Is the journal legitimate?
- There are many predatory publishers that target faculty with flattering emails that entice them to submit manuscripts with promises of quick turnaround times.
Predatory journals are low quality publications that aggressively solicit manuscripts, promise quick publication turnarounds, lack transparency and target faculty authors rather than highlight content for readers. Librarian Jeffrey Beall coined the phrase “predatory publishes” in 2010.
- Criteria for detecting predatory journals:
- Email solicitations for a manuscript. Legitimate journals do send emails to faculty, but be especially careful with journals that you learned about from an email.
- Pretending to operate in one country with a PO box address when the operations are really in another country
- A misleading geographic name (e.g. The Australian Journal of Economics with no Australian editors or institutional affiliations). We have also encountered predatory journals that use names of prestigious institutions like “Cambridge” that have no connection with these universities.
- False claims about inclusion in article databases or curated lists of approved journals. You will have to double check these claims yourself (or contact a librarian) by looking at the journal title lists of the databases.
- False claims about Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate or bogus metrics services that haven’t been mentioned in this book like the Index Copernicus Value that many predatory publishers mention. Pepperdine doesn’t subscribe to the journal citations report, but you can search the free Master Journal List Manuscript Matcher (https://mjl.clarivate.com/)
- Promises of quick publication (e.g. less than month) and optional fees for expedited publication.
- Non-professional email addresses like .gmail.com, yahoo.com
- Websites with grammatical errors and misspellings
- The website targets authors rather than readers. Ethical journals emphasize content for readers while predatory journals target authors and highlight quick publication times.
- Copyright for open access articles is retained by the publisher rather than the author despite being charged article processing charges. An advantage of open access publishing is that authors retain copyright which is in contrast to publishers retaining copyright with subscription journals. You should be concerned if a journal’s website doesn’t address copyright.
- Fuzzy and unclear images on the websites or images without permissions
- There isn’t a retraction policy. In many cases retraction policies are at the publisher rather than journal level.
- Low article processing charges, which sounds counterintuitive, could be a sign of a predatory journal. Many legitimate journals will have article processing charges over $1,000. We suspect that predatory journals can entice desperate authors with lower APCs.
Is there is a list of approved journals?
- Cabell’s Journalytics is a database that has journals which meet Cabell’s quality criteria. Our subscription covers the disciplines of business economics, education and psychology.
- Cabell’s doesn’t list every single legitimate journal
What about lists of predatory journals?
- Beall’s original list of predatory journals is defunct and out of date
- Lists of predatory journals have two limitations:
- Lists have unfairly included journals that aren’t truly predatory
- With the growth of predatory journals, it’s difficult for any list to include every possible predatory journal.
Is the journal prestigious?
- While the Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate is the most famous, other resources like SCIMago and CiteScore rank journals by often their articles or cited.
