Predatory Journals: What They Are and How to Avoid Them

What are predatory journals?

Journals that mimic scientific journals and trick researchers into publishing with them, using false promises for an expedited publication process, scientific and language editing, and peer review. In reality, these journals have a fictitious scientific board and do not employ any screening or quality checks on the content they accept for publication.

What is the damage of publishing in predatory journals?

Articles published in predatory journals are not taken into account for academic promotion.
Waste of research funds: the research is not taken into account and cannot be republished in other acclaimed journals.
The research does not get its rightful exposure to the scientific community.

Where should you publish?

Check if the journal you wish to publish appears in JCR – this database ranks academic journals and calculates their Impact Factor. Only articles published in journals that appear in JCR are taken into account for academic promotion.

The library's Reference team can check for you if the journal appears in the database and help you decide whether a journal you wish to publish in is a legitimate or predatory journal.

What are the warning signs of predatory journals?

Only journals ranked by JCR are acceptable for academic promotion, but many legitimate journals are not ranked by it. Here are some red flags that can help you identify predatory journals:

Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors on the publisher's website.
Promise for an expedited/rapid publication process without proper details on how the manuscript is handled.
No clear policy of APC. In many cases, publication fees are not disclosed until after submitting an article.
The journals boast a distinguished list of editors, but that turns out to be fictitious: they have never heard of the journal and have nothing to do with it. Sometimes, the editors are not recognized as researchers in the field.
Missing, partial, or generic contact email addresses like GMAIL or YAHOO.
The journal does not have an Impact Factor, uses false claims to such rank, or uses misleading names of other false ranks.
The journal's broad scope of interest includes articles on unrelated subjects.
The names of the journals intentionally resemble the names of well-known journals in the field but with an unknown publisher.
Recent articles in the journal show poor research quality.
The journal has no ISSN or a faulty one.
There is no clear policy for the peer review process, or the process is not up to academic standards.
The journal does not appear in trustworthy databases such as SCOPUS, WOS, or JCR or lists of Open Access journals like DOAJ. Google Scholar includes legitimate sources as well as predatory ones. Predatory journal articles sometimes even make it into Pubmed.

Other sources to locate legitimate journals:

Ulrich's Periodical Directory: a directory for locating information about journals from various fields, such as ISSN, publisher's name, whether it is an academic journal, whether it is a peer-reviewed journal, etc.
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals): a list of legitimate open access journals.
SHERPA: a service that helps researchers locate an open-access journal to publish in. The service does not evaluate the quality of the journals.

Where else can you check if you are dealing with a predatory journal?

You can use the following blacklists, although predatory journals are experts at disguising themselves, and sometimes it takes a while for the blacklists to update:

Other Services for Researchers

Searches for Systematic Reviews >

Open Access Publishing >

Request for Your Scientific Publication List >

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