Problems Associated With Predatory Journals

Predatory journals are publications that falsely characterize their publishing methods while posing as respectable scholarly journals. They do not conduct adequate peer review, hence the submitted articles' quality is questionable. Your research will be more challenging to find and less likely to be used by others if you publish it in a low-quality journal. Researchers in your field are less likely to explore or read these fraudulent journals because they are thought to be of low quality and unreliable sources. Publishing in predatory journals can hinder the career development of researchers, waste funding resources by paying for poor-quality publishing, and damage funding prospects for researchers and their institutions. Thus, one should be very careful of these fraudulent journals and follow the proper steps in identifying them.

Methods To Identify Predatory Journals

A great way to identify a predatory journal is to look it up in Beall's list. Simply enter the journal's name or its URL in the search box above in the below link. If the journal has a publisher that was assessed to be predatory, then it will be considered to be a predatory journal.

Beall's List

Here is a curated list that will help a researcher in identifying predatory journals and publishers:

Qualities Of A Respectable Journal

• Well-known among other researchers.
• Easy to identify and contact the publisher.
• Evident regarding the peer review process.
• Has proper indexing in their other published works
• The costs of publications are clearly stated.
• The publisher is a member of a recognised industry initiative (COPE,DOAJ,OASPA)