number of dental journals issued by them; publication start and end dates; number of published articles (original articles, reviews, case reports, editorials, guest editorials, short communications, letters to the editors, journal reviews, book reviews, obituaries); publication charges; membership in the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association; listing of the title in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ); journals that have been awarded the DOAJ Seal of Approval for Open Access Journals; journals that are referenced (as “indexed” or “currently not indexed”) in the NCBI Databases (NLM Catalog); existence of characteristics commonly associated with predatory journals.

Results: We identified 187 dental journals published by 93 companies. Among them, one single publisher located in India has offered 53 titles. Additional results of our analysis will be presented at the annual conference of the Network for Evidence-based Medicine in Basel.

Conclusion: The awareness of the wide dissemination of questionable journals and the negative consequences for both the dental/medical community and potential authors should be considerably increased.

Competing interests: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.