How authors can spot predatory journals
ICMJE committee members recently published an editorial about how to recognize and avoid predatory or ‘pseudo’ scientific journals, co-hosted in the Annals of Internal Medicine and NEJM. Their top giveaways for a predatory journal were:
- Aggressive solicitation: you receive multiple emails asking you to submit a paper
- Promise of super fast turnaround (good peer review and editorial work takes a couple of months at least)
- Little transparency about the peer review and/or publication process
- A journal name that is very close to, but not exactly, the name of a reputable journal
- Is the journal actually listed in the indexing or metrics database that it claims to be?
I would add other practices that I’ve seen from predatory journals:
- Solicitation emails that are overly general/generic or that have multiple errors (if an editor from a reputable journal is asking you to submit an article, they will likely have a specific interest in mind that they mention in the email; or you may have met them at a conference and they’re following up)
- Very high fees (although TBH a few reputable journals are charging an arm and leg nowadays for open access articles)
If you have a question about a possible predatory journal, ask your colleagues. Or ask a professional in the field, like me – I have 20+ years of experiencing publishing in peer reviewed journals.
ThinkCheckSubmit.org is another resource to use.
The editorial notes that “Unfortunately, no current, comprehensive, and accurate list of predatory journals is available. Creation of such a list is infeasible as new entities continuously appear and disappear.”