The Generic Structure of the Call for Papers of Predatory Journals: A Social Semiotic Perspective

Abstract

“Predatory journals” are profit-oriented journals which ignore academic quality. In 2014 Jeffrey Beall, a librarian from the University of Colorado Denver, compiled two lists in order to highlight this issue: one which listed questionable publishers and another which listed questionable standalone journals. He insisted that these publishers and journals were “corrupt” and that they “exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts” (Beall 2014). In his study of “bogus journals”, Renandya (2014, pp. 4–7) identified the key characteristics of predatory journals as: (1) publication fees; (2) high frequency publication; (3) an extremely high acceptance rate; (4) quick turnaround times; (5) a rapid review process; and (6) low or extremely uneven quality of published articles. While Beall’s (2014) and Renandya’s (2014) contributions to the detection of predatory publishers are very important, there is currently a lack of available information on the generic structure of the predatory publishers’ call for papers. As the first point of contact for many academic writers, the call for papers plays a vital part in early detection of predatory publishers. This chapter addresses this issue by analysing the generic structure of 25 calls for papers using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The chapter draws from Martin’s work on genre as “…staged, goal oriented” and “purposeful activity” (2009, p. 13) and Halliday’s features of field, tenor and mode that exist within the context of situation in SFL (Halliday 1978; Halliday and Hasan 1985/1989), to interpret the social context of the predatory call for papers. Further analyses of the appraisal devices (Martin and White 2005) and lexico-grammatical choices within the texts were conducted and are outlined in this chapter (Halliday and Matthiesen 2014; Sardinha 2013), with some analysis of the spoken and written forms of text emerging in the email (Halliday 1989). Beall’s (2014) and Renandya’s (2014) concepts were used to identify the 25 predatory emails used in this study. Understanding the generic structure and the lexico-grammatical construction is beneficial to writers seeking to publish their work in reputable circles.