If you are reading this post, you understand that publishing your scientific research is important for your career, for your field, and for society in general. Publishing your work can be what stands between you and finishing your Masters or PhD, getting a postdoc, moving on to your next job, getting your next grant, or even being tenured and promoted. However, you don’t want to just publish anywhere. You want to publish in a good journal, and at minimum, a legitimate journal. You don’t want to publish a predatory journal, because that’s not going to be seen as a positive, that’s going to be seen as a negative. And it’s going to hurt your career, not help it. Let’s talk about what a predatory journal is, and then how to avoid publishing your work in a predatory journal.

It can be hard these days to tell what’s a real journal and what’s not a real journal. Let’s first define what a predatory journal is. I’d like to start with a quote from a publication in Biochem Med in 2021. The quote says “A predatory journal could be provisionally defined as one masquerading as a genuine academic publication but offers little if any rigorous peer-review. Predatory journals or publishers place a focus on maximizing financial profit as opposed to regulated dissemination of scientific advancements. As a result authors can often get their work published in such journals with little scrutiny on quality.” That’s why publishing in a predatory journal is not going to help your career; because nobody is going to take that article seriously. They’re not going to respect it, and they’re not going to find it credible.

Now that we have a preliminary definition of predatory journal, let’s look at some characteristics of predatory journals. They have peer reviews that happen too fast to be credible. You might get reviews back in a few days, but it’s just not possible to find qualified reviewers to review that quickly. Most journals give reviewers at least two or three weeks. Another sign is that the peer reviews are not legitimately critical. Predatory journals will accept any manuscript regardless of rigor or quality. I’ve seen some exposes where authors have made-up nonsense articles and submitted them to predatory journals and they get accepted, even though the article makes no sense whatsoever and it’s not scientifically valid. Another sign of a predatory journal is that it charges a fee. However, many legitimate journals charge a fee also. (Take a look at my post on Open Access publishing.)

Another sign is that they mimic or impersonate established journals. They might make a slight variation of the name of a very good journal so that it is confusing, and people might accidentally submit to this predatory journal that has a very similar name. A lot of times predatory journals will also have Editorial Boards of people that are not qualified to be on the editorial board. Or they might even be made up of people that don’t even exist. Also, they might put an impact factor on their website, but that impact factor is not real. (Take a look at my post on Journal Impact Factor.)

One clue that the journal might be predatory is that the article processing charge is really inexpensive compared to other journals. Let’s take a look at another article that was published in the Indian Journal of Dermatology, Venerology, and Leprology in 2020. A quote from this article is: “an independent investigation on Indian predatory journals shows that the charge or fee ranges from $30 to $1,800 per piece or article global average estimate is 500 to $1,000 per publication.” Now compare that with the average cost for publishing a legitimate open-access journals which is more like $2,800 to $3,000. That doesn’t guarantee that the journal is predatory, but it could be a clue that tells you to dig a little bit deeper.

A list of basic criteria for predatory publications is found in this same article. Some of these are similar to what we’ve seen before: Charging exorbitant rates for publication of articles in conjunction with a lack of peer review or editorial oversight, notifying the authors of fees only after acceptance, targeting scholars through mass email spamming, quick acceptance of low-quality papers, including hoax papers, listings scholars as members of editorial board without their permission or not allowing them to resign, listing fake scholars as members of the editorial board, copying the visual design and language of a legitimate, established journals, fraudulent or improper use of ISSN, giving false information about the location of the publishing operation, and giving fake, non-existent, or misrepresented impact factors.

Doing your own research on all of the characteristics and things to look for to identify a predatory journal is a lot of work, and you might not be able to find all that information. So is there an easier way? Is there just a list that you can look at? Well, there are some lists, there are what we call blacklists, which list known or suspected predatory journals or publishers, and then there are lists called whitelists, witch are journals that are deemed to be legitimate or non-predatory.

Where do you find these? One place you can find a blacklist is on this website called Scholarly OA. This Scholarly OA is a copy of what was formerly called Beall’s list. This was a list of journals and publishers. It was put together by the former University librarian named Jeffrey Beall. He took that list down in 2017, but this website took over and published that list. One of the criticisms of Beall’s list is that the criteria for putting journals on this list is not transparent. We don’t know what the criteria are. And there’s a problem with this website as it is at the time I published this post, because this link that says learn more about the criteria doesn’t actually give information about the criteria. So we have to take it with a grain of salt. But it is a place to start. Another blacklist is from Cabell’s Scholarly Analytics. This list is called Predatory Reports and it is a “pay to see the list” business model. If you are a student, staff, or faculty of a University, maybe your university library subscribes to Cabell’s. They analyze over 60 behavioral indicators, along the themes of: peer review, editorial services, policy, business practices, publishing, archiving, and access, their website, and their indexing and metrics.

Cabell’s also publishes a whitelist, and another whitelist can be found at the Directory of Open Access Journals. This article in Nature has a figure in it that shows a comparison of the blacklists from Beall’s and from Cabell’s, and the whitelists from Cabell’s and the Directory of Open Access Journals. Some of the journals that are on those blacklists happened to be on the whitelist of the Directory of Open Access Journals, and one of them is on the whitelist from Cabell’s. So, there is a gray area where some of these journals are not clearly predatory, and they’re not clearly NOT predatory. Another indication of the scope of the problem of predatory journals is that there were over 11,700 predatory journals compared to 22,300 legitimate journals. One-third of the journals out there are predatory journals! It might even be more at this point.

What is the take home message? Be careful where you publish! Put a lot of thought into it. (Take a look at this post about some of the things to consider when you are choosing a target journal.) Ask yourself, have I heard of this journal before? Have I read papers from this journal, or have I cited papers from this journal? If you’re in doubt ask some colleagues, and if they don’t know anything it is always a good option to turn to your university librarian and have them take a look. They can give you a lot of information about whether that journal is legitimate or predatory.

What do you do to avoid predatory journals? Leave a comment below!