Matt Holland, Library Manager, LKS ASE
So, you have been asked if a journal is potentially predatory – what do you do? Well, you would do the usual checks: Does the title make sense? Is the scope of the title overly broad? Do any of the contents have any relation to each other and the title, or is it a randomly gathered selection of the mad and the bad? Does it have an endless list of editors from the four corners of the earth? Is the website littered with spelling and grammar errors? Other more comprehensive checklists are available. To be honest, most of the worst predatory journals don’t try that hard – they are speculative ventures to trap the unwary or offer a service to academic con artists.
What if they are kind of plausible and you are just not sure? Well, the next thing to do is to get on Google Maps and track the address via the postcode. Most predatory journals like to burnish their websites with a UK address as they think it adds plausibility – the way they do this is to rent a mailing address which is essentially just a forwarding address or a front. So, if you find that the international publisher with a growing portfolio of journals is based in an industrial estate in Slough or a quiet residential address in London not known for its publishing houses, that would be a red flag. You can also search Companies House, and you may find that an implausibly large number of businesses share the same small location – that would also be a red flag. Look further at the contact details and yes, there is the second address in India. That’s another big red flag – most predatory journals are based in developing countries[i].
However, there is a problem – it appears to be indexed on PubMed. Determined predatory publishers try to spam the PubMed journals list by submitting articles through PubMed Central (PMC) – this may generate a listing of the journal title in the NLM Catalog. If you find that your suspect journal is listed, you may also find the comment:
“Not currently indexed for MEDLINE. Citations are for articles where the manuscript was deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) in compliance with public access policies. For further information, see Author Manuscripts in PMC.”
It’s the old saying: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck, and so it is with predatory journals – if it looks predatory … etc., etc., etc..
What to do? Clearly, the answer is don’t touch this journal with a bargepole. There is also a teaching moment about predatory journals to explain to your enquirer what they are, how they operate and why you should avoid them.
There is something else. You could go through the list of editors, and you will easily spot editors who do not belong there; these will be from credible UK, US and Australian universities with extensive publication records who have had their identities stolen to add credibility to the latest Open Access journal of nonsense. Write to the editors and alert them to their presence on the editors list. I did this and sadly, they were aware of the problem – however, if they are not, they can take action to get their names removed.
[i] Demir, S.B., 2018. Predatory journals: Who publishes in them and why? Journal of Informetrics, 12(4), 1296-1311. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2018.10.008.
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