Predatory Publishing: Identifying predatory journals

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Where is the journal indexed?

One of the first steps in identifying whether a journal is legitimate or predatory is to take a look at which databases index the journal. This has the added benefit of giving you a good idea of the reach you can expect for your article if you published with a legitimate journal.

While most journals say on their website where they are indexed, predatory journals may be misleading in this area. So it's best to check credible sources.

Ulrichsweb is a credible and reliable place to find information on legitimate journals. If a journal is not listed in Ulrichsweb, it is either predatory or so new that it isn't established yet, and may not be a great choice for publication anyway.

The screenshot below shows the listing for the journal Education Research International. You can find and expand the Abstracting & Indexing section at the bottom of the page. For this one, Ulrich's shows that the journal was indexed in Web of Science, but that it has recently been dropped.

Compare that to the following entry for the Journal Remedial and Special Education. For this journal, the Abstracting & Indexing section has too many databases to capture in the screenshot or list here, including all of the primary multidisciplinary and subject specific databases you would hope to see for an education journal.

Does it have an impact measure?

An additional thing to check for identifying if a journal is predatory or not is the type of impact measure it has, if any. If a journal shows up in Ulrichsweb, but doesn't have any impact measure associated with it, it could still be suspect. 

The metric you are likely most familiar with is Impact Factor. This is a specific measure given by Journal Citation Reports to journals indexed in the Web of Science, it's companion databases. Not all journals will be captured, but many will.

If the journal you're searching for is not in Journal Citation Reports, it may have an impact factor elsewhere. Two others to check are the SCImago Journal Ranking (SJR) and the H5 Index, which can be found in Google Scholar.

If the journal isn't found in any of these three places, there is significant reason to be suspect.

Has it been flagged as predatory?

There are a few places you can check to see if a specific journal has previously been flagged as predatory. 

Still not sure?

Here are a couple more strategies you can try.

• Use the Think Check Submit checklist
• Run a search in the search engine of your choice with the title of the journal and the word predatory and see what pops up.