How to check if a journal is predatory
Predatory journals take an article processing charge and skip the peer review, editing and indexing they promise. Publishing in one can cost you the paper — it is hard to withdraw and hard to republish elsewhere. The good news: most of them fail simple checks. Here is how to run them.
The ten most common red flags
- Guaranteed or very fast acceptance — peer review that takes days, or an email promising acceptance before anyone has read the paper.
- Unsolicited, flattering invitations addressed to you by a generic title, praising a paper that has nothing to do with the journal's scope.
- A scope that covers everything — engineering, medicine and social science in one journal.
- Invented or misleading metrics such as a "Global Impact Factor" or "Universal Impact Factor" instead of recognised ones.
- Hidden or unclear fees that only appear after acceptance.
- Editors with free email addresses (Gmail, Yahoo) and no verifiable affiliation.
- An editorial board that doesn't check out — people who never agreed to serve, or names you cannot find elsewhere.
- A name copied from a real journal with one word changed, or a website that imitates a well-known publisher.
- Indexing claims you cannot confirm in the index itself.
- Poor quality published papers — obvious errors, no peer-review dates, no DOIs.
Five checks to run before you submit
Red flags are signals. These checks turn them into an answer:
- Look it up in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) if it claims to be open access. Being listed isn't a guarantee, but many predatory journals are not.
- Verify indexing claims at the source. If the journal claims Scopus or Web of Science indexing, search the index's own title list — not the journal's website.
- Check the ISSN in the ISSN Portal. A made-up or mismatched ISSN is a strong warning.
- Check membership claims. COPE and OASPA publish their member lists; confirm the journal or publisher is on them.
- Read two or three recently published papers. Would you want your work next to them?
The predatory journal checker runs the red-flag scan on a journal name and its invitation email in seconds; use it as the first filter, then do the checks above.
Use the Think. Check. Submit. checklist
Think. Check. Submit. is a cross-industry initiative with a short checklist for choosing trusted journals. If you are unsure, go through it and ask your library or research office — assessing journals is part of their job.
Find a trustworthy journal instead
The safest way to avoid predatory journals is to start from where your field actually publishes. Paste your abstract into the journal finder: it lists the journals that published papers similar to yours, with ISSN, publisher, h-index, APC and open-access status.
If you have already submitted
- Write to the journal asking to withdraw the manuscript, and keep all correspondence.
- Do not pay an invoice for a paper you want to withdraw.
- Tell your co-authors and your research office.
- If it has been published, ask your library for advice before submitting the work elsewhere.