Here are the 11 publications (as at 11 Sep 2023) that Jeffrey Beall has written, as indexed by Scopus.
The list is sorted by the number of times the papers have been cited.
We note, that Beall has written a lot more papers (about 40) on predatory publishing but these are in journals not indexed by Scopus, so have not been included here.
Medical Publishing Triage – Chronicling Predatory Open Access Publishers (2013) Annals of Medicine and Surgery, 2 (2), pp. 47 – 49, Cited 98 times. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2049-0801(13)70035-9
Predatory publishing is just one of the consequences of gold open access (2013) Learned Publishing, 26 (2), pp. 79 – 84, Cited 90 times. https://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20130203
Dangerous predatory publishers threaten medical research (2016) Journal of Korean Medical Science, 31 (10), pp. 1511 – 1513, Cited 82 times. https://dx.doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2016.31.10.1511
Predatory journals and the breakdown of research cultures (2015) Information Development, 31 (5), pp. 473 – 476, Cited 39 times. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0266666915601421
Unethical practices in scholarly, open-access publishing (2013) Journal of Information Ethics, 22 (1), pp. 11 – 20, Cited 12 times. https://dx.doi.org/10.3172/JIE.22.1.11
[Note: This DOI (10.3172/JIE.22.1.11) does not appear to work (it leads to a “metapress page”) and we are struggling to locate this paper. If you can help with a correct link, please let us know]
Predatory publishers: Implications for pharmacy practice and practitioners (2017) Canadian Pharmacists Journal, 150 (5), pp. 274 – 275, Cited 7 times. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1715163517725269
Behind the Spam: A Spectral Analysis of Predatory Publishers (2015) Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 11 (A29A), pp. 166 – 171, Cited 2 times. https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S17439
It might be easier to identify journals which are not predatory
Researchers often ask, “How do you identify a predatory journal, so that I can avoid it?” But we can turn that question on its head and instead ask “How do I identify a non-predatory journal?”
In this article, we suggest several checks that you can do, which can inform the decision whether you want to submit to that journal.
If you want a quick answer, you might want to target journals that are not open access, as this model can’t be exploited by predatory publishers. You should also speak to colleagues who may have more knowledge and experience of the journal that you are considering sending your article to.
Is there a traditional publishing route for the journal you plan to submit to?
The reason that predatory publishing exists is because of the open access model (i.e. the author()s, or another stakeholder pays to publish the article). If an article is not being published as open access, predatory publishers cannot exploit you.
If you want to know more about Open Access and Predatory Publishing, you may want to take a look at “Scholarly Communication: What Everyone Needs to Know” by Rick Anderson. The book covers a lot of material but, in the context of this article, you might want to look at Chapter 12, which covers “What are Sponsored Journals? Are they like Predatory Journals?“
Before predatory publishing, there was really only way to publish a scientific article, often called “traditional publishing.”
In this model, once your paper is accepted, you sign over the copyright to the journal/publisher, they publish the paper and then make money by selling it via subscriptions and/or by selling individual downloads.
Some people have issues with this model, with the most common being that the author(s) do all the work and then hand over the copyright to the publisher, who is then able to profit by selling that article
If you consider most publishing models, such as a book, the author would get some of the income from sales of the book, even if they signed over the copyright. This is not the case with scientific publishing.
Reviewers and editors also work for free. The publisher profits from the work of all these scholars by charging them to access the article, which might include the institution that the author(s) works for, or even the author(s) themselves. But that is a discussion for another day.
In the context of predatory publishing, if the journal has a traditional publishing route, then you can be assured that the journal is not predatory as they will not expect you to pay, so have no way of profiteering from you.
Look at the review times for the journal you are considering submitting to
One of the characteristics of predatory journals is the very fast (sometimes just days) review times. We are unaware, in our disciplines, of any journals that responds so quickly. If we get a first decision within three months, we think we are very lucky, with six months being closer to the average.
However, it is not always easy to find out review times. You could try emailing the editor but that is almost always a futile exercise. The best an editor can tell you is what the journal’s aspirations are. When we have been involved in editorial duties (whether as an Editor-in-Chief or an Associate Editor), when we received an email asking how quickly papers were reviewed we replied with the journal’s aspiration, which was usually something like “We try to give a first decision within 90 days but we are reliant to the reviewers who may take longer this this to upload their review(s).”
Some journals show this data as a matter of course, which is very useful. Not all journal’s show this data, but it is very useful when it does.
This image on the left shows an example from a paper we looked at. It shows that the paper was received on 5 Mar, a revised version was received on 13 Jul and it was accepted on 19 Aug.
To us, this seems a reasonable timeline and would suggest that this is not a predatory journal, where the timelines would almost certainly be a lot shorter.
There is an interesting book by Matthias Starck called “Scientific Peer Review: Guidelines for Informative Peer Review (essentials)“, which looks at the peer review process, including a section (8.2) on “Fake Journal Peer Review“. The Amazon link is here.
Are a journal's Aims and Scope focused?
Many predatory journals, who just want to attract papers – any papers – have very broad scopes in the hope that it will appeal to as many authors as possible.
Non-predatory journals tend to have a much more focused scope, as they want to address just a single area and not spread themselves too thinly.
If the journal has a narrow focus, then it is an indication that the journal is not predatory, although you should validate this with the other checks you are doing.
Is the Editorial Board of the journal of the quality you would expect?
Like the journal’s aims and scope, the editorial board should, similarly, be focused on the area that is addressed by the journal. If the disciplines and expertise of the editorial board are aligned with the narrow scope of the journals, this is another indicator that the journal is not predatory.
It is always useful to be able to see pictures of the editorial board and to be presented with a short biography. A link their home page, or institutional page, is also useful.
We are not that worried about an email address, although it is useful and should be easy to find from the link to the home/institutional page.
We don’t blame people for not wanting their email addresses displayed, not because they do not want to be contacted but it is just another way that spammers can collect email addresses.
Really, what you are trying to do is to check that the editorial board member is a real person and that they have a presence at a reputable institution or organization.
It is also useful to see if they list the journal on their web site, stating that they are an editorial board member of the journal.
The main problem we have with tracking editorial board members is the time it takes. Not only because home pages are not always given (so you have to search) but it is surprising the number of academics who do not have home pages. For those that do, they are, understandably, in different formats and provide different levels of information. If you need to track down the editorial boards of a few journals it will be time consuming. We wish there was a central directory of this information.
Talk to colleagues about the journal you are considering submitting to
This is an obvious point, so we only make it for completeness.
If you are unsure whether a journal is suitable to submit to, ask your colleagues, especially if you are an Early Career Researcher.
Even if you are not, just a couple of minutes spent seeking the advice of a colleague might be the best two minutes you have ever spent.
Journals published before 1993 are unlikely to be predatory
The Open Access movement started in 1993 (see this paper for a history of Open Access). As it was open access that provided the catalyst for predatory journals to enter the market, it is a reasonably safe assumption that any journal that predates 1993 is not a predatory journal.
Like all the points made in this article, that is not a cast iron guarantee (it could have transformed into a predatory journal) but it is strong evidence that can inform your decision whether you are looking at a predatory journal or not.
Is the journal you are considering submitting to indexed by Web of Science and/or Scopus?
Web of Science (now called Clarivate Analytics) and Scopus are probably the most widely used bibliographic databases, at least with regard to indexing high quality journals.
Google Scholar, of course, is also widely used as are bibliographic search engines such as Science Direct, IEEE Xplore etc. But for the purposes of this article we are looking at those bibliographic repositories that index journals, rather than just papers.
Most researchers will be familiar with Web of Science and Scopus, as the journals they index are the ones they are “told” they have to publish in. How many have heard that certain institutions insist that their researchers are expected to publish in ISI Q1 or Q2 journals.
Having journals indexed in Web of Science or Scopus does provide an indication of quality which, in the context of this article, suggests that it is a non-predatory journal.
It is not a guarantee though. There have been reports of predatory journals being indexed in Scopus, for example, so being indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus, in our opinion, is a strong indicator of quality but it is worth using that information in the context of the other indicators you look at.
If you want to check if a journal is indexed by Web of Science you can use Journal Citation Reports (JCR), but this requires a subscription. There is also a free resource here.
If you want to check whether a journal is indexed by Scopus, you can use their subscription based service, but there is a free option here.
Summary
It might be easier to identify a non-predatory journal, when deciding where to submit an article to, but the author still needs to proceed with caution.
The suggestions in this article should be taken as a whole. There is not one check that provides a definitive answer. Rather, you have to put all the evidence together and consider it all.
Of course, the suggestions here can also be turned on their head and used to identify predatory journals but there are also other ways that that this can be done, which we cover elsewhere.
Article history
Where an article has been updated since first being written, we provide a history of the changes. Why? Why not :-).
The original article was published on 7 January 2020.
The article was updated on 22 June 2023. The main content was not changed but we reformatted it a little (as we now have more experience with the tools we use) and also to try and improve the flow. The header image was also corrected as it was the wrong size..
Our team does not include nurses, or indeed, anybody from a medical discipline, but we have noticed that the nursing discipline does seem to over-represented in predatory publishing.
This observation is made after working on another project and nursing seemed to stand out from the other disciplines. We delved a little deeper and we quickly found the following articles, which fitted well with the project we were engaged with.
This is by no means a comprehensive list (see the end of the article for more) but it did highlight to use the amount of research material that is published in the nursing domain.
Clark, A.M. and Thompson, D.R. (2017), Five (bad) reasons to publish your research in predatory journals. J Adv Nurs, 73: 2499-2501. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.13090
Gabrielsson, S., Eriksson S., T. Godskesen. 2021. Predatory nursing journals: A case study of author prevalence and characteristics. Nursing Ethics 28(5) 823–833. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0969733020968215
Hijji, B. M. 2021. A warning against predatory publishing services. Journal of Nursing Measurement 29(3) 377.
Lewinski, A. A., M. H. Oermann. 2018. Characteristics of e-mail solicitations from predatory nursing journals and publishers. Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing 1(4) 177–177. https://dx.doi.org/10.3928/00220124-20180320-07
McCann, T. V., M. Polacsek. 2018. False gold: Safely navigating open access publishing to avoid predatory publishers and journals. Journal of Advanced Nursing 74(4) 809–817. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.13483
Oermann, M. H., J. L. Conklin, L. H. Nicoll, P. L. Chinn, K. S. Ashton, A. H. Edie, S. Amarasekara, S. C. Budinger. 2016. Study of predatory open access nursing journals. Journal of Nursing Scholarship 48(6) 624–632. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12248
Oermann, M. H., L. H. Nicoll, K. S. Ashton, A. H. Edie, S. Amarasekara, P.L. Chinn, H. Carter-Templeton, L. S. Ledbetter. 2020. Analysis of citation patterns and impact of predatory sources in the nursing literature. Journal of Nursing Scholarship 52(3) 311–319. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12557
Oermann, M.H., L.H. Nicoll, P.L. Chinn, K.S. Ashton, J. L. Conklin, A. H. Edie, S. Amarasekara, B.L. Williams. 2018. Quality of articles published in predatory nursing journals. Nursing Outlook 66(1) 4–10. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2017.05.005
Rawas, H., J. de Beer, H. A. J. Najjar, N. Bano. 2020. Falling prey to predatory journal: Experiences of nursing faculty. International Journal of Africa Nursing Sciences 13 100222. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijans.2020.100222
Figure 1: Number of "Predatory Publishing" returned by Scopus
Figure 2: Number of Predatory Publishing papers, by discipline
To try and be a little more subjective, we took a look at Scopus and searched for “Predatory Publishing” (the quotes are part of the search). The search was done on 19 April 2022.
This search returned 310 articles (see Figure 1). If we delve a little deeper, 52 (16.77%) of the 310 articles were in the nursing domain (see Figure 2). It is also interesting to note that 136 (43.87%) of the articles were in the Medicine discipline. We assume, but have not checked, that the 52 nursing articles are captured within the 136 Medicine articles.
Putting the 118 Social Sciences articles aside (as this will cover many disciplines), Medicine and Nursing are the top represented disciplines which, we would suggest, supports our initial gut feeling that nursing has a higher representation than other disciplines in the area of predatory publishing research.
It is not necessarily the case that nursing publishes more papers in predatory journals (though we suspect that may be the case) or that there are more predatory journals that focus on nursing (we are unsure about this).
Conclusion
This article has not provided any answers. It is more like the future work section of a paper as it suggests that there is some research that is crying out to be done to try and work out why nursing (together with medicine) represents almost half the published research on predatory publishing. Perhaps this discipline just cares more about the problem that predatory publishing poses.
If you know, and would like to contribute a blog post, explaining why, please let us know and we would be very happy to work with you to publish your thoughts.
Finally
We thought it might be useful to list the 52 articles that we retrieved from Scopus that were published on predatory publishing in the nursing discipline, rather than just the 15 that we found as part of our current project.
Hijji, B.M. A Warning Against Predatory Publishing Services (2021) Journal of Nursing Measurement, 29 (3), p. 377.
Teixeira da Silva, J.A. Should anonymous and pseudonymous entities be cited or acknowledged? (2021) Journal of Professional Nursing, 37 (6), pp. 1207-1209. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2021.08.014
Broome, M.E., Oermann, M.H., Nicoll, L.H., Waldrop, J.B., Carter-Templeton, H., Chinn, P.L. Publishing in Predatory Journals: Guidelines for Nursing Faculty in Promotion and Tenure Policies (2021) Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 53 (6), pp. 746-752. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12696
Munn, Z., Barker, T., Stern, C., Pollock, D., Ross-White, A., Klugar, M., Wiechula, R., Aromataris, E., Shamseer, L. Should I include studies from “predatory” journals in a systematic review? Interim guidance for systematic reviewers (2021) JBI Evidence Synthesis, 19 (8), pp. 1915-1923. https://dx.doi.org/10.11124/JBIES-21-00138
Gabrielsson, S., Eriksson, S., Godskesen, T. Predatory nursing journals: A case study of author prevalence and characteristics (2021) Nursing Ethics, 28 (5), pp. 823-833. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0969733020968215
Oermann, M.H., Nicoll, L.H., Ashton, K.S., Edie, A.H., Amarasekara, S., Chinn, P.L., Carter-Templeton, H., Ledbetter, L.S. Analysis of Citation Patterns and Impact of Predatory Sources in the Nursing Literature (2020) Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 52 (3), pp. 311-319. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12557
Moldoveanu, B., Cuciureanu, G. Publishing as an Indicator of Scientific Research Quality and Ethics: The Case of Law Journals from Moldova (2020) Science and Engineering Ethics, 26 (2), pp. 1039-1052. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00189-2
Rawas, H., de Beer, J., Al Najjar, H., Bano, N. Falling prey to predatory journal: Experiences of nursing faculty (2020) International Journal of Africa Nursing Sciences, 13, art. no. 100222, . https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijans.2020.100222
Likis, F.E. Predatory Publishing: The Threat Continues (2019) Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health, 64 (5), pp. 523-525. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jmwh.13056
Nahlen, D., Clark, S. The Publisher’s Perspective on Journal and Book Publishing (2018) Seminars in Oncology Nursing, 34 (4), pp. 381-385. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.soncn.2018.09.006
Memon, A.R. Predatory Journals Spamming for Publications: What Should Researchers Do? (2018) Science and Engineering Ethics, 24 (5), pp. 1617-1639. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9955-6
Sanz, Á., del Valle, M.L., Flores, L.A., Hernansanz, S., Gutiérrez, C., Ramos, D. Open access journals and predatory publishing in palliative care [Revistas de acceso abierto y voracidad editorial en cuidados paliativos] (2018) Medicina Paliativa, 25 (3), pp. 184-190. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.medipa.2017.03.003
Aponte, J. Predatory Publishing and Organizers: What Scholars in Academia Need to Know (2018) Hispanic Health Care International, 16 (2), pp. 54-55. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1540415318790704
Umlauf, M.G., Mochizuki, Y. Predatory publishing and cybercrime targeting academics (2018) International Journal of Nursing Practice, 24, art. no. e12656. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ijn.12656
Lewinski, A.A., Oermann, M.H. Characteristics of e-mail solicitations from predatory nursing journals and publishers (2018) Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 49 (4), pp. 171-177. https://dx.doi.org/10.3928/00220124-20180320-07
McCann, T.V., Polacsek, M. False gold: Safely navigating open access publishing to avoid predatory publishers and journals (2018) Journal of Advanced Nursing, 74 (4), pp. 809-817. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jan.13483
Miller, E., DeBerg, J. The Perils of Predatory Publishing: Views and Advice from an Editor and a Health Sciences Librarian (2017) Pain Management Nursing, 18 (6), pp. 351-352. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pmn.2017.10.003
Relf, M.V., Swanson, B. Predatory Publishing: A Growing Threat to HIV Nursing? (2017) Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, 28 (3), pp. 303-305. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jana.2017.03.001
Lowe, N.K. Open Access and Predatory Publishing (2017) JOGNN – Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing, 46 (2), pp. 161-162. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jogn.2017.01.003
Baker, J.D. Professional versus predatory publishing: Cautions for perioperative nurse authors (2016) ACORN, 29 (4), pp. 48-49.
Angelini, D., Bakewell-Sachs, S. Predatory Publishing: What Do Perinatal and Neonatal Nurses Need to Know (2015) Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing, 29 (2), pp. 95-96. https://dx.doi.org/10.1097/JPN.0000000000000095
Stone, T.E., Rossiter, R.C. Predatory publishing: Take care that you are not caught in the Open Access net (2015) Nursing and Health Sciences, 17 (3), pp. 277-279. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/nhs.12215
Baker, J.D. Professional Versus Predatory Publishing: Cautions for Perioperative Nurse Authors (2015) AORN Journal, 101 (6), pp. 599-601. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aorn.2015.04.012
Kearney, M.H., Thorne, S., Chinn, P.L., Nicoll, L.H., Pickler, R., D’Antonio, P., Connolly, C., Peternelj-Taylor, C., Welliver, D., Don Baker, J., Flanagin, A., Bradley-Springer, L., The INANE Predatory Publishing Practices Collaborative Predatory publishing: What authors need to know (2015) Research in Nursing and Health, 38 (1), pp. 1-3. https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/nur.21640
Djuric, D. Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing: The Romanian Connection (2015) Science and Engineering Ethics, 21 (1), pp. 183-202. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4
Beall, J. Behind the Spam: A Spectral Analysis of Predatory Publishers (2015) Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 11 (A29A), pp. 166-171. https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1743921316002684
Sorrell, J.M., Owens, J.K. Ethics: Predatory publishing: Keeping the wolves from your office door (2015) Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 20 (3), 1 p. https://dx.doi.org/10.3912/OJIN.Vol20No03EthCol01
Roberts, D. Author, beware! a look at the dangers of predatory publishing (2015) MEDSURG Nursing, 24 (1), p. 7.
Smith, G. Predatory publishing houses: Challenging the legitimacy of open access journals (2015) Australasian Journal of Paramedicine, 12 (2), 2 p. https://dx.doi.org/10.33151/ajp.12.2.234
Pearson, G.S. Predatory Publishing Practices and Nurses (2015) Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 51 (1), pp. 1-2. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ppc.12094
Yucha, C. Predatory Publishing: What Authors, Reviewers, and Editors Need to Know (2015) Biological Research for Nursing, 17 (1), pp. 5-7. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1099800414563378
Boumil, M.M., Salem, D.N. In … And out: Open access publishing in scientific journals (2014) Quality Management in Health Care, 23 (3), pp. 133-137. https://dx.doi.org/10.1097/QMH.0000000000000035
Vít Macháček & Martin Srholec (2021) Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences, Scientometrics, 126, 1897-1921 has been retracted due to:
Errors in Analyses
Errors in Methods
Unreliable Results
In this article we provide a few more details about this retraction.
Figure 1: Notice from Retraction Watch
Article Abstract
To provide some details about the paper that has been retracted, this is its abstract:
“Predatory publishing represents a major challenge to scholarly communication. This paper maps the infiltration of journals suspected of predatory practices into the citation database Scopus and examines cross-country differences in the propensity of scholars to publish in such journals. Using the names of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory journals and publishers on Beall’s lists, we derived the ISSNs of 3,293 journals from Ulrichsweb and searched Scopus with them. 324 of journals that appear both in Beall’s lists and Scopus with 164 thousand articles published over 2015–2017 were identified. Analysis of data for 172 countries in 4 fields of research indicates that there is a remarkable heterogeneity. In the most affected countries, including Kazakhstan and Indonesia, around 17% of articles fall into the predatory category, while some other countries have no predatory articles whatsoever. Countries with large research sectors at the medium level of economic development, especially in Asia and North Africa, tend to be most susceptible to predatory publishing. Arab, oil-rich and/or eastern countries also appear to be particularly vulnerable. Policymakers and stakeholders in these and other developing countries need to pay more attention to the quality of research evaluation.“
Retraction Details
Figure 2: The retracted article, image from the Scientometrics web site
Retraction Watch recently reported that an article published in Scientometrics has been retracted. The reasons for retracting the article were given as, Error in Analyses, Error in Methods and Unreliable Results.
The retracted article is
Macháček, V., Srholec, M. RETRACTED ARTICLE: Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences. Scientometrics 126, 1897–1921 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03852-4
The article was published on 7 Feb 2021 and retracted on 6 September 2021.
The retraction notice can be seen in Figure 3. It is given in the form of another paper, with its own DOI.
Macháček, V., Srholec, M. Retraction Note to: Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences. Scientometrics (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04149-w
Figure 3: The retraction notice. Image taken from Scientometrics web site
Further details of the retraction
If you look at the retraction notice (see Figure 3, and the associated URL), you’ll see the reasons why the paper was retracted.
The retraction notice is not that long but it mentions that some of the findings are unreliable and that “Post-publication peer review indicated the article includes statements about authors from some geographic regions which are unjustified in the generality of the conclusions.“
Reference is made to the regression analysis being incomplete and that the Scopus database cannot be considered a control group.
Finally it states that the authors disagree with the retraction but they have been offered the opportunity to submit a reworked manuscript, which will undergo peer review.
Final Comment
We have purposefully not given any comment, or view, on the retraction of this paper. We do not know the full details, were not involved in the peer review and have no insights into the issues that were found.
However, we did want to report it on this blog though, as it is a paper about predatory publishing and we thought it was worth mentioning.
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Thank you for reading this article. If you would like to support the work we do, please consider becoming one of our patrons.
With your support, it will enable us to deploy some of the ideas that we have, and will also enable us to work more closely together. As an example, we will look at journals and/or publishers that you propose. You can read more here.
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Controversy
We recognize that we are tackling a very controversial area, where others before us have faced significant difficulties. This is the reason why we are, at the moment, remaining anonymous. Once we have the trust of the scientific community and some traction, we will be more transparent about who is behind this initiative. The target we have set ourselves in 10,000 Twitter followers but we do review this as a goal from time to time but, at the moment, this is still out goal. At the time of writing we are about 37% towards that goal.
"Can you help/advise me, or do you have a view?"
As we have gained more exposure and traction, we are often asked questions, or for our views, about journals and publishers. Although we respond, we often have to say that “we will add it to our ever growing list and will look at the journal/publisher when time allows.“
We do work through that list but it is a little ad-hoc and, to be honest, we choose the ones that we think are most interesting. It might be useful if we had a way of prioritizing the journals/publishers that we look at.
What are our plans?
With your help, we hope that we can develop this platform even further and do more than we are doing at the moment.
We have the following ideas that, with your help, we can progress.
We are asking our patrons (see below) to request reviews of journals and publishers, this will not only make the content we produce more relevant but it will also provide a constant source of content that we hope our supporters will find interesting.
As we develop our database of journals and publishers, we will compile a searchable database so that others can find out about the journals and publishers that we have investigated.
The number of blog posts we can produce at the moment is limited, due to time limitations and other calls on our time. If our patrons are keen to write about predatory journals (see below), this would not only add additional blog posts but also give a different perspective, rather than just hearing our views all of the time.
We are considering starting a YouTube channel that focuses on Predatory Publishing, but this is not possible at the moment. We are keeping this idea on the “nice to do” list, but we need more time and/or support to be able to progress.
We would like to develop some short courses, so that scholars can have a more structured way to learn about predatory publishers, enabling them to avoid the pit falls. Like the YouTube channel, we require more time/support.
We have reported on several occasions sting operations against predatory journals. We believe that this is an effective way to highlight those journals that are operating in a predatory way. We would like to have a sustained way of testing suspected journals, rather than just having one off examples. That said, we must be careful not to waste the time of legitimate journals.
We would like to publish peer reviewed papers, in (obviously) non-predatory journals that record the results of our findings. If others are willing we would be delighted to co-author papers with like minded researchers.
Given the data and knowledge that we have accumulated during our journey, we would like to publish a book that provides the history of predatory publishing, the state of predatory publish at the present time and what can be done about it going forward. This will be a longer term project but the first stage is to find potential co-authors and then develop a proposal for a suitable publisher.
For those of you that follow our Twitter account, you will see that we tweet on various topics, such as EMAIL snippets from (probably) predatory journals and quotes from papers on predatory publishing. Some of you may have noticed that these tweets follow a similar layout and the reason that we are able to tweet so regularly is because we have automated much of the processes behind these tweets. It is not really to do with predatory publishing but we are thinking about sharing some of the ways we do this, perhaps on a different platform.
Our longer term plans include working with research institutes to provide a more bespoke service that we can offer at the moment.
Become a Patron
We would like to invite those that are interested in our work to become one of our patrons.
This will support us financially, which will enable us to do even more but, importantly, it will also enable us to be more targeted in areas that are of direct interest to the community.
We will also be able to engage with our patrons in a more meaningful way, especially those who, like us, want to eliminate predatory publishing and fake journals.
If you would like to be come a patron, please use this link and below we outline the various levels at which you can support us.
PLEASE NOTE: Whenever you decide to support us, you will be charged for the full amount for that month. This is the way Patreon works, at least for the way we have joined the scheme.
So, if you join on the 15th of the month you will be charged the full amount for that month and then charged again on the 1st of the following month. We are unable to provide refunds, or accept part payment for the month you start supporting us. If you want to avoid this (although you can still access all the services offered in that month), we suggest that you join us at the start of a month, so that you get the full benefit for that month.
1. Supporter
You will receive a monthly newsletter, that contains information that is either exclusive to our patrons or is provided ahead of time of being published on our other platforms. We will also use you as a sounding board for some of the ideas that we have.
2. Contributor
If you are interested in predatory/fake publishing and/or want to get some experience in writing/blogging, we would welcome one blog post a month from you. This will be published on our blog site (subject to editorial controls). We will help you to get the blog post as good as it can be so that it is a credit to you and us.
3. Journal Review
In each calendar month, you can request a review of a specific journal. We will provide some key data points (assuming the data is available). We will try to include:
Whether the journal is recognized, or a member of, organizations such as ISSN, COPE, DOAJ and Scopus.
Where the journal is located?
How long it has been operating?
How many articles have been published?
Whether it is an open access journal.
What are its Article Processing Charges (APCs)?
We will also provide our thoughts/comments as we carry out the investigation.
We will share this review on our blog site, so as to help others, but we will delay that post for at least a month so that you have the information before anybody else.
4. Publisher Review
In each calendar month, you can request a review of a specific publisher. We will provide key data points (assuming the data is available). We will try to include the following:
How many journals the publisher has in their portfolio?
Where the publisher is located?
How long they have been operating?
Whether they are indexed/members of organisations such as ISSN, COPE, DOAJ and Scopus?
Whether they are only an open access publisher.
We will also provide our thoughts/comments as we carry out the investigation.
We are happy for you to request a review of a journal, rather than a publisher.
We will share this review on our blog site, in order to help others, but we will delay that post for at least a month so that you have the information before anybody else
5. Multiple Journal Reviews
This level of support provides the same as an individual journal review, but you can request up to four journal reviews in any calendar month. This provides one review free of charge when compared to the single journal review option.
6. Multiple Publisher Reviews
This level of support provides the same as an individual publisher review, but you can request up to four publisher reviews in any calendar month. This provides one review free of charge when compared to the single publisher review option.
7. Premium Supporter
This provides access to all of our other services. You will receive our newsletter, you can write a blog post each month and you can request both journal/publisher reviews, up to 10 in a calendar month, split across journal and publishers, whichever best meets your requirements.
As a premium supporter we will also provide you the other reviews that we have done at least a week before we publish them on our blog and/or web site, so that you get to see them before others (expect those that requested the review – they will get them first).
"I can't provide financial support at the moment"
We welcome any help that people can afford but if you cannot help at the present time (for whatever reason) no problem.
We hope that you will stay engaged and help us say spreading the word so that others can see what we are doing.
Some journals, especially those which do not have a Scopus or an ISI Web of Science (aka Clarivates) impact factor, will often quote other impact factors. Some of these are not to be trusted but Google Scholar is a trusted name so if the journal quotes a Google Scholar impact factor, can we trust the data provided? The answer is proceed with caution.
For any impact factor, you should be able to verify (i.e. reproduce) it. With Google Scholar, this is possible but can be time consuming and it also requires a certain level of knowledge that many may not posses.
In this article, we look at how to use Google Scholar and how you would access the data to enable you to calculate an impact factor, so that you can verify statements made by a given journal. But first we look at the general issues of why other impact factors might not be everything they claim to be.
What is wrong with quoting other impact factors?
There is nothing wrong with journals using other impact factors but first let’s be clear what we mean by other.
Let’s assume that the journals are being honest, as least with respect to not misrepresenting their association with Scopus and ISI. However they would still like to advertise some sort of impact factor, to give the impression that they are running a high quality journal and that the articles it publishes are being cited. And, indeed that might be the case but we should ask ourselves two questions.
Is the impact factor that is being quoted an impact factor that you can have confidence in?
Can you verify the value of the impact factor being stated?
To address these two issues, we make the following observations.
Some impact factors are just like predatory journals, in that they exist to provide an impact factor that the journal can use, without really have any strong basis for the value they quote. Even if they outline their process, some of it might be subjective so that reproducability is virtually impossible.
One of our previous articles , “When is ISI not ISI“, looked at one of these services that we believe gives the impression that a journal is indexed by ISI Web of Science when, in fact, this is not the case.
The other thing that you need to be able to do is to be able to verify the impact factor you are being quoted. This requires 1) you know where the data comes from and you can access it, importantly, in a way that does not rely on the journal just providing you with figures and 2) you need to know how to calculate the impact factor.
You will be surprised how often these two pieces of information are missing, in which case, you should question whether the impact factor is a valid measure.
Predatory impact factors (for want of a better phrase) is not something we have really focused, as part of blog or our Twitter account, but it is really an area that we should give more attention to, and we will look at more of these in future blogs. Let us know if there are any ones you would particularly like us to look at?
Why are we looking at Google Scholar?
We focus on Google Scholar as many journals/publishers state that they are indexed on Google Scholar and then state an impact factor that they have calculated. We would like to be able to verify that impact factor. Alternately, a journal may give an impact factor, with no information about where it has been derived from. In these cases it would be nice to know if this has been calculated from Google Scholar, by comparing our calculated figure with theirs.
It is understandable that journals want to associate themselves with Google Scholar. It is a trusted name on the internet and the Google Scholar service is free, so both journals/publishes and the research community (indeed the general public) can access all of this information free of charge.
One of the issues with Google Scholar is validating the impact factor that a journal presents you with. Let’s say that a journal says that it has a Google Scholar impact factor of 7.429, how do you know whether this is a valid figure, or something they have just made up, knowing that 7.429 will sound like an impressive number to most people, probably higher that what would be expected from Scopus and ISI’s Web of Science.
In general, you would expect a Google Scholar impact factor to be higher than Scopus/ISI as they will consider citations from a wider variety of sources that Scopus/ISI, so we should not be too worried about the magnitude of the number, but we should be able to verify it.
However, this is quite difficult on Google Scholar (unless anybody knows differently) as we discuss below.
Two ways a journal can be found on Google Scholar
There are two ways, that we are aware of, which enables a journal to have a Google Scholar presence. One way is where the journal has set up a specific account. A second way is when the journal does not have an account, but you can still search for the journal using Google Scholar’s advanced search feature.
We look at both these options below.
When a journal has a Google Scholar account
In the same way that individual scholars can have a Google Scholar account, a journal can also register for an account. This makes it easy to find the journal and its publications.
Figure 1 shows the account. You can see that the name of the journal appears at the top of the screen, where you would normally see the name of a scholar.
We have also showed the user name (this does not appear on the page, but we show it for information). If you know the username, you can go directly to their Google Scholar page using the URL:
… you’ll see that that last part of the URL is the username.
When a journal does not have a Google Scholar account
Many journals have a Google Scholar account, but many do not; the majority in our experience, although we have no real data to support that statement – it is just our experience.
However, there is still a way that you can search for articles that a journal has published, even though it does not have Google Scholar account.
How to use Google Scholar Advanced Search
Figure 2: Google Scholar Advanced Search
Google Scholar has an advanced search function that enables you to look for articles published by a specific journal, even if that journal does not have an explicit Google Scholar account.
Figure 2 shows you how to use Google Scholar’s Advance Search functionality.
If you go to the Google Scholar home page, at the top level is a drop down menu (see 1, in Figure 2).
The drop down menu has an entry called “Advanced Search” (see 2, in Figure 2).
Accessing the Advanced Search menu leads to the form shown in 3, in Figure 2. Simply enter the journal name in the “Return articles published in” field, and click on the search icon.
This will return the articles that have been published by that journal (see 4, in Figure 3).
In the example in Figure 2, we have used the same journal (International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies) as before just to demonstrate how it works, but the journal does not need to have a Google Scholar account.
What can you Google Scholar tell you?
You can find out the papers a journal has published (according to Google Scholar) in at least two ways and the way you choose depends whether the journal has an explicit Google Scholar.
We have shown examples of these above.
Armed with these search results, what else can we find out?
The two things that many people are interested in are the h-index and the impact factor.
Google Scholar h-index
Figure 3: A Google Scholar h-index (accessed 07 Aug 2021)
For a journal (or person) that has a Google Scholar account, Google will automatically calculate the h-index of that journal or person.
We are planning an article that goes into more details about the h-index, but you may want to look at the wikipedia entry in the meantime.
Essentially though, the h-index is “the maximum value of h such that the given author/journal has published at least h papers that have each been cited at least h times”.
If you look at Figure 3, it shows that the journal we looked at in Figure 1 has an h-index of 28.
This means that 28 papers have been cited 28 times or more. You will not be able to find 29 papers that have been cited 29 times, or more as that would give the journal an h-index of 29.
If a journal does not have a Google Scholar account, so you can only search for the journal as shown in Figure 2, the the h-index is not available through Google Scholar. You could calculate it manually by looking at every paper that the journal has published, seeing how many times it has been cited and then carrying out the necessary calculations. The idea behind this process is not that difficult but it will be time consuming if there are a large number of articles, unless you can automate it in some way – which we discuss below, when looking at the impact factor.
Google Scholar impact factor
The Google Scholar impact factor is often quoted by a journal, but is there a way that we can validate it? Unfortunately, the answer is no, at least not easily. The impact factor is not something that Google Scholar displays so we need another way of calculating it ourselves.
However, that is easier said that done. You really need to download all the data so that you can carry out the analysis, using a spreadsheet, or some other suitable tool. Downloading the data though is not easy, as Google Scholar does not provide this functionality (i.e. there is no export option), so you would have to rely on an external tool. Even those seem few and far between, but you may want to take a look at this link, which discusses this topic.
If you want/need to do it manually, you would need to copy/paste each paper, ensuring the collect the important information such the paper title, how many times it has been cited and the year it was published, as this information is important when calculating an impact factor.
Once you have the data, you then need to carry out the analysis. At this stage you still have key decisions to make, such as the number of years that the analysis will cover and the exact formula for the calculation. We will look at this in a later article.
Conclusion
We would like to leave you with better news, but calculating (or verifying) a Google Scholar impact factor is not easy. This is problematical as you may not want to verify the figure that is being provided by an external source, such as a journal that is quoting a specific impact factor.
We are currently developing a tool that enables us to do this. That is, if we provide a Google Scholar identifier, it will return various statistics, which will include the impact factor.
The International Journal of Management (ISSN: 0976-6502), which is published by IAEME Publication has two Google Scholar entries. Each one shows a different number of publications, citations, h-index etc. In this article, we take a closer look as well as comparing against the journal’s own records, from its web site.
About IAEME Publication
IAEME claims to be one of the largest open access publishers, publishing more than 120 journals. It says that its journals are indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, Scope Database and jifactor. See figure 1 for further details (click to see a larger image).
Figure 1: About IAEME Publication (accessed 16 Jul 2021)
IAEME Publication is based in India. Figure 2 shows a map (click to see a larger image), along with their contact details.
Figure2: Location of IAEME Publication (accessed 16 Jul 2021)
Concerns with IAEME
We admit to having some concerns with IAEME Publication and we are currently carrying out a deeper study, which goes beyond this Google Scholar analysis. Just to give you some idea of our other concerns, we mention three things.
The first is their review times. When we access their web page a pop up appears (see Figure 3). It states that the average review time is 3 days. This seems very short for a scientific journal?
Figure 3: Call for Paper Pup Up (accessed 16 Jul 2021)
Figure 4: The International Journal of Management is not longer indexed by Scopus (from this tweet)
Our second concern is that the publisher claims that some of their journals are indexed by Scopus. One of the journals we checked, and which is the the focus of this article (International Journal of Management), states that it is indexed by Scopus. We recently tweeted that the journal was making this claim, but it is not true, which can be verified by looking at the Scopus web site.
Our third concern is that IAEME Publication has blocked us on Twitter (see Figure 5). We are not really concerned about being blocked (it goes with the territory) but it shows us that they have taken some notice of what we have done (or doing) and the worry is, why are they worried.
Figure 5: IAEME has blocked us on Twitter (accesses 16 Jul 2021)
As we mentioned above, we have been tweeting about IAEME Publication. We hope that these have been fair, in that we present facts, rather than subjective observations, but feel free to judge that for yourself. Some of our tweets can be seen here.
We are currently carrying out a more in depth investigation of IAEME Publication and will present our findings in a future blog post.
International Journal of Management (IJM)
The focus of this article is the International Journal of Management (IJM), which is published by IAEME Publication. We will specifically look at their Google Scholar records, but there are other concerns about this journal, as we have mentioned on Twitter. For example:
A query about the calculation of the Google Scholar impact factor (see here)
Where do the other impact factors they mention come from? (see here)
The number of citations they are reporting, as opposed to the number given by Google Scholar (see here)
The fact they mention that they are indexed by Scopus when they are not (see here)
Journal of International Management Google Scholar Records
While looking at IAEME Publication and the Journal of International Management it came to our attention that the journal has two different Google Scholar entries. We reported this in this tweet.
At the time of writing, one of these profiles (FO7xZmsAAAAJ) had 3,468 citations and an h-index of 21 (see Figure 6) and the other (G8kfJ-MAAAAJ) had 4,737 citations and an h-index of 21 (see Figure 7).
Figures 6 and 7 showing the Google Scholar profile for FO7xZmsAAAAJ and G8kfJ-MAAAAJ, both of which are for the Journal of International Management (accessed 16 Jul 2021)
FO7xZmsAAAAJ
This was the first Google Scholar account we found for the International Journal of Management (see Figure 6). We took a closer look at the publications that were indexed (we did this by downloading the entries into a spreadsheet and analyzed them from there). Figure 8 shows the number of publications indexed by Google Scholar, split by year.
It is interesting to note the significant increase in published papers in the last two years, bearing in mind, at the time of writing, we are only just over half way through 2021.
Figure 8: Number of papers indexed on the Google Scholar account FO7xZmsAAAAJ
Figure 9 shows the number of citations, recorded by Google Scholar, for account FO7xZmsAAAAJ. The profile is a little surprising. You would expect to see citations increase year-on-year, as more papers are published that can be cited from. We have not done a detailed analysis of this but we wonder why the journal only attracted 22 (resp. 34) citations in 2018 (resp. 2019).
Figure 9: Number of citations to Journal of Management papers as indexed by Google Scholar account FO7xZmsAAAAJ
If we take the number of papers as 1,916 and the number of citations as 3,470, this would give an impact factor of (3470/1916)=1.81. This is higher than the 1.2 impact factor that the journal was reporting, or even the 0.98 that we previously calculated.
G8kfJ-MAAAAJ
This was the second Google Scholar account we found for the International Journal of Management (see Figure 7). We took a closer look at the publications that were indexed (again, by downloading the entries and analyzing using a spreadsheet). Figure 10 shows the number of publications indexed by Google Scholar, split by year.
We should note that we deleted 836 records from the papers listed in Google Scholar as they were duplicates (identified by the title). These are typically indicated on Google Scholar by the use of an asterix.
Figure 10: Number of citations to the Internatioanl Journal of Management as indexed by account papers indexed on the Google Scholar account
It is interesting to note that this account indexes more papers (2,140 vs 1,916), yet it does not (yet) index 2021 papers. It is reasonable to suppose that this would be around 500, taking the total to around 2,600
Figure 11: Number of citations to Journal of Management papers as indexed by Google Scholar account G8kfJ-MAAAAJ
Figure 11 shows the number of citations that the journal has attracted, as indexed by account G8kfJ-MAAAAJ. Similar to the other account, there is a dip in 2018 and 2019, but it is picking up in 2020.
If we take the number of papers as 2,140 and the number of citations as 5,319, this would give an impact factor of (5319/2140)=2.53. This is higher than the 1.2 impact factor that the journal was reporting, or even the 0.98 that we previously calculated.
Comparison with the journal's data
It is useful to also compare the Google Scholar data with the data as recorded by the journal, on their own web site.
We extracted the number of papers they had published each year and present this analysis in Figure 12.
Figure 12: Number of papers published by the International Journal of Management (Source: IJM web site, 17 Jul 2021)
We make the following observations on the data presented in Figure 12:
The number of published papers increased significantly in 2020. This year represents more than 50% of the papers they have published since the journal started in 2010.
What made 2020 such a high year was the large number of papers the journal published in issues 11 and 12, although there appeared to be a significant rise since issue 5. Figure 13, shows the breakdown, by issue, for 2020 (click image to enlarge it).
Figure 13: Number of papers published by the International Journal of Management in 2020
Figure 14: Number of papers published by the International Journal of Management in 2021
2021 is already ahead of all the other years, with the exception of 2020. So far, volume 12 (i.e. 2021) has published 493 papers (see Figure 14). This is up to issue 7. Assuming they publish 12 issues, this could mean that they will publish about 850 papers this year. It is noticeable that the number of papers published in 2021 is decreasing, recognizing that issue 7 may not yet be complete.
Final Remarks
The purpose of this article was to raise the issue that a journal had two different Google Scholar accounts, which report different data. Moreover, neither Google Scholar account aligns with the data on the journal’s own web site. In our view, it would be useful if the journal editors consolidated their two Google Scholar accounts and also aligned that (single) account with the data held on the journal’s web site. If the editors could do this, it might actually benefit them as both Google Scholar accounts appear to under report what is shown on the journal’s web site.
Aside from the Google Scholar concerns, our recent tweets have asked other questions. As an example, some of the publisher’s journals were indexed by Scopus but this indexing was discontinued in 2020, apart from one journal as far as we could tell. We also asked, via Twitter, about areas such as impact factor calculations and, indeed, what impact factors are being used.
The journal has blocked us on Twitter. Rather than doing that, we would much rather enter into a dialogue and we have made the offer for them to write a blog post, to enable them to present their views. We hope that they take up this offer.
Whilst researching another article, we came across something called Scope Database. This is not something that we had seen before, so we made a note to investigate it further and this article is the result of that investigation.
One of the things that concerned us was how parts of the web site looked like Scopus.
The Scope Database web site, in some places, looks the same as the Scopus web site. As far as we can see there is no relationship between the Scope Database and Scopus and we can only conclude that Scope Database is trying to fool the unwary researcher.
In this article, we look at Scopus and Scope Database and show why we think that Scope Database is trying to give the illusion (even sub-consciously) that it is associated with Scopus. We also look at the journals that are indexed by Scope Database, in order to give a view of how many, and the type of journals, that are indexed.
What is Scopus?
Scopus is one of the leading bibliographic search engines, with the other popular one being Web of Science. Scopus has a free service, as we well as a subscription based product, which many if not most, universities subscribe to. The subscription model provides access to many additional features which are useful to the academic community.
Scopus maintains the largest citation database of peer-reviewed literature, which includes journals, conference proceedings and books. It also provides an impact factor for each journal that it indexes. This is important to many researchers as they either wish to, or are under instruction to, publish in Scopus and/or Web of Science journals. Therefore, researchers are often under pressure to target journals that are indexed by Scopus, or that they believe are indexed by Scopus.
If you want to know how to check whether a journal is in the Scopus database, these two videos might be of help.
What is Scope Database?
To quote from their web site "Scope Database is a global information analytics business that helps institutions and professional’s advance healthcare, open science and improve performance for the benefit of humanity. Scope Database is a global publishing and analytics company specializing in scientific, social, technical, and medical content."
The menus
If you look at the Scopus and Scope Database web site and read some of the content it is apparent that the two services are not associated with each other. Neither mentions the other, and searching each web site you cannot see locate anything that appears to refer to the other. So what is the problem?
The menu bars are one potential issue.
Scopus menu
The image above is the menu bar on the Scopus home page. For those of you that access Scopus regularly, you will probably recognize it, as it is as much about branding as anything else. Clicking on each on each piece of text, or icon, links to another page.
Scope Database menu
By way of comparison, this image is the menu bar from the Scope Database web site. We are sure that you can see the similarities, which gives this part of the web site the same look and feel. We may be wrong, but we cannot help feel that the design of the Scope Database menu bar is not an accident and, although it is not identical, it is similar enough to draw the conclusion that the Scope Database used the Scopus menu bar as inspiration for its own menu look and feel. If we were being really cynical, we might say that Scope Database have copied it to make it appear as similar to the Scopus web site as possible.
Comparing the home screens
You might be wondering about the rest of the home screen. To be fair, they do not look similar. We have not shown the home pages here, but we have linked to screenshots that we took on 13 Jan 2021, not only so that you can see them (should you wish to do so), but also so that we have a record of what the home pages looked like when we wrote this article.
The home page of Scopus can be seen here and the home page of Scope Database can be seen here. These are screenshots (as at 13 Jan 2021), if you want to see what they look like now, see here (for Scopus) and here (for Scope Database).
Other Observations
Active menus
We thought it would be useful to look at the menu options in a little more detail.
The six items on the Scopus menu are all active, and lead to pages that you would expect.
Looking at each of the menu items on the Scope Database page, we note the following.
The menu items leads to a page where you can search by author. For completeness, a screenshot of the full page is available here (as at 14 Jan 2021).
This menu items leads to a page that lists the sources that are indexed by Scope Database. We say more on this below.
These four menu items all lead no where. That is, they do nothing and you stay on the same page.
Digging a little deeper, the link (which you can see when you hover over the menu item) says “javascript:void(0);“. Essentially, this says that the menu item is undefined. For those that are interested, you can read more details here.
The only conclusion that we can reach from these observations is that Scope Database has made their menu look like the menu on the Scopus web site, but has not linked up four of the menu items. We can only assume that aim is to make it look like Scopus, rather than make it a fully functioning system.
Scope Database sources
Figure 1 shows an extract of the Scope Database home page. It states that the Scope Database contains almost 3,500 peer-reviewed journals.
Figure 1: Number of peer reviewed titles in the Scope Database stated as 3,500 (accessed 14 Jan 2021)
If you follow Scope Database “Sources” menu, this leads to a page that says that the Scope Database has 61 journals in its database (see Figure 2). An image of the complete sources page is available here.
Figure 2: Part of the Sources page of Scope Database, where it states that it indexes 61 journals
We cannot work out why one page of the web site says that they have 3,500 journals in their database, yet only 61 show up when you look at the sources?
It is also noticeable that there are columns for “SNIP” and “SJR”. There are very much Scopus terms and we are not sure why they appear in this table? In any case, none of the rows contain any values.
Analysis of sources
Looking at the 61 journals that are listed, we thought that it might be useful to delve a little deeper. Figure 3 shows a bar chart, which shows the number of journals by publisher. We have also made the complete list available, just in case you are interested, but also so that there is a record on the day we wrote this article (14 Jab 2021).
Figure 3: Analysis of publishers on the Scope Database web site (as at 14 Jan 2021)
It is noticeable that the list is dominated by one publisher (IAEME Publication), which has 32 journals registered with Scope Database. PRJ Publication has nine journals listed [Note: When we tried to access the PRJ Publication web site, it led to a page suggesting that it no longer exists. This may be fixed at some time after this article has been published]. The three “Not defined” journals are actually conferences. The other 17 publishers have one journal each.
It is not the purpose of this article to look more deeply into the publishers but, as we always do, when we come across open access publishers, we add them to our “Keep in View” list and, when we have the time, we will look at those publishers.
Conclusion
Whilst investigating another article we came across Scope Database. We had not seen this before.
We may have ignored it, but their menu structure caught our eye as it looked very much like the Scopus menu. We’ll let you decide if the similarities could have happened by chance or it was deliberately copied to try and give the illusion that Scope database is somehow associated with Scopus.
We cannot work out why they state that Scope Database has 3,500 journals in its database, yet only 61 are listed when you look at their sources. Moreover, the database listing has (empty) columns for “SNIP” and “SJR”. These are Scopus terms, which do not seems to have any meaning within the context of Scope Database. As far as we could see, there is no other reference to these terms on their web site.
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Thank you for reading this article. If you would like to support the work we do, please consider becoming one of our patrons.
With your support, it will enable us to deploy some of the ideas that we have, and will also enable us to work more closely together. As an example, we will look at journals and/or publishers that you propose. You can read more here.
We are getting an increasing number of people asking us “Is [insert journal] a legitimate journal?”
Typically, we are sent a journal name, in the hope that we can tell them whether a journal is predatory or not. Our usual response is that we do not have a list of journals that we can simply refer to. That is not a service we offer, indeed, not a service we can offer at the moment, but there are others that do; for example Cabells.
At the present time, we see ourselves more as educators, trying to tell researchers what they should look out for.
In any case, we do not want to be the sole arbiter, deciding whether a journal is predatory or not. This is one of the things that Jeffrey Beall was criticized for. He, and he alone, decided whether a journal should appear on his list and some publishers were upset by this. We have written about this in one of our other articles.
Start by seeing if the journal is a member of COPE and/or DOAJ. You should also check if the journal is registered in Scopus and/or Web of Science. These will not provide a definitive answer as to whether the journal is predatory, but it’s a good start.
Sample Correspondence
Here are examples of typical questions that we get, together with our responses. We have, for obvious reasons, respected the confidentiality of the person who asked question who, we recognize just wants to know if they should submit to the journal in question.
“Could you please check whether the journal called [journal name] is a fake Journal or not? I have already published a paper with them in January 2020, but cannot find it through Google.”
We had a quick look at this journal and it does look predatory, and we told the author that. We followed up this correspondence by writing an article, in which we provide a case study of the journal, which led us to the conclusion that the journal in question is a fake journal, although the evidence trail that led to this conclusion was far from straight forward. Please take a look at the article, it is an interesting read.
“Could you please tell me about the Authenticity of these two Journals if whether they’ are Fake Journals or not? Thank you.” We were provided with images of two journal covers.
In response to this question we asked “What is your view? Have you done any analysis?“, to which the answer was “No. I just ask if you know about them, then please just tell me. I was thinking that you are a group or organisation having database about fake journals.“
We had to say “We don’t have a database, not even for predatory journals, let alone fake journals. We have to look at every journal individually. We will add it to our list of journals to investigate – but it will take time. But you can see the steps we went through from our previous article so if this is urgent, please take a look yourself.“
“Have you checked this journal [journal name]? Would request to hear your verdict on it. Wanted to publish with them and I found some contradicting reviews; some say predatory, others recommend it. So I was looking for an independent objective review.”
Our response was “We do not have time to do a full review, but just had a quick look and we would (personally) avoid. Not least of all as you have to pay 60 USD just to submit, but there are other worrying things. We would look elsewhere. Not saying it is definitely predatory, but erring on the side of caution.“
Education is Important
Rather than trying to be the sole arbiter of whether a journal is predatory (or fake) or not, we are more inclined to help educate people, so that they can come to their own conclusion, and make a decision based on that. We believe that this is much more effective than maintaining yet another white/black list of journals.
Previously, we have made some judgments, which we back up with evidence, but we do not generally just say that a journal is predatory (or not) after just a cursory glance. To be frank, sometimes it is obvious, but we do not believe it is our place to make statements that might be biased, based on too little information or simply drawing an incorrect conclusion.
Another comment we often make, when asked for our view of a journal, is “What is your view?” Many people either fail to respond, or say that they do not know, which is the reason they asked us. That is fine, but if we just give our view that may not be fair on the journal as it is just one view, perhaps, based on limited information. There is a more of a need for education, to inform researchers what to look for when trying to decide if to submit to a journal or not.
Whenever we look at a journal, there are four quick checks that we always carry out.
Is the journal a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)? COPE is a member based service, which publishers and journals can apply to join. If they pass the checks made by COPE than they will be accepted.
Are they listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)? DOAJ maintains a list of open access journals that they have validated. DOAJ did have some issues a few years ago but that is in the past and, in our view, it is now a valuable and reliable resource.
Is the journal in the Scopus bibliographic database? Scopus is one of the recognized bibliographic databases that provides, among other, this impact factors for the journals that they accept. To get accepted by Scopus is a robust process.
Is the journal listed in the Web of Science bibliographic database? The Web of Science database provides a similar service to Scopus. It is arguably more difficult to get accepted by Web of Science than it is to be accepted by Scopus.
If you want more information, below we have linked to some video’s which goes into further detail about COPE, DOAJ, Scopus and Web of Science.
Table 1 shows these journals and whether they are recognized by COPE, DOAJ, Scopus and Web of Science.
[table id=058_001 /]
What if they all say No?
It is IMPORTANT to note that, even if the answer, for a given journal, to each of the questions above is No, this is far from a definitive indication that the journal is either fake or predatory. As an example, if a journal is not an Open Access journal, then DOAJ would not list it. That does not make it a bad journal. It just means that it is not even on the radar of DOAJ and will not be evaluated.
Similarly, not being included in the other three databases we mention is not necessarily a negative.
Therefore, we cannot immediately infer anything about the second and third journal in Table 1 just because they are not members, or recognized, by any of those organizations. It does suggest though that further investigation is required.
But, and it's a big BUT
If the journal does have at least one “Yes” next to it, it starts to build confidence, but you should still carry out additional checks.
This was particularly apparent when we investigated Interciencia Journal. Everything looked fine, and it ticked a few boxes, but it became apparent that it had hijacked the ISSN of a legitimate journal and so, of course, everything looked good, until you dug a little deeper.
We decided to delve a little deeper into the two journals that had some positive indicators in Table 1, just to show you what additional checks you may want to do.
Figure 1: Home page of Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews (accessed, 10 Jan 2021)
Just because a journal says something on its home page, does not necessarily mean that it is telling the truth. You need to double check. Figure 2 shows this check, when we accessed the Scopus web site using the ISSN for Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews.
Figure 2: Checking Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews on Scopus
It is good to see that this appears to check out. Not only does the the ISSN check out, which cannot always be totally trusted as we saw from our previous case study, but the journal name and the publisher also align with the journal’s home page.
More checks should be carried out, but the fact that the journal has been verified as a Scopus journal bodes well.
International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (IJCIET)
The International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology was also found when we searched the Scopus database. Figure 3 shows the journal’s home page. It claims to be recognized by Scopus. That is easy to check, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 3: Home page of International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (accessed, 10 Jan 2021)
Figure 4 shows that the journal is recognized by Scopus. This is good news, but it is worrying that all the various metrics are shown as “N/A”. This needs a little further investigation.
Figure 4: Checking International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology on Scopus
Clicking on the journal name, leads us to a screen that is shown at the bottom of Figure 4. We have highlighted the important part, with a yellow highlighter, which shows that the journal has been discontinued in Scopus. This is a worry and is deserving of further investigation.
We are not going to carry out a detailed investigation, but we will make a couple of comments, just to show you some of our thought processes.
Looking at Figure 3, there is a box that mentions journal impact, giving a list of impact factors from 2010 to 2020. This looks impressive as the impact factor is increasing and shows that the journal has been publishing for at least 10 years. The issue we would raise is that there are no links on the page and we do not know what impact factor the journal is referring to.
Again, looking at Figure 3, the journal makes reference to the Scope Database. We are not aware of this database so we would suggest that it requires more investigation, just to check on its validity and authenticity. It might be fine, but (personally) we would want to check.
There are some concerns about this journal, despite it being listed by Scopus. This is why, the four checks we suggest in this article should only be the start of your investigation.
Conclusion
We are getting an increasing number of requests to give our view on a given journal. We are not happy to provide a view, without carrying out an extensive, evidence based study. Given the number of alleged predatory journals, that is simply not possible.
We see a need for education so that researchers can arrive at their own conclusion about a journal. In this article we provide four quick checks that we carry out, which anybody can do, especially if you have the ISSN for the journal that you are investigating.
It is important to realize though that these four indicators are just that, indicators, and they should be used as a starting point for further investigations.
We did that for two journals and got very different results. One journal was validated as being an active registered journal with Scopus, while the other was registered with Scopus but its listing has now been discontinued. At first sight the journals look the same, with regard to their Scopus status, but digging a little deeper shows that this is not the case.
As we have said before though, the world is not short of legitimate journals so, if you have any doubts just move onto the next journal on your target list, rather than taking a chance on a journal that you are unsure of.
We were recently contacted via a direct message on Twitter which asked if a particular journal was a fake journal. This was an intriguing question and one which we felt we had to answer, or least look at to see if we could offer advice.
In this article, we document the process we went through to answer this question, using the journal in question as a case study.
How to spot a fake journal?
Check the journal name very carefully. The fake journal may have very subtle differences to the journal they are impersonating. They may even have the same name, which is just another element that you will need to investigate.
Check the URL of the journal. Does it agree with what you might expect to see.
Look at the journal’s home page and investigate all the claims that they make with regard to membership (such as DOAJ and COPE), impact factors and whether they are listed in bibliographic databases such as Scopus and Clarivate.
Do not just rely on the ISSN, as the fake journal may be using the ISSN of the legitimate journal and all the checks you make will validate the journal as legitimate.
Check the journal’s web site, editorial board, previous papers, open access policy etc. Does it look like a legitimate journal?
Try to track down the journal that it is impersonating. This will be your strongest evidence as you can then compare the two.
At first it may seem daunting to try and establish whether a journal is fake, but you only need to find one thing and that will lead to other things and the body of evidence will quickly build up.
In this article, we provide a case study which documents our investigation. Every investigation will be different, but we hope this article provides some ideas as to how you can carry out your own investigation.
Like predatory journals, if you have any doubts, just move onto the next journal. The scientific world is not short of journals that you can submit to.
We will keep the identify of the person who asked the original question confidential (it was a private direct message after all), but will send a link of this article to the person that asked the question by way of a response, which we hope they find useful.
What is a fake journal?
It is important that we understand what we mean by a fake journal, at least for the purposes of this article.
A fake journal represents itself as another journal in the hope that it can get researchers to submit to this fake journal, rather than the researcher submitting their research to the legitimate journal.Invariably they will want to charge for publishing your article, even if the legitimate journal it is impersonating does not have an Article Processing Charge (APC).
Fake journals are different to predatory journals. Predatory journals use the open access model of publishing but have little (or no) peer review, and will accept most (if not all) papers. Fake journals take this one stage further. They are predatory, but also leverage on the good name and reputation of a legitimate journal.
Predatory journals, as are fake journals, are primarily motivated by financial gains. They have no interest in ensuring that the integrity of the scientific archive is maintained.
If you want to read more about this topic, the following articles may be of interest:
As mentioned in the introductory remarks, we received a Twiter direct message which said:
“Hello
Thanks for all your efforts for ridding Scientific Research and Publications from Predatory/fake Journals. Could you please check if the Journal Interciencia Journal is a fake Journal or not?
I have already published a paper with them in [redacted] and I did not yet find it in Google Search.
Regards“
We have redacted the date that the author had published a paper, to further protect their identity.
Initial investigation
Our aim is to ascertain whether Interciencia Journal is a fake journal, or not. First of all we looked through various metrics, organisations – just to see if the journal was listed and recognized by them.
Search for the journal
As you might expect the first thing we did was to search for the journal. The first entry in the search results was a link to a journal, with a URL of http://www.intercienciajournal.com/, which led to the home page shown in Figure 1.
Whether a journal has an ISSN, or not, is no indicator of quality but the ISSN can be used to find out about the journal, as it it is a unique identifier.
Figure 2 shows the result returned from the ISSN portal.
Figure 2: Searching for ISSN 0378-1844 on the ISSN portal
This looks good. At least the ISSN is valid and we can use it in other searches, knowing that the ISSN is recognised.
Using the ISSN (0378-1844), it is easy to find out of a journal is a member of DOAJ. Figure 3 shows the result.
Figure 3: Searching for ISSN 0378-1844 on DOAJ. Three articles are returned, but not journal
The search returned three results, but these are all articles. The expected journal is not returned. This is a red flag, which deserves further investigation. It is not necessarily bad, but it is something to be noted, especially as the journals says that it has been evaluated by DOAJ.
Committee on Publications Effort (COPE)
COPE is an organisation that journals can join, committing them to uphold certain ethical standards with regard to scientific publishing.
Although Interciencia Journal does not claim to be a member of COPE it is often a check we make. If it turns out to be a member, that is a positive. It is not necessarily a negative if it is not a member, but it is worth the ten seconds it takes to check.
Figure 4 shows the result of the search.
Figure 4: Searching for ISSN 0378-1884 being a member of the Committee of Publication Ethics
The result of the search show that ISSN 0378-1844 is not a member of COPE.
Thomson Reuters (ISI)
One of the claims made by Interciencia Journal is that it is indexed by ISI. If you look at Figure 1, you can see where this claim is made. The highlighted area (bottom right of Figure 1) is a clickable URL. If you follow this link, it leads to the screen shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Following the Thomson Reuters link on the Interciencia Journal web site
This leads to the Clarivate web site (which is what we would expect) and the ISSN/journal appears. This looks good.
As a secondary check, we also searched Web of Science, from outside of the Interciencia Journal web site and saw the information shown in Figure 6. This confirms that the journal is recognised by Web of Science.
Moreover, it has an impact factor of 0.448 and, for those of you who are interested in these things it has been indexed since 1997 (across two different categories), ranking as Q3 or Q4. Since 2008, when it transferred from the “Multidisciplinary Sciences” category to the “Ecology” category, it has always been Q4 (at least up to 2019, which is the latest figures available when we chanced on 25 Nov 2020).
Figure 6: Verifying that ISSN 0378-1844 is recognised by Web of Science
Scopus
Figure 1 shows that Interciencia Journal is indexed by Scopus. There is no link on the journal’s home page, but it is easy to check whether it is a Scopus recognised journal or not.
We logged into Scopus and searched for the journal. The result is shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Validating that ISSN 0378-1844 is listed by Scopus
This confirms that 0378-1844 is recognised by Scopus.
What does this tell us?
After this initial investigation, what do we know.
The ISSN is a valid ISSN and is recognised by the body which looks after ISSN.
The journal is not registered with either DOAJ or COPE
The journal is recognised by Thomson Reuters (Web of Science, ISI or Clarivate; or however you refer to it).
The journal is recognised by Scopus
Given that the journal is recognised by ISI and Scopus, we can forgive it not being a member of DOAJ or COPE and this profile would certainly suggest that we are looking at a legitimate journal and we can go ahead and submit our research paper.
But, and there is a big but ….
The Journal Name
So far we have focussed on the ISSN, as this is a unique identifier and it enables us to check on website sites such as DOAJ, COPE and Scopus a lot more easily that typing the journal name in.
But what about the journal name? We are looking at a journal called Interciencia Journal, but if you look at Figure 2 (ISSN), Figure 5 (Web of Science), Figure 6 (Web of Science) and Figure 7 (Scopus) you might have noticed that the journal name is given as Interciencia. The “Journal” is “missing“.
Is this something we should be concerned about? After all, if somebody told you that the journal was called Interciencia, it would seem reasonable to search for “Interciencia Journal”.
Searching for Interciencia
Rather than searching for “Interciencia Journal“, we searched for “Interciencia“. Figure 8 shows the search page that was returned.
Figure 8: Searching for “Interciencia”, rather than “Interciencia Journal”
When we searched before (for “Interciencia Journal“), the third entry in Figure 8 appeared at the top of the list. When we search for “Interciencia” (without Journal) that entry is now third in the list and there is a new item as the first entry.
Both of these links lead to journals with an ISSN of 0378-1844. You can see this in Figure 1, and Figure 9 shows the page that https://www.interciencia.net/ leads to. We have highlighted the ISSN (0378-1844) shown at the top of the page.
This is a worry as we have found two different home pages, which are using the same ISSN.
Interciencia versus Interciencia Journal
We are now in a position where we have two journals that have (or at least claim to have) the same ISSN. Which journal is the correct one, and which one is the fake one.
The name is the giveaway. One agrees with Scopus, Thomson Reuters and the ISSN portal. That is, Interciencia WITHOUT “Journal”, is the legitimate journal. Interciencia Journal is a fake journal.
Just to be absolutely clear, Interciencia is a legitimate journal and Interciencia Journal is a fake journal, trying to leverage off the success of the legitimate journal.
Observations
Now that we have established that there are two journals with the same ISSN, but one of them is fake, what else can we say?
We make the following observations, noting that this is related to just these two journals. As we say above, any investigation that you carry out will be different but we hope that our observations will give you some idea of areas that you may want to look at.
We have already commented on the Interciencia Journal home page. Most of its information is leveraging on ISSN 0378-1844.
What we have found about ISSN 0378-1844 is largely correct, with the exception of having any association with DOAJ, although it did only say that it was being “evaluated“, not that it was a member of DOAJ.
The key point is that Interciencia Journal is not the journal that has an ISSN of 0378-1844. This ISSN belongs to another, legitimate journal, with a very similar name.
Looking at the “Policies” page for Interciencia Journal (we have provided it here if you want to see it), it states “All papers will be double blind peer reviewed by 2-3 expert reviewers with 2 weeks from the submission time.” In line with many predatory journals, one thing they offer is fast review (and publication) times.
Note: we have not shown some images on this page, but have provided a link to them. This is an attempt to not “clutter up” up this page but to still make the images accessible to those that would like to see them.
Both journals are publishing volume 45 in 2020. In the case of Interciencia Journal you can only access the archive back to 2012 (Volume 37). Strangely Interciencia only goes back to 2009 (Volume 34). We are unsure why you cannot access back to Volume 1?
If you are still not convinced that they are different journals, take a look at the papers published in (say) Volume 45 Issue 10. The paper titles for both journals are totally different.
When we tried to access the papers, the papers in Interciencia are freely available, but Interciencia Journal asks for 2,000 USD to access all of their content (here is a screenshot of the web page).
If you click on this link you are taken to a Knowledge Insights web page, where you can make payment (a screenshot is available here). We have had a quick look at Knowledge Insights. It was not on the original Beall’s List, but is now (22 Nov 2020), marked as “may be predatory“. See https://beallslist.net/ (accessed 22 Nov 2020).
When you look at the papers on Interciencia Journal, you are unable to see who the authors are (unless, we assume, you pay US$ 2,000 and access the full paper). This is not necessarily bad, but is a little strange.
We would like to have checked whether the the paper had been published by the person who contacted us. You might recall, they said “As I have already published a paper with them in [Redacted] and I did not yet find it in Google Search !!!” We don’t have access to the author name, or the paper title, so we are unable to check whether it has actually been published.
The editorial boards of both journals are different. Just so that we have it recorded, here is the editorial board of Interciencia and Interciencia Journal.
If you look at some of text describing the journals, you will find this on Interciencia Journal (screenshot here) web site:
“The journal is dedicated to stimulating scientific and technological research, to its humane use and to the study of the social context in which scientific and technological development occur.“
If you look at the web pages of Interciencia, you will find the following text (screenshot here)
“It is dedicated to stimulate scientific research, its humanitarian use and the study of its social context, specially in Latin America and the Caribbean and to promote communication between the scientific and technological communities of the Americas.“
The two pieces of text are different but you cannot help but notice the similarities.
Interciencia Journal does not provide any information about its Article Processing Charges (APC) but we were informed by the person that originally contacted us that they were required to pay a fee. They were unwilling to tell us how much. Bear in mind that readers also have to pay (US$ 2,000) – see point 6 above.
Interciencia is an open access journal and charges US$225 per published page, as well as offering some concessions. See the screenshot here.
What does Interciencia have to say?
Looking at the legitimate journal’s web site they are aware that others are making use of their name. Figure 10 shows a screenshot from their web site warning of unscrupulous practices.
Note that this is dated 2017, so they have recognized the problem for a number of years.
Figure 10: The warning given on the web site of Interciencia (accessed 22 Nov 2020)
Conclusion
What started off as a simple question led us down a path of discovery. We quickly came to the conclusion that Interciencia Journal was a fake journal, giving it a very similar name to another journal and publishing statistics on its web site which, although true, are related to an ISSN that belongs to the legitimate journal.
The choice of journal name is also part of the con. If you know that the journal is called Interciencia you are quite likely to search for “Interciencia Journal“. However, by doing so, this shows the fake journal at the top of the search results.
There were some warning signs that the authors might have looked for. They could have verified the journal through Thomson Reuters and Scopus, paying special attention to the journal name. They might have also looked at the web site, which looks a little cumbersome and amateurish.
When they received a demand for payment, this should have raised a red flag, as there is nothing on the web site to say that the journal is open access and will charge a publication fee.
It is always useful to look at some of the papers that have been published which does not seem possible for Intercencia Journal, unless you pay $US 2,000, which goes against the principles of open access.
So, the clues were there, but it is so easy to get conned that we can only feel sorry for the authors and we hope that this article helps others not to suffer the same fate.
Acknowledgments
We would like to than the person who raised this issue with us. We have said that we will not publish their name, but we owe a debt of thanks nonetheless.
