PredCheck: Detecting Predatory Behaviour in Scholarly World

Dataset used in the paper "PredCheck: Detecting Predatory Behaviour in Scholarly World" accepted at JCDL 2020 as a poster.

Abstract: High solicitation for publishing a paper in scientific journals has led to the emergence of a large number of open-access predatory publishers. They fail to provide a rigorous peer-review process, thereby diluting the quality of research work and charge high article processing fees. Identification of such publishers has remained a challenge due to the vast diversity of the scholarly publishing ecosystem. Earlier works utilises only the objective features such as metadata. In this work, we aim to explore the possibility of identifying predatory behaviour through text-based features. We propose PredCheck, a four-step classificaton pipeline. The first classifier identifies the subject of the paper using TF-IDF vectors. Based on the subject of the paper, the Doc2Vec embeddings of the text are found. These embeddings are then fed into a Naive Bayes classifier that identifies the text to be predatory or non-predatory. Our pipeline gives a macro accuracy of 95% and an F1-score of 0.89.