Some 98 percent of the articles Uzbek academics publish abroad appear in discredited journals.

Anyone tracking scholarship on Central Asia is sure to be swamped by Uzbek research in unreputable publications

A new paper has found why: Under pressure from Uzbekistan’s government, academics are succumbing to predatory journals – publishers that, for a fee, overlook best practices like peer review or editing. Many of the researchers are forced to publish far more often than feasible if the bar were higher, and the quality shows: Uzbek academics are global leaders in spreading research that some scholars would explicitly call “bullshit.”

“Publish or perish”: It’s a global problem among academics, with eye-opening salience in Uzbekistan, find Bahtiyor Eshchanov of the Center for Economic Research and Reforms in Tashkent and his three Uzbek co-authors in a new paper in Publications, a peer-reviewed journal about scholarly publishing.

Eshchanov and his colleagues trace the proliferation of this “pseudo-research” and find that the trouble in Uzbekistan is caused by two forces, one local and one global.