Web of Science – Predatory Journals and Conferences

August 8, 2021August 8, 2021

Verifying a Google Scholar impact factor?

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.

In the context of this article, “other” means anything apart from Scopus or IS Web of Science (aka Clarivates). We specifically mention these two as they are the two that most journals want to be associated with. Some journals will even say they are indexed by these bibliographic indexes, even though they are not.

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.

To use as an example, we chose the journal “International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies“. This is a journal that we have previously tweeted about.

This journal has its own Google Scholar account, which you can see by following this link.

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:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gcY_JeAAAAAJ

… 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

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

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.

January 10, 2021March 20, 2021

Is this a legitimate journal? How we respond

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.

What can you check?

We have written a number of previous articles on what you can check when trying to decide whether to submit to a particular journal. The case study we did, we think, will be useful in this regards. You might also want to take a look at “Three quick was to spot a predatory journal” and “Analysing a journal: An Example“.

Four quick checks

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.

Testing it out

We thought we would take a look at the journals we were asked about using the above four criteria. We have not included Interciencia Journal as this is fully discussed in the article that looked specifically at that journal.

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.

Humanities & Social Sciences Research

On its home page Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews claims that it is listed in Scopus (see Figure 1).

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.

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 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.

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.

November 24, 2020March 20, 2021

How to spot a fake journal | A case study

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:

What started the investigation?

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.

Figure 1: Home page of **Interciencia Journal**, accessed 22 Nov 2020

From this home page we note that (see the blue highlights):

The journal has an ISSN (0378-1844).
It says that some of the source data comes from “Thomson Reuters Citation Data“. This is encouraging.
It says it is indexed in the “Science Citation Index Expanded“. This is good to see.
It says it is indexed in Scopus, again good to see.
It says that is has been evaluated by the Directory of Open Access Journals. Not sure what “been evaluated” means.
It has a link to the Thomson Reuters ISI Index page. This is a good sign

This what we would expect to see for a high quality, open access journal. So let’s take a closer look at these some of these to verify them.

ISSN

If you want to read more about ISSN’s, take a look at our article “What is an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)?” where we go into more depth about what they are.

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.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

The Directory of Open Access Journals maintains a list (via a membership scheme) of legitimate open access journals. If you want to know more about DOAJ, take a look at the article we we wrote on this organisation.

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.

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.

The first item has a URL of https://www.interciencia.net/, and the third entry has a URL of https://intercienciajournal.com/.

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?
Here are the screenshots of the relevant pages.
Archive for Interciencia (taken 22 Nov 2020)
Archive for Interciencia Journal (taken 22 Nov 2020)
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.
Header image: https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-qztso

October 3, 2020March 18, 2021

What is Predatory Publishing? | … and should you care?

Predatory publishing is the practice of publishers/journals charging fees to publish scientific articles, yet not providing the services that would normally be expected of a scientific journal. This includes not having robust peer review, thus not ensuring the quality and integrity of the papers which will form part of the scientific archive. Moreover, predatory journals may not have an editorial board. Even if they do, the members may not be recognized experts in the discipline being addressed by the journal, they may not make independent decisions and may be influenced by financial considerations.

Predatory publishing is a relatively new phenomena. It was first highlighted by Eysenbach in 2008, in a blog post titled “Black sheep among Open Access Journals and Publishers“. Katharine Sanderson, also raised the issue in her article “Two new journals copy the old“. Jeffrey Beall started writing about predatory publishing in his 2009 article Bentham Open, which we wrote about in one of our other articles.

We believe that the first predatory journal appeared in 2001. Our article “What was the first predatory journal? | Who published it?” explains how we arrived at this conclusion. By comparison, the first journal to introduce peer review, Medical Essays and Observations, was published almost 300 years ago in 1731.

What is the Definition of Predatory Publishing?

There is no universally accepted definition of predatory publishing. There are many definitions out there, but not one which everybody agrees on.

Blog/online definitions

All the proposed definitions have their merits. For example, we cannot disagree with any of these that have appeared in blogs/online articles

“A predatory publisher is an opportunistic publishing venue that exploits the academic need to publish but offers little reward for those using their services.”
What is a predatory publisher?, IOWA State University [link]

“Predatory Journals take advantage of authors by asking them to publish for a fee without providing peer-review or editing services. Because predatory publishers do not follow the proper academic standards for publishing, they usually offer a quick turnaround on publishing a manuscript.“
What is a Predatory Journal?, The University of Texas [link]

“There is no one standard definition of what constitutes a predatory publisher but generally they are those publishers who charge a fee for the publication of material without providing the publication services an author would expect such as peer review and editing.“
Scholarly Communication, The University of Cambridge [link]

Definitions of Predatory Publishing in Peer Reviewed Papers

Some scholars have published peer reviewed papers that have offered a definition of predatory publishing.

As an example, from 2018, What is a predatory journal? A scoping review, opens with:

“There is no standardized definition of what a predatory journal is, nor have the characteristics of these journals been delineated or agreed upon“
From https://dx.doi.org/10.12688%2Ff1000research.15256.2

…. with the article concluding

“Possible objectives could be to develop a consensus definition of a predatory journal.“
From https://dx.doi.org/10.12688%2Ff1000research.15256.2

The article actually undertakes a very good review, but does not provide its own definition.

In Defining predatory journals and responding to the threat they pose: a modified Delphi consensus process, published in 2020, their objective is stated as

“To conduct a Delphi survey informing a consensus definition of predatory journals and publishers“
From https://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-035561

They invited 115 people to take part in a survey, which resulted in 18 terms that should be included in the definition of predatory journals and publishers. Table 2 in the paper (which is open access, so you are able to easily view it) shows the 18 terms that were agreed as defining a predatory journal/publisher.

A Nature paper from 2019, reported a meeting between between 43 people, from 10 countries representing publishing societies, research funders, researchers, policymakers, academic institutions, libraries and patient partners. After 12 hours of discussion, they arrived at the following definition.

“Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.“
The proposed definition of predatory publishing from Nature 576, 210-212 (2019) (DOI: 10.1038/d41586-019-03759-y)

Our Definition of Predatory Publishing

We have attempted to come up with our own definition, which is shown at the opening of this article, but it is just another, among the many others that have been proposed.

Does it Matter not having an Accepted Definition of Predatory Publishing?

In our view, yes it does.

If we do not have a widely accepted definition of a predatory journal it makes classifying a journal as being predatory difficult. Moreover, we run the risk of arguing about the definition, rather than focusing on trying to stop predatory journals operating. This plays into the hands of the predatory publishers who can simply sit back and watch others argue about what it means to be a predatory journal, rather than having to ensure that they will not be closed down.

When was predatory publishing first highlighted?

As the opening remarks of this article say, the first mention of predatory publishing, although not using the term, was in a 2008 blog post by Gunther Eysenbach. A 2010 article in Nature, by Katharine Sanderson, also highlighted the issue. Following this Jeffrey Beall took up challenge and published a number of articles, and also introduced the term predatory publishing.

In the next two sub-sections, we look at the contribution of Eysenbach and Sanderson. Following this, we focus on Jeffrey Beall’s early contributions.

Gunther Eysenbach’s Blog

Image of the blog post entitled :Black Sheep among Open Access Journals and Publishers — Figure 1: Gunther Eysenbach blog post which first highlighted predatory publishing

The earliest reference that we can find to predatory publishing is a blog post by Gunther Eysenbach on 8 Mar 2008, titled Black sheep among Open Access Journals and Publishers. Gunther does not use the term predatory publishing. This term was introduced by Jeffrey Beall, as we discuss later in this article.

In his blog post Gunther says that he has seen an increase in the number of spam emails he receives from publishers asking him to submit to their open access journal. He highlights one particular journal (Bentham Open) which, over a two month period, sent him 11 emails. The emails were seeking submissions to different journals from their 200+ portfolio. They were keen to recognize his eminence and they pointed out that their institution, or a research grant, would probably pay their modest open access fees.

If you have the time, we would encourage you to read Eysenbach blog post, or at least have a quick glance through it. It was written more than 10 years ago but the concerns raised by Eysenbach are still very much issues today. The only difference seems to be that the problem is now very much worse, with, alas, no sign of getting better.

Katharine Sanderson’s Nature Paper

Image of the blog post entitled "Two new journals copy the old" — Figure 2: Sanderson K. (2010) Two new journals copy old, Nature, 463, 148

In January 2010, Katharine Sanderson published a paper in Nature entitled Two new journals copy the old. The papers opens as follows:

“At least two journals recently launched by the same publisher have duplicated papers online that had been published elsewhere.“
Opening sentence from Two new journals copy the old, Nature, 2010

The article focuses on the publisher Scientific Research Publishing, which still operates today. In its journal, the Journal of Modern Physics, it reproduced two papers from the New Journal of Physics (DOI:10.1088/1367-2630/2/1/331 and DOI:10.1088/1367-2630/2/1/323). The Journal of Modern Physics said that this was a mistake due to it posting sample content on the journal’s web pages and the content was removed.

Other notable quotes from Sanderson’s article include:

“The Scientific Research journal Psychology also contains papers that seem to have been published previously, including one in its first issue that was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 after being published elsewhere.“

“The home page for the Journal of Biophysical Chemistry contains only the titles and page numbers of four papers in the first issue. Identical paper titles appear in the Journal of Bioscience, published by Springer India, from 2000.“

We should note that Sanderson’s paper was published in 2010 and we are not saying that Scientific Research Publishing is operating these practices today. Indeed, we take no view whether they are a predatory publisher or not. To ascertain that, would require further investigation, which is not the purpose of this article.

Beall’s First Papers

Jeffrey Beall was an academic librarian at the University of Colorado who was instrumental in highlighting the issues of predatory publishing.

Image of Jeffrey Beall's first paper that highlighted predatory publishing — Beall’s first paper, highlighting predatory publishing

Four of Beall’s early papers, which addressed predatory publishing, were published in The Charleston Advisor. Each of these papers highlighted, and analysed, a number of publishers. Of the 18 publishers analysed, all but one was categorized as predatory.

Beall’s first paper that discussed predatory publishing highlighted one particular publisher, Bentham Open, which was also one of the publishers mentioned in Eysenbach’s blog.

We have discussed Beall’s first paper in another of our articles.

In his second article, which appeared in April 2010, it was the first time that Beall used the term “predatory” in a scientific article.

This second article analysed nine publishers:

Academic Journals
Academic Journals, Inc
ANSINetswork
Dove Press
Insight Knowledge
Knowledgia Review
Libertas Academia
Science Publications
Scientific Journals International

Beall published another paper in 2010, which reported another three predatory publishers:

Medwell
International Research Journals
OMICS Publishing Group

In 2012, Beall’s fourth paper looked at another five publishers:

Academy Publish
AOSIS Open Journals
BioInfo
Science Domain International
Scientific Research Publishing

These four articles, all published in The Charleston Advisor, analyzed 18 publishers,which published 1,328 journals. Beall categorized them all as being predatory publishers, with the exception of AOSIS Open Journals.

Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers and Journals

You cannot talk about predatory publishing without mentioning Beall’s List. Indeed, it is arguable that without Beall’s List, along with the papers that Jeffrey Beall wrote on this topic, that predatory publishing would have received the attention that it has.

Beall’s List is such an intrinsic part of predatory publishing, we have devoted a separate article to it. This article tells you when the list was set up, when it was taken of line, why it was taken down and some of the criticisms leveled at the list.

Is the number of predatory journals increasing?

One of the challenges in trying to monitor predatory journals is that there is no universally agreed way to categorize a predatory journal. As such, there is no robust way to monitor if they are on the increase or decline, although we should be able to look at general trends and draw some conclusions.

In the next two sub-sections, we consider Beall’s List and papers from the scientific archive, which have both provided a viewpoint as to how many predatory journals there are.

Beall’s List

The challenge of categorizing journals is illustrated in Beall’s List where the decision whether a journal was predatory was made by one person and there was sometimes disagreement whether a journal should be on the list or not, often with representation from the journal itself. It is arguably, for this reason, that the journal was taken offline, largely due to the objection from Frontiers (read more here).

In our article which looked at Beall’s list, we note that the number of predatory publishers on the list in 2011 was 18, rising to 1,115 in 2017. The number of predatory standalone journals was 126 in 2013, rising to 1,294 in 2017. The graphs in our article show the steep rise in the number of journals that Beall classified as predatory.

We may argue about some of the journals on Beall’s List, but we believe that the evidence provided by Beall shows that the number of predatory journals and publishers rose between 2011 and 2017. Either that or they were there all the time and Beall only discovered them over the years he was maintaining Beall’s List. If we wanted a definitive answer to this question, we would need to look at when the journals published their first issue. We do not believe that this work has been done or, at least, it has not been reported in one place. It would actually be an interesting study.

Scientific Archive

The paper that is most often cited, to show the rise in the number of predatory journals is “‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics“. The authors say:

“Over the studied period, predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals.“

Figure 3 (taken from the article, under CC BY 4.0) shows the increase in the number of predatory journals, with a rise from under 2,000 journals in 2010 to around 8,000 in 2014. The figure also shows the statistics for publishers who publish a different numbers of journals.

Graph showing the rise in predatory journals between 2010 and 2014 — Figure 3: The rise of predatory journals between 2010 and 2014. Image from https://dx.doi.org/10.1186%2Fs12916-015-0469-2, reproduced under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Figure 4 (also taken from the same article, under CC BY 4.0) shows the number of predatory articles that were published between 2010 and 2014, showing a rise from about 53,000 articles in 2010 to about 420,000 articles in 2014. Similar to Figure 3, there are also statistics breaking down the figures based on the number of journals a publisher produces.

Graph showing the rise in predatory articles between 2010 and 2014 — Figure 4: The rise of predatory articles between 2010 and 2014. Image from https://dx.doi.org/10.1186%2Fs12916-015-0469-2, reproduced under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Why should you care?

If we accept that predatory journals exist, should we care? Why not just ignore them, and hope they go away? It may not be as easy as that.

Here are four reasons why you should care about predatory journals. We have provided a link to some of our other articles, where we believe that this might be useful.

Damaging the integrity of the scientific archive: If papers that have not been properly peer reviewed are allowed to get into the scientific archive, then it damages the archive in a number of ways, including:
- The results that are being claimed may not be correct.
- The reported results may not be reproducible.
- The findings in the paper may simply be a work of fiction.
- Others may rely on the results and try to develop them further, which is likely to be futile.
- The scientific archive is a trusted resource. If that trust is broken it could bring the entire archive into question.
- The results from the predatory papers may be used to advertise products to the general public. Indeed, to do this, might be the motivation to publish the paper.
  
  … further reading
Cost to the tax payer: A lot of research is funded by the tax payer, with the funds being distributed by research funding agencies. If some of that money is used to pay the article processing charges to predatory publishers/journals this is a waste of tax payers money which could be used for other research and/or other services that would benefit the general public.
Damage to your CV: If your CV is littered with papers published in predatory journals, or even if you have only published one or two, this will have a negative effect on your CV. It may get you another job, it may get you promotion but ultimately your CV will be judged for what it is.

… further reading
Lack of Impact: Papers which you publish in predatory journals are unlikely to get the attention that you might get if you published your paper in a non-predatory journal. This is due to many reasons, including:
- The journals are not so well known, so are unlikely to be the “go to” place for those looking for a paper to cite.
- Predatory journals tend to be very broad, so it may be difficult to find a paper in your discipline, among the many others which have nothing to do with your discipline.
- Even if your paper is well written and is underpinned by robust research, it is likely to be among papers which are not of the same quality. As a result, your paper could be ignored in the belief that the journal doe snot publish high quality papers that are worth citing.
- Predatory journals are unlikely to be indexed by the major bibliographic databases (such as Web of Science and Scopus), so may not be on the radar of researchers who rely on those databases as their main source of references.
  
  … further reading

Conclusion

Predatory publishers exploit the open access model of publishing by charging a fee to publish scientific articles. However, they lack the services that you would normally expect from a scientific publisher, most importantly a robust peer review process. This results in papers being entered into the scientific archive which have not been peer reviewed to the standards that we would normally expect.

Predatory publishing has been around since around 2000, but only started to attract the attention of critics in about 2008. Since then, there have been many studies, with only a small sample being mentioned in this article, but our other blog articles will reference more studies if you are interested.

Both Beall’s List and peer reviewed papers have shown the significant rise in the number of predatory publishers and journals in recent years. Unfortunately, unless we are missing something, there is not a recent study so it is hard to gauge if this increase is continuing. It would certainly be useful if somebody produced an updated study.

Part of the problem is that there is no widely accepted definition of predatory publishers. Most of the definitions that are provided are quite similar and the scientific community would benefit from converging to one definition, so that the community can focus on tackling the problem of predatory journals, rather than trying to come up with a definition which classifies what a predatory journal is.

Predatory publishing should be of concern to all researchers that would like to be able to rely on the scientific archive. Researchers with any integrity should be opposed to predatory journals and publishers and should do what they can to eliminate them from the research community.

Acknowledgements

Gaping Crocodile image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crocodile_Gaping.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0
Journal image: http://ppublishing.org/about/, (search for ESR_11-12(74-75) in Google images), CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

The above two images were combined to create the header image that is used for this article.

April 14, 2020September 18, 2021

When is ISI not ISI?

We were recently sent an email (see Figure 1), where Catherine Nichols stated that the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research had an ISI impact factor of 0.823.

The person who received this email was considering submitting as they like to publish in ISI rated journals, but they sought our opinion first.

We thought we would investigate, just to make sure that the journal’s claim is true.

Our findings? It is true but very misleading. In this article we will tell you why we believe that the claim to have an ISI impact factor of 0.823 is misleading.

If you are interested in citation analysis, you may want to take a look at this book, Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation [affiliate link].

Web of Science impact factor

This article is really about what the term “ISI” means and whether it is being misrepresented? So we thought it was worth having a brief discussion of what most people, in the academic community, would think when they hear the term “ISI”.

Web of Science is probably the most trusted, most respected and well used, impact factor. When somebody refers to an impact factor, without any other context, they are likely to be referring to Web of Science, more commonly referred to as ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) but now more correctly called the Clarivate Analytics Impact Factor.

To be totally clear, if somebody says a journal has an ISI impact factor, then it will most likely be assumed that the impact factor is the one that has been set by Web of Science.

Publishing in ISI indexed journals is important to a lot of people and a lot of institutions as it is generally accepted that ISI indexed journals represent the highest quality journals. Indeed, some institutions go as far as saying that their academics should only submit to ISI ranked journals.

The EMAIL

The email in Figure 1 was passed to us recently. We have our suspicions that the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Engineering is a predatory journal, as it is listed on an updated version of Beall’s list (see Figure 2).

However, the journal states that it has an ISI impact factor of 0.823. To most people this would mean that the journal is listed by Web of Science. Although unlikely, it is possible that a predatory journal could somehow get listed by Web of Science but if a journal is listed as a possible predatory journal and it is claiming to have an ISI impact factor it is worth taking a look at the claim that is being made.

Is the journal listed on Web of Science?

The first thing to do is to see if the journal is actually listed on Web of Science. This is easy to do, as Web of Science provides a Journal Citation Report (also known as JCR) which enables the user to look up a specific journal, as well as categories of journals.

Figure 3: Searching for a journal on Web of Science (see Figure 3) shows this search (click on the image to enlarge it). We searched for “American Journal of Bio”. As the figure shows this only returned two results, actually the same journal (American Journal of Bioethics) twice. We also searched American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research using its ISSN (2642-1747) and, as expected, the journal was not found.

Bottom line, the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research is not a Web of Science ISI listed journal, which begs the question why the journal makes the statement that it has an ISI impact factor of 0.823.

The journal's web site

The email (Figure 1) did not provide a link to the journal’s web site, but a quick search found it. Figure 4 shows the banner for the journal’s web site. We know we have the right journal, as the ISSN is the same. We can also see that the same impact factor is being claimed (0.823).

The impact factor is a clickable link and if we follow that link, we end up on the web site of International Scientific Indexing, at the page that lists the entry for American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research (see Figure 5). This indexing service certainly has the initials ISI, but it is not what most people would think of when we say ISI, in the context of impact factors.

International Scientific Indexing

Of course, International Scientific Indexing could be a perfectly legitimate indexing service. On the other hand, it could be a way for journals that cannot get indexed by Web of Science to deceive the academic community.

We thought we would carry out a few checks.

Firstly, we searched for “American Journal of Bio”, in the same way that we searched for this phrase on Web of Science. This returned four journals (see Figure 6). It is noticeable that the American Journal of Bioethics does not appear. Whilst not every journal should appear on every legitimate list of indexed journals, we might expect to see Web of Science ISI indexed journals to appear on other lists. This is often the case, for example with Scopus. If a journal is on Web of Science, it is often on Scopus as well, although the reverse is not always true.

Further checking shows that the International Scientific Indexing only accepts open access journals in its index, which might explain why the American Journal of Bioethics does not appear. We would like to do a fuller investigation but as a quick check, we did look up Plos One (perhaps the most well-known open access journal). This is listed on Web of Science (impact factor 2.776) but it does not appear on International Scientific Indexing. This raises a red flag that is worthy of further investigation as it is a worry that one of the most well known open access journals is not listed on the International Scientific Indexing web site.

The second quick check we did was to look at how International Scientific Indexing calculates its impact factors. In a previous article, we looked at the African Quality Centre for Journals (AQCJ), which is another indexing measure. In that article, we described how Web of Science calculates its impact factor, which is both easy and transparent. AQCJ did not describe its evaluation methodology in a transparent way, which was a cause for concern.

Similarly, we could not find the evaluation methodology for the International Scientific Indexing. The only thing we could find was on the payment page (see Figure 7). The second point (b.) says if you want them to calculate your impact factor, you have to pay USD 100. There is no mention of how the impact factor is actually calculated.

Moreover, it says that the impact factor is based on the International Citation Report (ICR). If you search for this term, the first item that is displayed is Web of Science’s Journal Citation Report. The cynical side of us thinks that this may be another attempt to confuse the unwary that the Web of Science ISI impact factor and the International Scientific Indexing impact factor are the same thing.

Conclusion

After seeing the email that was sent to us, and carrying out our investigation, we believe that International Scientific Indexing are trying to misrepresent themselves as being the Web of Science ISI impact factor. Whilst a few clicks can determine that they are not Web of Science, the fact that International Scientific Index, and the journals they index, refers to them as “ISI”, in legal terms could be considered as “passing off”, which is somebody misrepresenting goods or services as being the goods and services of another. For anybody who would like a deeper legal understanding, you might want to take a look at books such as “A User’s Guide to Trade Marks and Passing Off” (Amazon link here).

We hope that this is not the case but we would urge International Scientific Indexing to use their full name in any correspondence, and encourage their subscribers to do the same. They should not use an acronym, which is in common day use within the scientific community, but for a different, yet similar service.

We would also urge International Scientific Indexing to publish their methodology as to how their impact factor is calculated. Web of Science do this, so why should other indexes services not follow their lead.

Until International Scientific Indexing are more open about who they are, and they publish their evaluation methodology, we would suggest that the scientific community just ignores this impact factor as it confusing in the way that it could be thought of as Web of Science and the fact that its methodology is not available makes it meaningless as they could be just be picking random numbers.

If you have had your journal indexed by International Scientific Indexing, you might be told how your impact factor is calculated. If this is the case, we would love you to get in touch.

In summary, the International Scientific Indexing should be treated with extreme caution and it is probably best just to ignore it as its impact factor has no meaning.

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