Background: The Research Integrity and Predatory Publishing in Evidence Reviews (RIPPER) Working Group is an international and multidisciplinary team of researchers and methodologists based out of the University of Adelaide, Australia in association with JBI. This group was formed aiming to untangle the issues associated with predatory journals and their practices, in addition to concerns of fraudulent and erroneous research findings, from the perspective of evidence synthesis.
Objective: Here, we aim to showcase the work, progress, and achievements of the RIPPER Working Group. We will present the work to date from the group and discuss the strengths and learnings that we have discovered following our 3 years of operation. Finally, we will also discuss the future and strategies of the group moving forward.
Methods and Results: The main objective of the RIPPER Working Group is to generate and disseminate research and methodological guidance on the use of predatory publishing and fraudulent and erroneous data in evidence synthesis. To achieve this, the group has led multiple primary research papers on this topic, including quantitative analytical cross-sectional surveys to determine how researchers in this space consider these issues, qualitative research towards the driving factors of these issues from the perspective of evidence synthesizers, and methodological guidance for whether systematic reviewers should include predatory journals in their reviews. Currently, the group is engaged in a large scoping review to identify and catalogue all known tools that can be applied to an evidence synthesis that may control for fraudulent and/or erroneous data.
Conclusion: The RIPPER Working Group is dedicated to building the research interests of evidence synthesizers in the field of predatory publishing. The group includes members of all career levels and a variety of primary research fields. The outputs generated by this group can be used by all researchers and evidence synthesizers.