Contamination by citations: references to predatory journals in the peer-reviewed marketing literature

PurposePredatory publishing is a growing and global issue infecting all scientific domains. Predatory publishers create counterfeit, not (properly) peer-reviewed journals to exploit the open access (OA) model in which the author pays. The plethora of predatory marketing journals along with the sophisticated deceptive practices of their publishers may create total confusion. One of the many highly likely risks of that bewilderment is when peer-reviewed, prestigious marketing journals cite these pseudo-marketing journals. This phenomenon is called citation contamination. This study aims to investigate the extent of citation contamination in the peer-reviewed marketing literature.Design/methodology/approachUsing Google Scholar as a citation gathering tool, this study investigates references to four predatory marketing journals in 68 peer-reviewed marketing journals listed in the 2018 version of the Academic Journal Guide by the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABSs).FindingsResults indicate that 59 of the 68 CABS-ranked peer-reviewed marketing journals were, up to late January 2021, contaminated by at least one of the four sampled predatory journals. Together, these four pseudo-journals received (at least) 605 citations. Findings from nonparametric statistical procedures show that citation contamination occurred irrespective of the age of a journal or its 2019 Journal Impact Factor (JIF). They also point out that citation contamination happened independently from the fact that a journal is recognized by Clarivate Analytics or not.Research limitations/implicationsThis study investigated citations to only four predatory marketing journals in only 68 CABS-listed peer-reviewed marketing journals.Practical implicationsThese findings should sound an alarm to the entire marketing community (including academics and practitioners). To counteract citation contamination, recommendations are provided for researchers, practitioners, journal editors and academic and professional associations.Originality/valueThis study is the first to offer a systematic assessment of references to predatory journals in the peer-reviewed marketing literature.

Emotional perception and historical heritage: a segmentation of foreign tourists who visit the city of Lima

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conduct an analysis of the relationships existing among three basic constructs in the visitor’s decision-making process (motivation and satisfaction) in a tourist destination that is a World Heritage Site, such as the city of Lima (Peru). Bearing in mind the perception of heritage by the foreign visitors, four types of tourists were determined: alternative tourists, cultural tourists, emotional tourists and heritage tourists. Design/methodology/approach This research uses the multivariate technique of grouping cases (K-means clusters) to analyse the similarity existing among the surveyed persons. From the groups or segments obtained, statistics and measurements of association were applied, which provide the information necessary to study the possible trends of association existing between variables from a table of bidimensional contingencies. In the same way, nonparametric statistical procedures were used (Kruskal–Wallis H test and the Mann–Whitney U test) with the aim of analysing significant differences among groups of the sample. Findings The results show the existence of four diverse motivational dimensions among the foreign tourists to visit Lima: hedonic, cultural, convenience and circumstantial. Of the four dimensions, the cultural aspect is the most relevant. The results show the existence of a specific Ibero-American heritage and cultural identity. Originality/value This paper contributes to the academic literature on the links of the tourist with the historical and monumental heritage location(s) visited by the tourist and the tourist’s behaviour while visiting the site. In fact, it is one of the first investigations carried out on this subject in Latin America.

Distinct Features of the Self-Concept and the Meaning-Forming Motives of Intellectual Professionals: A Case of Australian and Russian Specialists of Intellectual Labour

Introduction. The authors substantiate the necessity and relevance of studying the features of self-concept and the meaning-forming motives for intellectual labour. The novelty of this study is that a comparative analysis of the particularities of self-concept and the meaning-forming motives of the Australian and Russian specialists of intellectual labour is carried out for the first time. Methods. The study is based on the survey of 30 Australian and 40 Russian professionals in various fields of intellectual labour, whose average age was 34 years and 36 years old respectively. Psychological testing and content analysis of respondents’ self-descriptions were used as primary methods of research. The questionnaire with open-ended items created by the authors, entitled “Meaning-Forming Motives of Labour Activity – Money”, has been used for data collection. Parametric and nonparametric statistical procedures were carried out in analyses. Results and Discussion. This section describes the features of cognitive and emotional-evaluative components of self-concept, work-related meaning-forming motives of Australian and Russian professionals in the field of intellectual labour, both men and women. The leading categories in self-descriptions of the respondents are dependent on their nationality and gender. The following features of self-concept were revealed in the study: Australian men describe themselves through their look, Australian women – through their hobbies and friendships, Russian women – through their society status and social environment. The obtained results can be used in the development of a general management system and of training programs for professionals in the field of intellectual labour.

New approaches to cooperation with parents through the perspective of class and subject teachers

The paper presents a new conceptual framework of mutual cooperation between teachers and parents based on connecting the adults in the function of the development of intrinsic orientation of children/students towards learning and knowledge acquisition. Empirical verification of the new approach was performed on the sample of 1441 teachers (43,2% class teachers and 56,8% subject teachers) from 40 primary schools in Serbia. The aim of the research was to test the grounding of the conceptual framework through positioning of class and subject teachers in the relation to the new determinants of cooperation. For the purpose of this research we created a questionnaire with close-ended questions related to certain thematic aspects of cooperation with parents and the same aspects of teachers? work with students. In data processing we used a set of parametric and nonparametric statistical procedures. The results revealed that some what less than half of teachers assess positively the importance of the existing forms of cooperation with parents, slightly more than one quarter do not see how cooperation can contribute to the enhancement of their work, while one quarter are indecisive. In the opinion of both groups of teachers the problems related to learning and encouragement of students? independence were more prominent topics when talking to parents than in work with students, while the issues of interests, abilities, talents and planning goals were more present in subject teachers? work with students than in talking to parents. The correlation between teacher?s interaction with parents in the aforementioned conceptual framework and teacher?s pedagogical practice in work with students is higher in class teachers than in subject teachers. The obtained findings have confirmed the potential of the established framework for the enhancement of the practice of cooperation, which serves as the foundation for suggesting implications for practice provided in the concluding part of the paper.

Differential Evolution Algorithm with Self-Adaptive Population Resizing Mechanism

A differential evolution (DE) algorithm with self-adaptive population resizing mechanism, SapsDE, is proposed to enhance the performance of DE by dynamically choosing one of two mutation strategies and tuning control parameters in a self-adaptive manner. More specifically, more appropriate mutation strategies along with its parameter settings can be determined adaptively according to the previous status at different stages of the evolution process. To verify the performance of SapsDE, 17 benchmark functions with a wide range of dimensions, and diverse complexities are used. Nonparametric statistical procedures were performed for multiple comparisons between the proposed algorithm and five well-known DE variants from the literature. Simulation results show that SapsDE is effective and efficient. It also exhibits much more superiorresultsthan the other five algorithms employed in the comparison in most of the cases.

Evolutionary Undersampling for Classification with Imbalanced Datasets: Proposals and Taxonomy

Learning with imbalanced data is one of the recent challenges in machine learning. Various solutions have been proposed in order to find a treatment for this problem, such as modifying methods or the application of a preprocessing stage. Within the preprocessing focused on balancing data, two tendencies exist: reduce the set of examples (undersampling) or replicate minority class examples (oversampling). Undersampling with imbalanced datasets could be considered as a prototype selection procedure with the purpose of balancing datasets to achieve a high classification rate, avoiding the bias toward majority class examples. Evolutionary algorithms have been used for classical prototype selection showing good results, where the fitness function is associated to the classification and reduction rates. In this paper, we propose a set of methods called evolutionary undersampling that take into consideration the nature of the problem and use different fitness functions for getting a good trade-off between balance of distribution of classes and performance. The study includes a taxonomy of the approaches and an overall comparison among our models and state of the art undersampling methods. The results have been contrasted by using nonparametric statistical procedures and show that evolutionary undersampling outperforms the nonevolutionary models when the degree of imbalance is increased.