One of the undeniable goals of Kscien organization is to eradicate the predatory journals and publishers in the universities of the developing countries and the Middle East. In this context, Predatory List Committee (PLC) is attempting to ascertain the exact nature of the problem in these regions, and in the past, the publications of several universities belonging to these countries were scrutinized and in a data wise manner, the results were released, meanwhile the corresponding universities and their teaching staffs were updated about the situation.

In the most recent mission, PLC collected and examined a sample of publications belonging to the teaching staff of the Tehran University of medical science. They were 4320 papers randomly selected from the Google scholar profiles of the university members, and in a double-blind format, they were inspected and re-checked to exclude problems like bias and typo.  Papers published in the local Iranian journals were regarded as legitimate studies(apart from Advanced Journal of Emergency Medicine). The result of the survey illustrated that about 263 papers (7%) were published in the predatory journals and 4016 (93%) were published in the local and genuine international journals. In comparison to the other universities in the region, like Bagdad university, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University or Erbil university, table 1, TUMS has few publications in the predatory journals. This is due to the higher number of papers being published in the local Iranian journals or greater awareness of the teaching staff members of this university! This is not clear. Further analysis is indicated.

Table 1 shows the percentages of papers published in the predatory journals across universities of three developing countries (Iraq, Iran, and India)

Note/ It is worthy of note that all the details of the analysis have been preserved in Kscien, anyone interested can contact Kscien (through this email: i[email protected]) and he/she will receive all the documents.