Published on: 23 June, 2025
Last month, our sleuth brought our attention to “Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences,” published by Babes-Bolyai University, Romania, and informed us that this journal exercises minimal or nescient review. Upon reviewing the published content, our sleuth discovered numerous flawed articles that were unsuitable for publication in the journal. The journal is indexed in Clarivate’s SSCI (Impact Factor 2023: 1), Scopus (Q3), DOAJ, etc.
To assess the publication quality of this journal, we randomly picked two (2) articles from its archive page. 1. Authentic leadership style and academia’s creativity in higher education institutions: Intrinsic motivation and mood as mediators; 2. Administrative burden and business satisfaction with public services. Let’s identify only a few major issues below:
Although Ahmad et al. (2015) tapped age, gender, and education, they did not include these control variables in the regression models (see p. 13, 14). Entering control variables in a mediation model is generally a good practice. Control variables help isolate the relationship between the independent variable, mediator, and dependent variable, improving the validity of the mediation analysis. They account for potential confounding effects, leading to more reliable findings.
Table 2 presents Authentic Leadership Style as a dependent variable and Creativity as an independent variable and reports the beta value for Creativity. Contrary to this, in the conceptual framework displayed in Figure 1 (p. 10), Authentic Leadership Style is an independent variable, whereas Creativity is a dependent variable. Similarly, Table 3 (p. 14) also presents Authentic Leadership Style as a dependent variable. These variables were wrongly reported in Tables 2 and 3. These are irrefutable reporting errors that should have been identified by the editors and reviewers.
As far as the analysis reporting is concerned, authors missed reporting the overall significance of both models (f-statistics); in addition, t-statistics were also not reported.
Let’s give a look to the second article, i.e., Sun et al. (2025).
Our chief concern in this study pertains to psychometrics. The authors confessed that, “To our knowledge, there are limited developed scales available to measure businesses’ perceived administrative burdens (p. 162).” Since the scales for three major constructs, i.e., Learning Costs Reduction, Psychological Costs Reduction, and Compliance Costs Reduction were developed, the prime responsibility of authors was to scientifically develop these scales by reporting factor analysis results, pattern matrix, KMO/Bartlett test results, test-retest reliability, etc. However, the authors followed an unscientific approach to scales, and editors and reviewers completely failed to identify and rectify this major concern. Due to this serious flaw, the credibility of study scales and validity of study results are highly questionable.
On page 163, the authors mentioned that PLS-SEM (in fact, it is PLS-PM) was used to test study hypotheses. Strangely, the authors failed to report many important statistics that serve as the blood of PLS-based hypothesis testing. For instance, we cannot find Model’s f Effect Size, Predictive Relevance (the Stone-Geisser’s Q2 Values), t-statistics, and standard errors. In PLS-SEM, t-statistics and standard errors are crucial for assessing the significance of path coefficients and other model parameters. Bootstrapping is used to estimate standard errors, and these are then used to calculate t-statistics. t-statistics, in turn, help determine the significance of the relationships between constructs by indicating how far the estimated value is from zero (or the null hypothesis) relative to its standard error. In the absence of t-statistics and standard errors, the results of this study are highly questionable.
Do you wonder how these articles were published in the presence of such stern blunders? Please ask the editors of Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences. Don't hesitate to comment if you enjoyed reading our article.
Update: On 23 June, 2025, the first author of Ahmad et al. (2015), Dr. Ifzal Ahmad, contacted us and threatened to take legal action against us. He said that the paper was published when he was a graduate student and editors and reviewers of the journal approved the erroneous publication; therefore, mistakes are justified. This justification exposes his graduate supervisors to serious consequences.
"Scholarly Criticism" is launched to serve as a watchdog on Business Research published in so-called Clarivate/Scopus indexed high quality Business Journals. It has been observed that, currently, this domain is empty and no one is serving to keep authors and publishers of journals on the right track who are conducting and publishing erroneous Business Research. To fill this gap, our organization serves as a key stakeholder of Business Research Publishing activities.
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