Predatory Journals and Conferences Guide

Even just the homepage of this journal website reveals some oddities you might not expect to find in a reputable journal. There is no space after commas in the writing, and manuscript length is stated in pages rather than words. And if you then move on to Abstracting & Indexing you won’t find a single actual citation database. Under Contact Us the address is ”Editor.irjabs@yahoo.com” a generic email service and address that doesn’t go to any specific named person.

A messy website that hardly makes a serious impression. The page is crowned by a grammatical error: "Article Received from Top Institutions" instead of Articles. The many logotypes displayed may well be used without permission. The journal scope is "all areas of Medical Sciences". And if that wasn’t enough red flags they use Index Copernicus Value as their bibliometric index.

This is a journal from OMICS, a publisher that a US federal judge ordered to pay $50 million in damages for for deceptive and predatory publishing activities in March 2019. There are a lot of things to take note of here: they use Index Copernicus Value and brag about how many more readers they have than other journals. But the real kicker is that the editorial board of this journal in the field of palliative care and medicine includes a member who  is a retired history professor. (W. Andrew Achenbaum, prominently pictured on the homepage, is Professor Emeritus in History and Social Work at the University of Houston.)

This journal website is kind of a mess. Looking under “Indexing” it gives the impression that it is indexed by Web of Science. Checking that shows that it’s a total fabrication. The h-index they list is based on data from Google Scholar, and so has not been through any kind of quality control.