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MedEd Scholarship Toolkit

Predatory Journals and Publishers

What is Predatory Journal?

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.

Characteristics of a Predatory Publisher

There are many ways to identify a predatory publisher and publication.  Here are some common traits:

  • They are not associated or ran by a credible scholarly or technical society/association, although they may "claim to be".
  • Do not receive pubic grants or funds.
  • They send constant spam emails.
  • They brag about the high quality of the journal, which can include false claims about their journal rankings and citations.
  • Features an editor-in-chief who also edits numerous other publications, from a variety of different disciplines.
  • Claims a fast publication process.
  • Titles of publications are vey similar to those of highly respected legitimate journals.
  • Their websites are hard to navigate - hard to find who manages the actual publication.

How to Avoid Predatory Publishers

  • Contact your librarian for a second opinion about the authenticity of a publisher or journal.
  • Be weary of email invitations to submit articles or to become an editor on their editorial board.
  • Review their peer-review process.  The less detail there is, then it probably isn't legitimate. 
  • Use common sense! If something looks off, proceed with caution.

Identifying Predatorial Journals

Established list of illegitimate publishers and journals.  The published list was accessible through a personal blog but it ceased publication in January of 2017.  The list still exists online but it is not maintained or updated.

Cabell's Jounralystics is an independent, curated database of scholarly journals.  This list provides complete contact and publication information, multiple quality metrics, submissions experience data, and peer review indicators.

A curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

This document provides a rubric and scoring sheet that can be sued to review a journal to determine if it is a credible publication.

Designed to help researches identify trusted journals for their research through a range of tools and practical resources.

 

Journal Metrics

Scopus Sources provides information on titles that are available on Scopus.  This information includes, CiteScore, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)

The CiteSource calculates the average number of citations received in a calendar year by the number of items published by the journal in the previous three years.  SNIP measures the average citation impact of the publications of a journal and corrects for difference sin citation pattern between fields.

The SJR analyzes journal and country rankings for Scopus journals. It metric ranks journals by attempting to account for the number of citations received by a journal and also the importance of the journals from where the citations originated.

Google Scholar provides a journal ranking based on the number of citations that a paper receives.  It includes English language publications only.

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