Webinar on publishing in journals

UTAR Centre for Sustainable Development and Corporate Social Responsibility in Business (CSDCSR), in collaboration with Institute of Postgraduate Studies and Research (IPSR) and Faculty of Accountancy and Management (FAM), conducted an online webinar on how to avoid predatory journal publication and how to publish in high impact journal on 4 August 2020 via Microsoft Teams.

The webinar was moderated by CSDCSR Chairperson Dr Mohammad Falahat Nejadmahani and delivered by Prof Ramayah Thurasamy. Prof Ramayah is a professor of Technology Management at Universiti Sains Malaysia and Sunway University, and he is one of the top researchers and trainers in Malaysia. Prof Ramayah is also the international collaborative partner of UTAR Global Research Network.

Prof Ramayah delivering his online talk

In his talk, Prof Ramayah explained what is high impact journals and the common issues faced to publish research work in high impact journals. He said, “Emerald provides Real Impact Awards every year for highly outstanding papers and highly recommended papers. Those are some of the indications that there is an impact. Other ways to measure the impact are such as considering the total number of papers, the total number of citations, average number of citations per paper, average number of papers per author, average number of citations per year and h-index.”

Prof Ramayah also explained indexed and non-indexed journals and said, “A journalist is already indexed when they publish journals in Emerald. Emerald is a publisher, however, the indexing bodies are separated. For example, Elsevier is a publisher and it has its own indexing bodies called Scopus. We also have non-indexed journals like trade journals. In Malaysia, we have Malaysian Management Review (MMR) Journal which is editorial.” He also demonstrated how to identify the impact factor for journals using Clarivate Analytics and journal website, and shared the blacklisted journals by Malaysia Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE).

He further explained the predatory open access journals, stating that open access journals are scholarly journals that are available online to the readers “without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself”. He added that some of the open access journals are subsidised, and some require payment on behalf of the author. He also explained some of the benefits gained from the open access, which included free availability to unrestricted online access, authors retain copyright, high quality and rigorous peer review, rapid publication, no space constraints, compliance with open access mandates, and citation tracking and inclusion in bibliographic databases. Besides, he also talked about the danger of open access and provided guidelines on how to identify predatory journals.

“In academic publishing, predatory open-access publishing is an exploitative open access publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to the author without giving the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals. They charge high publication fees but do not check the submitted papers for quality,” he said. He also shared some characteristics of predatory journal and stated that one of the easiest ways to identify predatory journals were by looking at Beall's list of potential predatory journals and publishers.

Beyond predatory journals, fake journals were another issue for researchers. Prof Ramayah said sometimes someone will create a counterfeit website that pretends to be the website of a legitimate scholarly journal. He also presented some examples of hijacked journals, guiding the participants to differentiate the original from fake journals. He also gave an explanation on four models which included Publishing Models, Social influence Model, Guru Co-author model, and Intrinsic Quality of Paper Model.

“One of the difficult parts of publishing is writing the paper. Talking about writing isn’t writing. Thinking about writing isn’t writing. Dreaming or fantasising isn’t writing. Neither are outlining, researching, or making notes. All these may be a part of the whole milieu of the writing life and necessary to getting a project completed, but only writing is writing,” he said. He also advised those young researchers to invest in their career.

Furthermore, Prof Ramayah mentioned that the idea of writing paper can come from literature, Google Scholar alerts, colleagues, competitors and reviewing paper. “You can get your research done individually, or with your postgraduate or undergraduate students, colleagues, or collaborate with other authors,” he said. He also shared tips on picking the right journal for a research paper, thereby increasing the chances of getting the research published.

“The wealth of a merchant is in their purses of gold, the wealth of a scholar is in the knowledge they unfold. When you are already successful, you must remember the people who have helped you. You will also learn more from sharing than holding,” Prof Ramayah said, adding that passion, perseverance and a little bit of luck were needed for the publication process.

Prof Ramayah shared his experience of interacting and working with authors and researchers