Effect of educational intervention on physicians and researchers’ knowledge, practices and perceptions towards predatory journals: an interventional study

In the current scholarly landscape, predatory journals have increasingly emerged along with open-access journals. These journals aim for profit rather than trusted science. Therefore, the main purpose of the current study is to assess the impact of an educational intervention on physicians' and researchers' knowledge, practices, and perceptions regarding predatory journals. This is an interventional, randomized, pretest–posttest, control group study. Physicians and researchers from King Fahad Medical City were randomly assigned either to an intervention group (received educational training) or a control group without training. A structured questionnaire was developed and validated to assess knowledge, practices, and perceptions toward predatory journals was used. A total of 304 participants enrolled in the study at baseline were allocated equally to intervention and control groups (n = 152, each). The distributions of baseline characteristics were similar in both groups. Post-intervention, participants in the intervention group showed significantly higher adjusted mean knowledge scores compared to the control group (10.26 ± 2.9 vs. 7.12 ± 4.1; p < 0.001) with moderate effect size; $$\upeta^{2}_{p}$$ = 0.095. Post-intervention practice scores were also significantly higher in the intervention group (45.81 ± 10.3) than in the control group (40.61 ± 12.1; p = 0.001), although the effect size was small (ƞₚ2 = 0.0048). Perception scores showed no significant difference between groups post-intervention (32.83 ± 3.9 vs. 33.55 ± 3.8; p = 0.316; ƞₚ2 = 0.005). The educational intervention significantly improved participants’ knowledge and practices but not their perceptions. Moreover, the post-intervention knowledge and practice scores reflected a moderate to small effect size, suggesting a room for further enhancement through sustained educational efforts.