Kolkata, Oct 27 (IANS): As much as 27.1 percent of the publishers of fake scientific journals are from India, putting the country on top in the list of predatory publishers in the world, a study has found.

Published in October in BMC Medicine journal, the paper sheds light on various aspects of this branch of e-business, including information on extent and regional distribution.

The study notes over the 2010 to 2014 period, predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals.

"We have reported the estimated geographical spread of predatory article authorship in terms of absolute numbers per year of articles, which is highly skewed with India at the top. The distribution is highly skewed, with 27 percent publishing in India," the authors said in the study.

Other regions of the world that were brought under the study are: Europe (8.8 percent), Africa (5.5 percent), South America (0.5 percent), North America (17.5 percent), Australia (1.7 percent), Middle East (0.5 percent) and Asia without India (11.6 percent).

As much as 26.8 percent was dubbed as "difficult to determine".

In addition, the study revealed that based on a sample of 262 "papers" published in fake journals, a whopping 35 percent of corresponding authors were from India, followed by Nigerian authors (8 percent) and US authors (6 percent).

The phrase ‘predatory publishers’ was coined by Jeffrey Beall. These journals are also referred to as pseudo-journals.