Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive, and Dodge: Identifying and Avoiding Predatory Journals

Author: Dr. Ryan Montalvo

As a first-year PhD student, you can often hang on every word that your senior doctoral student tells you and pick up their habits. One of the things that my student mentor loved was retractionwatch.com. I was not sure what his fascination was with it, or maybe he used it as a guide for what not to do in publishing, but he would log on almost daily. Retractionwatch.com’s parent company is the Center for Scientific Integrity whose goal is to “promote transparency and integrity in science and scientific publishing, and to disseminate best practices and increase efficiency in science.” As the name would imply the editors of RW provide regular updates from publishers or journals about articles that were retracted and the reason(s) why. RW’s blog often covers nuanced issues such as pre-publishing manuscript servers (BioRxiv.org), the use of AI in publishing, and many more, and I would highly recommend following their updates on X (@RetractionWatch). The RW archives reach back to 2010, and it has never been more important to be on guard against scientific misconduct than in today’s publishing landscape. However, the rise of predatory journals over the past decade also puts scientific integrity at risk on a larger scale, undermining the public’s trust in science. Professional and academic scientists are the safeguards for the public in the production and communication of our work, and the work of others, and in this article, we will provide helpful information for the identification and avoidance of predatory journals. 

In 2012, Jeffery Beall, a library Scientists with the University of Colorado Denver, wrote a commentary in Nature where he details unethical behavior practices of pay-to-publish journals, where he coined the term “predatory journals”. Although it has since been discontinued since 2017, Beall had maintained a running list of predatory journals, but similar lists can be found today and cross-referenced with a quick ctrl+f. Beall was compelled to discontinue this practice due to legal challenges from the journals he named as well as pressure from his university. In the original article Beall describes organizations that “publish counterfeit journals to exploit the open-access model in which the author pays. These predatory publishers are dishonest and lack transparency. They aim to dupe researchers, especially those inexperienced in scholarly communication.” 

Part of the difficulty in identification of predatory publishers is no clear agreed-upon statement of what constitutes “predatory”. Why is this not just considered capitalism? Caveat emptor right? What crosses the line into unethical behavior is putting the entire scientific community at risk with a substandard product. In a similar way the FDA regulates our food and drugs, but as a scientific community we are responsible for regulating ourselves. In 2019 a multidisciplinary group of researchers, academics, and policy scholars gathered in Ottawa, Canada to reach a consensus definition that can help in guiding our best practices: “Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.” 

You may be familiar with these solicitation emails from an obscurely named publisher like “international access journal” or “BDI Publishing” and you may even click on a link because, as many academics are, we are hungry to publish our work. If we can identify these predatory journals, we can avoid financial and scientific integrity scams and ensure that your work is viewed, reviewed, and revered by your target audience. 

There are several hallmarks of predatory journals that will make it easy to identify and avoid. 

1. The first and most clear indication of a predatory journal would be a lack of indexing on Scopus, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Web of Science, and similar library resources. This may also be displayed as a very minimal (<0.5) impact factor, or no impact factor at all, although impact factor isn’t everything. 

2. Where is the journal located? The contact information may state one address or country, but the journal is named or identified somewhere else. Example: The Houston Journal of Cancer Research address is in Cambodia (nothing against Cambodians). Like this practice, a predatory journal may have a similar name as a famous and reputable journal but is not affiliated with them in the slightest. Example: The American Journal of Physiology (top notch publisher) as opposed to the American Journal of Physiological Science, which I cannot identify exists anywhere. The journal’s contact phone number can also be very telling, is the country code correct? 

3. Predatory actions: Claims to be peer reviewed but lacks transparency in their peer review process and does not contain any information on their website about their standard practices. This may also come across as solicitation and adherence to unethical peer review. A colleague and I were discussing a journal that my lab was considering publishing in that had recently gained popularity. He was asked to do a peer review for that journal and ultimately recommended that a paper should be rejected from publication for good reason. However, the publisher denied his recommendation, solicited additional peer review, and then accepted the publication based on those recommendations. I will never seek that journal to publish again, even though it has been recommended by other peers. 

4. The timeline for publication is dramatically unrealistic. Some of the fantastical claims (<1 week or even 2 weeks from submission to publication) may be true for the journal but this would point to a lack of thorough peer review and minimal standards and practices that decrease confidence in scientific integrity. 

5. Publishing charges cannot be identified online or are non-existent on the website. After your article is accepted, which would be a dubious practice indeed, you could be hit with a large bill afterwards but may feel compelled to pay because the article has been accepted. What goes hand and hand with this practice is if you do get to the step of submitting and article it should be a glaring red flag if the journal asks you to pay up front or asks you to sign away your rights to the article at the time of submission, ensuring that you are not able to publish the report anywhere else.   

Contrastingly, there are guidelines to help decide on reputable journals to publish your work. The World Association of Medical editors (WAME) has produced a Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. Although this list is geared towards biomedical science research the details are general enough that it applies to most disciplines. For the most part, what makes a reputable journal is the reciprocal factors of what makes a predatory journal. 

1. Paramount Transparency: on the website it should be easy to ascertain information like publishing standards and practices for peer review. Article processing charges should be straightforward. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the higher the impact factor the more it may cost to publish but that is a separate topic for discussion. The address and contact information are straightforward and it is easy to contact an editor and members of the editorial board are clearly listed. Lastly, many journals are trending towards completely transparent peer review, which can be a green flag for a healthy and transparent process. 

2. Impact factor does not tell everything but in general is a decent indicator that other scientists trust the work that they are citing and therefore endorse the manuscript in that journal. Personally, when a journal website appears to be less than reputable and/ or I do not recognize the publisher I will not include that reference, even if it was the information I was searching for. 

3. Authors that you trust have published within the journal. Although I may be shooting for publications in Nature and Cell and Science (and failing), when a highly respected author publishes in a “lower” status journal it is a clear indication that they were comfortable with the process. Everyone has a different experience, especially based on reviewer comments, but I would take this as an endorsement from those authors, at least the anchor author(s). An additional check in this regard would be the inclusion of scientists that you respect on the editorial board.

4. Who are the stakeholders? Ownership and management of the journal is very important and clear indicator of credibility. For example, I know, in general, when I access an article, I can usually trust publications from Elsevier journals, as they have proven to be generally trustworthy. This is a skill that is developed over time to more easily identify reputable sources. If you have doubts, air on the side of caution and feel free to do a little digging. 

Delete Delete Delete. 

When you get these soliciting emails there are a few things to avoid and identify. A clear-cut sign of a phishing or predatory email are spelling errors from the journal aspect or misspelling or misaddressing your name are two of the biggest; overly flattering language is also a glaring danger sign such as “Esteemed, beautiful, and wonderful Dr. Smith, we seek your assistance with providing 1 article to complete our journals collection work based on your pre-eminent knowledge of science.”  You may be esteemed and wonderful AND beautiful but do not be the crow falling for the fox of Aesop’s fable. Do not directly click on any links from that email, even those to unsubscribe because the server will then be able to identify your email address as active. I have found that clicking on a link may get your signed up for 10 more email lists… and the predatory emails never stop. Instead, if you are suspicious but not 100% confident independently google the publisher to investigate legitimacy based on the descriptions from above. In most instances, it is best to just delete the emails and hope to not be contacted again. Further, if the emails that you receive are from a publishing group that you then don’t identify as reputable, it is a good sign to not seek to publish with them in the future, even when endorsed by a colleague. 

Predatory… Conferences?

What goes hand in hand with predatory publishing emails, these days, are predatory conference emails. Another email list you wish you could unsubscribe from. Maybe we will cover this more thoroughly in another blog post but there are several interesting articles available that detail these for-profit conferences. Hallmarks of predatory conferences solicitations include inviting you to a distant country to be the keynote speaker for a topic that you are not a specialist in… and asking you to pay for it… and there’s the kicker. Emails I frequently receive go something like this: Venerated Dr. Montalvo, your attendance would be appreciated at the Singapore International Conference for Audiology where we have provided for you the opportunity to give the Keynote Address. An exciting email to get as a master’s student until you recognize it as phishing. These emails can be a little bit more obvious about their fraudulent claims and often read more like “there are singles in your area that want to meet you”, which can easily be identified as counterfeit. 

At SciSummary we are committed to making science accessible and digestible for everyone and scientific integrity is at the core of what we do. Further, we want to empower scientists at all levels to navigate the complicated world of research, and we hope this this article can provide guidelines to help your work reach its target audience and not be eaten up by predatory publishing practices.