In a recent letter to The Lancet, Andrea Manca and colleagues called for PubMed to act over the increasing number of predatory journals indexed in the biomedical database. This followed a survey conducted by the group, which revealed that in the six-month period from October 2016, the proportion of predatory journals indexed in PubMed increased in the fields of rehabilitation (from 12.0% to 23.7%), neuroscience (11.4% to 16.1%) and neurology (20.2% to 24.7%).

The authors described the “polluting” effect that predatory journals can have on the quality of published science, and the potential impact of this on clinical practice. They concluded that PubMed and PubMed Central should follow the example of other databases, such as the Directory of Open Access Journal, Scopus and MEDLINE, and increase the stringency of their inclusion criteria.

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Summary by Alice Wareham, PhD from Aspire Scientific