Predatory Journals and Conferences Guide

Journal Subject Area

That it is important to publish in a journal relevant to your research is pretty self-evident. If you are researching children's intensive care and are invited to a palliative care journal the bad fit is obvious. But sometimes you can get interesting invitations from journals you are unfamiliar with. How should you go about checking if the quality of the journal is good enough for you to choose to publish there?

Start with the title

The title is the first thing that will tell you something about the relevance of a given journal. It usually indicates which area of research it covers. It is common that predatory journals pick very broad and diffuse. One example is International Journal of Development – what kind of development are they interested in? Predatory journals can also use titles that sound like widely read journals with good reputation, e.g. Journal of Palliative Care and Journal of Palliative Care & Medicine. The former is an established SAGE journal and the latter is a journal published by OMICS, a known predatory publisher.

Continue with Aims & Scope

A journal’s website should list their Aims & Scope where you can find out more about what kind of articles they are interested in. Here is an example of an established journal’s Aims & Scope:

The primary topics of interest in Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine (SJTREM) are the pre-hospital and early in-hospital diagnostic and therapeutic aspects of emergency medicine, trauma, and resuscitation. Contributions focusing on dispatch, major incidents, etiology, pathophysiology, rehabilitation, epidemiology, prevention, education, training, implementation, work environment, as well as ethical and socio-economic aspects may also be assessed for publication.

As Aims & Scope are important to the journal an established journal wouldn’t have any obvious errors. The Aims & Scope section should be clear – vague language is a warning flag. Most journals know exactly what kind of articles they want to publish, so a journal that makes it difficult to discern what their aims are is not one you can trust. Something predatory publishers do with their Aims & Scope section is to copy bits from Wikipedia or other websites to sound as if they have expert knowledge. A tip to see if the Aims & Scope have been plagiarized is to copy a section of text and search for it online.

There are serious journals that publish articles in many different subjects. These “mega journals” are often very well-known – see this list on Wikipedia for examples. But if an unknown journal accepts articles in "Agriculture, Botany, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Engineering Technologies, Environmental Sciences, Food Sciences, Genetics, Mathematics, Media Sciences, Physics, Statistics, Veterinary Science and Zoology" [1] you probably don’t want to publish your research there.

[1] The example is taken from Journal of Basic & Applied Science which was published by lifesciencegolbal.com. The journal is no longer listed on the publisher’s website, so the source link goes to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.