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Summary
Many scientists have decried the rise of "predatory" journals—open-access publications that charge authors to publish but offer little or no peer review or other quality controls and use aggressive marketing tactics. Scholars have worried that the resulting articles have contaminated the literature with mediocre, flawed, or intentionally misleading findings. But a new study finds that 60% of articles published in a sample of "predatory journals" attracted not a single citation over a 5-year period. And the articles that received citations did so at a rate much lower than papers in conventional peer-reviewed journals.