Publishing Tips

Steps to determine whether a journal or publisher is credible include:

1. Visit the journal's website. Some publishers' websites appear professionally created and managed, however closer inspection may reveal poor design, typographical errors, and grammatical errors that would not appear on a reputable publisher's site. Be cautious of those that provide only web contact forms.
    
2. Review the journal's scope as described on the website. Most questionable journals have scopes so broad that they will publish articles on nearly any topic.
    
3. Check that a journal's editorial board lists recognized experts with full affiliations. Contact some of board members and ask about their experience with the journal or publisher.
    
4. Examine articles that appear in the journal and judge their caliber. Predatory publishers are not interested in producing journal articles that demonstrate excellent research or that offer compelling arguments, and rarely engage in screening or quality control.
    
5. Check the peer-review policy. Unscrupulous publishers promise a quick peer-review turnaround. Considering the peer-review process used by reputable journals can take months, a publisher that states their peer-review system takes as little as 21 days is either rushing the process or not doing any peer-review at all.
    
6. Check for the author's publication fee schedule. If it does not appear on the website or if the publisher states it will notify authors of the fee after their papers are accepted for publication, the publisher is likely charging excessively high author fees. Legitimate journal publishers make this information easy to find on their website.
    
7. Be wary of e-mail invitations to submit to journals or to become editorial board members.
    
8. Find out whether the journal is a member of an industry association that vets its members, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org).

Recognizing deceptive journals

• Disreputable journals are adept at mimicry and may appear at first to be a real peer-reviewed or scholarly journal site
  • Publish journals which are improbable combinations of disciplines
  • Use spam to solicit papers
  • Publish papers which have already been published elsewhere
  • Website has false or very little contact information
  • Promise peer-review and publication "the next day" or some other unlikely time frame
  • List members of the editorial board who may not actually be on the board
  • Have 'sales' on the cost of publishing articles
  • Misspellings and/or bad grammar
  • Tout non-existant impact factors (Impact factors are only calculated for journals indexed in the Citation Indexes, which is only a portion of all journals published)

Be aware, these journals will show up in the results in Google Scholar.

Check the publications list in academic databases for inclusion of a journal. Subscription databases have already appraised the journals they include.

The resources listed under the Identifying Journals for Manuscript Submission tab can also be used to appraise a journal for credibility.

Check for Open Access Publishing Memberships

Who publishes the journal? Legitimate open access publishers will have memberships in one or more of the following organizations

Journal Directories & Databases

Use these resources to check for journal inclusion. Journals that are included in these resources have been assessed for credibility.

Tools / Checklists for Evaluating Journals