Predatory journals and conferences imitate legitimate academic venues but exist mainly to collect fees, offering little or no genuine peer review. Publishing or presenting with them can cost researchers money and damage their professional reputation. This guide explains the warning signs and how to verify a journal or conference using free, widely trusted tools. It is built around the Think. Check. Submit. and Think. Check. Attend. checklists, with journals and conferences covered in separate sections.
What Is a Predatory Journal?
Predatory journal: a journal that collects publication fees but provides little or no real peer review, editing, or quality control, while presenting itself as legitimate.
Consensus definition (Grudniewicz et al., 2019, Nature): “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 aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.”
Found in every academic discipline.
Not the same as a preprint: preprint servers (arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN) openly say that a paper has not been peer-reviewed yet, which is an honest, disclosed status, not a deception. Predatory journals are different since they falsely claim, or give the impression that proper peer review has been carried out.
Why Are Predatory Journals Dangerous?
What are the risks to me as a researcher?
Loss of money and time: publication fees are paid without receiving the editorial, peer review or publishing services you expected.
Career impact: publishing in predatory journals can affect how your research record is viewed in recruitment, tenure, promotion, or grant decisions.
Loss of work: some predatory publishers refuse withdrawal requests, and the paper counts as "already published", leaving you unable to submit the same work to a reputable journal. Furthermore, predatory publishers may disappear, leaving published work inaccessible or poorly preserved.
Identity misuse: researchers' names are sometimes added to editorial boards without their consent.
Early-career researchers are targeted most, due to publish-or-perish pressure and less familiarity with publishing practices in reputable journals.
What are the risks to scholarship?
Research that has not undergone appropriate peer review may start being cited and shared in the media.
Sharing of medical or scientific information before flaws are noticed.
Predatory publishing can damage confidence in scholarly publishing, including legitimate Open Access Journals.
What is the actual intent of predatory publishers?
To generate revenue by presenting themselves as legitimate scholarly publishers without providing the expected standards of editorial oversight and peer review.
To exploit the publish-or-perish pressure, the growth of author-paid Open Access publishing model, and the lack of experience of non-specialists to judge the quality of research at first glance.
Journal Red Flags
Peer review & editors
Promises unusually fast peer review or publication (e.g. “3–7 days”) without a credible explanation of the review process.
No named editor-in-chief or editorial board, or listed board members cannot be verified.
The journal’s scope is unrealistically broad, covering many unrelated subject areas in a single journal.
There is little or no evidence that submitted papers are ever rejected.
Emails & communication
Sends unsolicited, overly flattering emails (e.g. “esteemed professor”), sometimes praising previous work that is unrelated to the journal’s field.
Uses poor grammar, spelling mistakes, or strange formatting, including inconsistent font sizes, or styles.
Uses a generic greeting rather than your correct name or title (e.g. “Dear Author”).
Provides contact only through a web form or free email service (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail) rather than an official institutional or journal domain.
Asks you to email your manuscript directly as an attachment rather than through a proper online submission system.
Fees
Article-processing charges undisclosed, unclear, or revealed only after acceptance of manuscript.
No waiver policy, no stated currency, no links to actual terms of service.
Fees seem unusually low or high without a clear explanation. Sometimes additional charges appear later in the publication process.
Website & policies
Has no clear “About Us” page or easily accessible contact information.
Does not provide an ISSN, or lists an ISSN that cannot be verified.
Provides no clear policies on retractions, copyright, or licensing.
Author guidelines are missing, vague, or inconsistent with the journal’s published content or practices.
Indexing, metrics & identity
Claims to be indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, or DOAJ, but the claim cannot be verified.
Advertises an “impact factor” or other metric from an unrecognised or questionable source (e.g. Global Impact Factor, CiteFactor, etc).
Uses a title that closely resembles that of an established journal, sometimes with only one or two words changed.
Has a website with multiple credibility concerns, such as generic templates, stock photos, broken links or contact details that cannot be verified.
Claims partnerships or affiliations with universities, professional bodies, or scholarly societies that cannot be verified.
How to check a journal before you submit
Before submitting your work, carry out a few basic checks, keeping in mind that no single indicator is conclusive.
Check recognised indexes and directories. Search the DOAJand, for health sciences, the NLM Catalog. Check whether the journal or its articles appear in your library's own subscription databases.
Check DOI registration where relevant. Search Crossref to see whether the journal's published articles and DOIs can be verified. Note that a DOI does not, in itself, indicate quality or endorsement of a journal.
3. Verify the journal's identity. Confirm its ISSN through theISSN Portal and check that the title and publisher details match. If you suspect a cloned or hijacked journal, check theRetraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker.
Check relevant professional memberships. Where applicable, verify claims of membership of organisations such asCOPE,OASPA or theSTM Association.
Check the publisher and editorial board. Look for clear publisher details and named board members. Verify a few members through their institutional profiles or Google Scholar.
Review the journal's publishing practices. A credible journal should clearly explain its peer-review process, fees, copyright and licensing arrangements, and policies on plagiarism, corrections and retractions.
Look at previous issues and articles. Check whether past issues are readily available and whether published articles appear professionally edited and consistent with the journal's stated scope.
Be cautious about unsolicited approaches. Repeated or mass email invitations to submit papers, particularly outside your area of expertise, should prompt further checks. Did your colleagues receive similar invitations?
A hijacked journal isa fake website that clones a real journal's name, ISSN, and is designed to collect fees for papers that will never actually be published.
Always reach a journal through its official publisher website or a trusted database, rather than through an unfamiliar search result or a link in an unsolicited email.
What is a fraudulent special issue?
A fraudulent special issue is a themed issue that may appear to be associated with a legitimate journal but is promoted or managed without the journal’s usual editorial safeguards. These invitations are often circulated through unsolicited emails.
Verify the special issue and journal independently before accepting an invitation to submit or act as a guest editor.
If in doubt, contact the editorial office via the publisher's official website, rather than replying to the invitation email.
Beyond the Checklist: Other Deceptive Practices to Know About
Think. Check. Submit [PDF] is designed to assess the credibility of a single journal. This section highlights other deceptive publishing practices that may not be identified through a standard journal check and, in some cases, can occur within otherwise legitimate journals.
Paper mills and authorship for sale
Paper mills are organisations that produce fake, fabricated, or heavily templated research papers and then sell authorship positions on those papers to people who want to appear as published researchers. These papers may be submitted to legitimate academic journals, and in some cases, can get published because the journal’s review process has been manipulated, for example through compromised guest editors or dishonest reviewers.
Unlike predatory journals, the journal itself may be legitimate. The misconduct lies in specific submissions or issues rather than in the entire journal.
Paper mills have become a significant and coordinated concern in scholarly publishing. In 2023, COPE and STM launched the industry-wide United2Act initiative to address this problem, and many publishers now screen incoming manuscripts for known paper-mill patterns.
If you are ever offered co-authorship on a paper you did not contribute to or researched, or asked to pay for an authorship position, treat this as a serious warning sign and decline the offer.
Citation manipulation
Citation cartelsaregroups of authors, editors, or journals who systematically cite each other, or coerce authors into adding unnecessary citations, purely to inflate citation counts and journal metrics.
A request from a reviewer or editor to add citations to their own work, or to a suspiciously narrow set of other papers, without a clear scholarly justification, is a warning sign.
Citation manipulation is different from the fees and peer-review issues covered in the checklist above, but it reflects the same broader problem of prioritising metrics over genuine scholarly contribution.
AI-generated fake content
AI-generated manuscripts, fabricated data, or AI-written peer reviews may be submitted to real journals, sometimes produced at scale by the same paper-mill operations described above.
Warning signs can include oddly generic or repetitive phrasing, citations that do not support the claims being made, or peer reviews that read as vague and templated rather than specific to the manuscript.
