How to spot predatory journals: 4 tips and 2 checklists

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Predatory journals are publications that present themselves as legitimate academic journals but prioritize profit by charging authors a fee while sidestepping editorial practices that are associated with legitimate journals, such as peer review and quality control.

They may have fake names on their editorial boards or list people who don’t know they are listed as members. Some may hijack the titles of legitimate journals.

Another hallmark of predatory journals is aggressive solicitation, such as repeated e-mails to researchers. The solicitations are indiscriminate. Many times, the invitee’s expertise is outside the journal’s scope. The emails tend to be excessively flattering and include bad formatting, spelling and grammar.

The number of predatory journals has been on the rise. There were at least 15,500 predatory journals in 2022 according to some estimates.

Several factors have led to the proliferation of predatory journals.

“The publish-or-perish culture, a lack of awareness of predatory publishing and difficulty in discerning legitimate from illegitimate publications, fosters an environment for predatory publications to exist,” write the authors of the 2019 paper, “Predatory Journals: No Definition, No Defense,” published in Nature.

With the increased accessibility of generative artificial intelligence, predatory journals are developing more sophisticated deceptive practices. Generative AI tools are making it easier for low-quality and fraudulent science to be produced and accepted by predatory journals. At the same time, AI tools are also being tested to identify predatory journals.

It’s important for journalists to be aware of predatory journals because such journals pose a threat to the integrity of science journalism. Journalists may unwittingly report on low-quality or even highly flawed studies published in these venues, says Alice Fleerackers, an assistant professor of journalism and civic engagement at the University of Amsterdam, who studies how journalists cover academic studies.

In a study based on in-depth interviews with 23 health and science journalists, Fleerackers and her co-authors find that some journalists have relatively limited awareness or concern about predatory journals. Many placed their confidence in avoiding problematic research on established practices, such as relying on journal prestige, reputation and familiarity.

This reliance has implications from a source diversity perspective, increasing the likelihood that research from newer, lesser-known journals — such as regional journals, open-access journals, and those published in the Global South — will remain hidden from public view, Fleerackers and co-authors write.

In this piece, we provide reporting tips, background on predatory journals, followed by checklists for spotting and avoiding them.

4 tips for journalists

Ivan Oransky, co-founder of the popular blog Retraction Watch, offered the following tips to avoid falling prey to shoddy research:

  • Develop sources who can help you vet research studies. Speak with a statistician or biostatistician to check the data and methods of a research study. Check resources like your local university, SciLine or the American Statistical Association.
  • Check lists such as the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, Cabells and Beall’s List.
  • Ask the authors of the study you’re covering what other journals they’ve tried to publish their research in. “In science, if you hear [the authors] tried to publish [their research in several journals] and it didn’t get through peer review in any of them, but it’s in this other journal,  it doesn’t tell you whether the journal’s predatory, but it tells you sort of how rigorous its peer review might have been,” Oransky says.
  • Have a basic understanding of how the business of academic journal publishing works. “If you don’t understand the incentive structure, which is what also gave rise to [the practice of predatory publishing], then you’re going to take things at face value a lot more,” Oransky says.

Background on predatory journals

The term ”predatory publishers” was coined in 2010 by Jeffrey Beall, a scholarly communications librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver.

Beall created the widely popular Beall’s List of predatory journals, which ceased operation in 2017 but is still available online. A few other sources keep a list of predatory journals, including one by the company Cabells, whose list is behind a paywall.

One of the seminal articles about predatory journals was published in 2015 in BMC Medicine, according to the 2022 book “The Predator Effect” by Simon Linacre, chief commercial officer at Cabells, a scholarly analytics company. The study put the number of predatory journals at an estimated 8,000 as of 2015. It also revealed that the number of articles published in such journals had increased from 53,000 in 2010 to 420,000 in 2014.

Academics have attempted to create a universal definition for predatory journals.

One of the most comprehensive definitions came from a gathering of researchers and publishers from 10 countries in 2019:

“Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices,” the group reported in an article published in Nature in December 2019.

In his book, Linacre offers this definition: “Predatory journals are deceptive and often fake, giving the appearance of legitimate peer-reviewed journals and impact academic stakeholders by exploiting the Open Access model while using misleading tactics to solicit article submissions.”

Also in 2022, the authors of the report “Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences,” a two-year study led by the InterAcademy Partnership, a global network of science, engineering and medical academies, offered a definition, offering a spectrum of behaviors that could make a journal predatory:

“At one end of the spectrum, traits common to both include deceitful practice; little, poor or no peer-review and/or editorial control; and the fraudulent use of the names of established journals, institutions or researchers,” write the authors of the report. “At the other end, there are questionable and unethical practices by some established reputable outlets, such as establishing a second tier of journals that publish rejected papers on payment, which can be harder to both identify and challenge.”

Even though the terms “predatory publishing” and “predatory journals” are better understood in recent years, they’re still subject to debate among academics.

For instance, some scholars argue that some large, established journals and publishing houses could be considered predatory because they collect exorbitant fees from authors in addition to charging high subscription fees from libraries, or because they have “aggressive commercial behaviors,” according to Linacre’s book. Others say that some high-quality research can be found in predatory journals, so they shouldn’t be entirely dismissed.

“I don’t love the term ‘predatory journals,’” says Oransky, who is also the executive director of the Center for Scientific Integrity. “That being said, I think that what the discussion around predatory journals has accomplished is to let people know that not everything that is peer reviewed, –not everything that claims to be peer reviewed really is to any level of rigor.”

Checklists to help you spot predatory journals

Here are some characteristics of predatory journals, according to the 2019 Nature article, “Predatory Journals: No Definition, No Defense,” and the 2020 paper, “Predatory Journals: What They Are and How to Avoid Them”:

  • False or misleading information: “A predatory journal’s website or e-mails often present contradictory statements, fake impact factors, incorrect addresses, misrepresentations of the editorial board, false claims of indexing or membership of associations and misleading claims about the rigor of peer review,” according to the 2019 Nature paper.
  • Not following best editorial and publication practices set forth by the Directory of Open Access Journals, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, Committee on Publication Ethics, and the World Association of Medical Editors: “Warning signs should be assessed with care. For instance, journals are not eligible for listing on the DOAJ or joining COPE until after one year of operation. A well-meaning but poorly resourced journal might not be able to maintain a professional website. Also, some journals claim to follow best practice but do not,” according to the 2019 Nature paper.
  • Lack of transparency regarding operational procedures like how editorial decisions are made and peer review is organized, and failure to provide contact information or details about article processing charges.
  • Advertising an unrealistically short timeline for publication.
  • Publishing articles that have many grammatical errors with little or no copyediting.
  • Hijacking the names of established and reputable journals and creating illegitimate clones that can appear higher in search results than the original journal. Retraction Watch’s Hijacked Journal Checker can help you track such journals.
  • Requiring authors to sign away their copyright to the article at the time of submission.

Because researchers are vulnerable to publishing in predatory journals, there are more than 90 checklists to help them vet journals before submitting their work, according to the 2019 Nature article.

One of the more popular and free lists is created by Think. Check. Submit., a campaign produced with the support of a coalition across scholarly communications in response to discussions about deceptive publishing.

Although the checklist is created for scientists, many of its items, listed below, can be helpful for journalists to identify predatory journals:

Knowledge of the journal

  • Have you read any articles in the journal before?
  • Is it easy to discover the latest papers in the journal?
  • Is the name of the journal unique, and not the same or easily confused with another journal?
  • Can you cross-check with information about the journal in the ISSN portal? An International Standard Serial Number is an eight-digit code to uniquely identify a periodical publication. It is especially helpful in distinguishing between publications with the same title.

Publisher’s contact information

  • Is the publisher’s name clearly displayed on the journal website?

Journal’s peer review process

  • Is the journal clear about its peer review process?

Fees for authors

  • Does the publisher explain on their website how they are financially supported?
  • Does the journal site explain what its fees are for and when they will be charged?

Guidelines for authors

  • Does the publisher have a clear policy regarding potential conflicts of interest for authors, editors and reviewers?

Publisher’s membership in a recognized industry initiative

Funders and Universities Urged to Join Fight Against Paper Mills
Sophie Hogan. Research Professional News, September 2025.

Journals Infiltrated With ‘Copycat’ Papers That Can Be Written by AI
Miryam Naddaf. Nature News, September 2025.

Evaluating the Visual Design of Science Publications — A Quantitative Approach Comparing Legitimate and Predatory Journal Papers
Andreas Siess. Scientometrics, August 2025.

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds
Carl Zimmer. The New York Time, August 2025.

How to spot a predatory conference, and what science needs to do about them: a guide
Nature, Career Feature. Christine Ro, July 2024.

Making Science Public: A Review of Journalists’ Use of Open Access Research
Alice Fleerackers, et al. F1000 Research, January 2024.

Predatory Journals: What They Are and How to Avoid Them
Susan A. Elmore and Eleanor H. Weston. Toxicologic Pathology, June 2020.

Predatory Journals: No Definition, No Defence
Agnes Grudniewicz, et al. Nature Comment, December 2019.

Who Is Actually Harmed by Predatory Publishers?
Martin Paul Eve and Ernesto Priego, August 2017.




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