LibGuides: Find a Place to Get Published: Evaluating Publishers, Journals, and Conferences

Evaluating Publishers, Journals, and Conferences

When it comes to evaluating journals and publishers, there is no single criterion that indicates whether or not a publication is reputable. Rather, look for a cumulative effect of more positives or negatives.

You can use the journal evaluation tools below to help you assess the quality of a particular journal or publisher. You may also want to check the lists of trusted open access publishers on the OA Publishers, Repositories, and Directories page of the Open Access Guide guide, or one of the tools listed on the Find a Place to Get Published page of this guide, to find high-quality, reputable journals in which to publish.

Journal Evaluation Tools:

Cabells Directory of Publishing Opportunities This link opens in a new window Lists scholarly journals and their publication guidelines. The "Journalytics" directory assists in identifying, evaluating, and comparing journals for publication, while "Predatory Reports" highlights journals to potentially avoid. Entries include guidelines, acceptance rates, review process, and audience. Terms of Use.
Cabells Journalytics Medicine & Predatory Reports This link opens in a new window Lists scholarly journals in medical fields and their publication guidelines. The "Journalytics" directory assists in identifying and evaluating journals for publication, while "Predatory Reports" highlights journals to potentially avoid. Terms of Use.

Think. Check. Submit. Think. Check. Submit. is a campaign to help researchers identify trusted journals for their research. It is a simple checklist researchers can use to assess the credentials of a journal or book publisher. There is now a Think. Check. Attend portion as well to check the legitimacy of conferences.
Retraction Watch This database tracks how often scientific papers are retracted (in both OA and non-OA journals), whether it's due to data problems, faulty conclusions, plagiarism, or outright fraud.
Open Access Journal Quality Indicators These guidelines are intended to help you evaluate open access publications as you consider appropriate publication venues or invitations to serve as reviewers or editors.
QOAM: Quality Open Access Market QOAM is a marketplace for scientific and scholarly journals which publish articles in open access. Quality scoring of the journals in QOAM is based on academic crowd sourcing. Libraries use a Base Score Card to score four critical journal aspects: Editorial information, Peer review, Governance, and Workflow.

Book Publisher Evaluation Tools

OA Books Toolkit This toolkit from OAPEN aims to help book authors to better understand open access book publishing and to increase trust in open access books. You will be able to find relevant articles on open access book publishing following the research lifecycle, by browsing frequently asked questions or by searching with keywords.
Open Book Environment (OBE) Dashboard Provides a set of common criteria for authors to evaluate publishing options for long form outputs and Open Access, ranking criteria like licensing, pricing, editorial quality, and self-archiving against levels of transparency.
Contracts in Publishing: A Toolkit for Authors and Publishers Provides information on copyright-related aspects and contractual options in the publishing sector. With a balanced approach considering the interests of both authors and publishers, the publication offers guidance to building basic knowledge and skills for successful publishing, co-publishing and licensing deals, targeting an audience of authors, visual artists, translators and publishers, especially in developing countries.

Conference Evaluation Tools:

Think. Check. Attend. From the makers of Think. Check. Submit., a campaign to help researchers identify trusted journals for their research, comes this simple checklist researchers can use to assess the legitimacy of conferences.

If you are still unsure about whether a particular journal or publisher is trustworthy, then please consult the list of criteria below that can help you determine if a journal may have questionable publishing practices you may wish to avoid.

What is a Questionable Publisher?

Questionable publishers (sometimes called "predatory" publishers) exploit the Gold model of open access publishing by charging publication fees to authors while simultaneously exploiting their work by offering low-quality publishing services, making false claims, and/or failing to live up to the expectations of a legitimate publisher. It is these latter behaviors that mark a publisher as questionable, not simply the fact that they are open access or charge publication fees. Many legitimate publishers provide open access publication services for a fee (i.e. the Gold model of OA publishing).

Identifying a Questionable Publisher

Here are some warning signs that a publisher may potentially be questionable. If you're still unsure, check out the links above for checklists and other tools to help determine if a publisher is legitimate:

Publication fees are not up-front and transparent. Some authors may not find out about publication fees until after their paper has been accepted, and/or the publisher may demand payment without any paperwork having been signed.
The journal/publisher is not a member of a recognized initiative such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), or Open Access Scholarly Publishers' Association (OASPA), which all vet their members to ensure they are meeting academic and industry standards and providing legitimate publishing services.
Tip: Check these listings to see if the journal/publisher is a member.
The submission and/or peer-review process is not clearly explained or is exceedingly fast.
The journal/publisher tries to affiliate itself with a more prestigious journal or brand, often by tacking an extra word onto the title of a more well-known journal (e.g. "______ Reviews/Advances/Reports/Journal") or making some other small variation to a legitimate journal's title.
Tip: Check the website of the more prestigious publisher to see if the questionable journal title is listed, and/or check a trusted source like the DOAJ or Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities to see if the journal is legitimate.
The scope of the journal is overly broad or contains unrelated subjects alongside legitimate topics.
The journal falsely advertises that it is indexed in a prestigious service or boasts about bogus impact metrics (either falsifying legitimate metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor or made-up or misleading metrics such as the "Universal Impact Factor").
Tip: The Libraries subscribe to Web of Science and Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, so you can easily check indexing claims there. You can also visit the Metrics & Impact Factors research guide to learn more about legitimate metrics or check this list of possibly misleading metrics from the Stop Predatory Journals website to learn more.
The editorial board and/or list of peer reviewers is falsified.
Tip: Googling names is a great way to discover whether the listed editors or peer reviewers are real people at all. Even if they are legitimate researchers, you can check their institutional profile or website to see if they mention their involvement with the questionable journal, or reach out to them for more information if needed.
The journals are empty shells or filled with stolen, plagiarized, or low-quality articles.
Copyright and/or author's rights information is vague or nonexistent.
No archiving or preservation policy is mentioned to ensure long-time access to your work, and past issues may disappear from the site after a short time or without warning.
Contact information for the publisher is hard to find or is unprofessional/non-publisher affiliated (e.g. Yahoo email addresses, residential business addresses, etc.).