Biswabrata Goswami
MIDNAPORE, 15 JUNE: The faculties of Vidyasagar University may find themselves in a jubilant mood to discover as many as thirty four of them listed in one AD Scientific Index 2021 in which no faculty from the University of Calcutta and Jadavpur University are found. Even the name of Professor Ranjan Chakrabarti, the Vice-Chancellor of Vidyasagar University, who is a reputed scholar in Environmental history, could not find a place in this database of researchers(https://www.adscientificindex.com/index.php?con=&tit=&q=Vidyasagar+University).
This new gigantic web index, which claims itself to be the first of its kind has been ranking the scholars and researchers of 200 countries belonging to 10,000 universities in different disciplines of physical, biological and social sciences to contribute towards planning for higher education. But from where this AD Scientific Index gets it data? The answer is given in the methodology page of the website, which states that the AD Scientific Index is developed “by using the total and last 5 years’ values of citation scores in Google Scholar” (https://www.adscientificindex.com/methodology/).
Furthermore, there is no data on the owners and location of this huge website in its homepage making it a non-transparent entity crawling in the cyberspace.
But does the using of data from google scholar make one credible and authentic enough to claim scientific validity? It is now well known in the academic world that google scholar does not discriminate between articles published in peer-reviewed and predatory journals and it does not provide the criteria for what makes its results “scholarly”. One can even upload the reference of an unpublished or even plagiarized article in her/his google scholar account and that may be cited several times by other researchers and the former may get a high h index, the famous magic word for academic recognition in today’s world, which simply counts the number of times an article is cited by a computer. Suffice it to say that the University Grants Commission in India also does not recognize the citations generated through the google scholar.
Predatory journals are those, which in exchange of money publish whatever is written by a scholar or a scientist without any prior review by the experts in a specific field. In an article published in the famous science journal nature (vol.489, 2012, p.179) Jeffrey Beall Librarian at the University of Colorado Denver warned: “Now there is a journal willing to accept almost every article, as long as the author is willing to pay the fee……. Perhaps nowhere are these abuses more acute than in India, where new predatory publishers or journals emerge each week. They are appearing because of the market need — hundreds of thousands of scientists in India and its neighbouring countries need to get published to earn tenure and promotion”.
Unsurprisingly, like predatory journals, there are also predatory indexing systems, which stand in a feedback relation and it is no wonder then that the AD Scientific Index in its page on methodology stated “We provide open access data. However, the services of corrections or the completion of missing data or any detailed analysis by the institution or the country will be provided for a fee for the sustainability and independence of this system (https://www.adscientificindex.com/methodology/).
