Scholarly Communication

The process of selecting journals and evaluating journals are extremely inter-related and inter-twined. There are a few ways authors can evaluate journals:

1) By scrutinizing the journal's homepage and information for authors. More often than not, authors miss out on this crucial step to evaluate if a journal is ideal for their publications. Questions such as the aims and scope of the journal, journal's article type/methodology restrictions, word count limits or even charges and fees are all important considerations when evaluating journals. If you have yet to see our recommendations for selecting journals, refer to our page on Journal Selection for more information!

2) Some authors prefer the use of metrics and journal quality indicators to help them evaluate journals.

3) Make use of tools/checklists when evaluating journals.Think, Check, Submit provides a simple assessment framework to help scholars identify trustworthy journals.

Predatory conferences are on the rise. The covid-19 pandemic has enabled many conference organizers to run virtual conferences, reaching out to more researchers and inviting them to attend or submit their manuscripts. Predatory conference organizers have also been enabled through these initiatives, moving their predatory conferences online and reaching out to more researchers who may unknowingly fall prey to their tactics. Think Check Attend has also created a checklist that can help you spot predatory conferences. Learn how to distinguish trustworthy credible conferences and avoid submitting your abstract or attending predatory ones.

The checklist below can be used to both evaluate legitimate journals or evaluate if a journal is potentially predatory. This checklist is adapted from Think. Check. Submit, an initiative started by a group of scholarly communication professionals, organisations and publishers to help researchers identify trusted journals and discern deceptive and predatory publishing practices. The more questions and issues encountered when verifying a journal's characteristics with the checklist, the more you should be wary and avoid publishing in that journal.

Authors may have different objectives, aims, tolerance or thresholds when using such checklists. As such, you should only submit your manuscript to a journal only if you can answer most or all of the questions satisfactorily based on your own standards or requirements.

Think. Check. Submit Checklist

Do you or your colleagues know the journal?

• Does the name of the journal seem familiar to you?
• Have you read any articles from the journal before?
• Can you find the journal easily on search engines?

Email or journal website

• Is there poor language with typos, weird choice of vocabulary, awkward formatting, inconsistent capitalisation.
• Unprofessional and amateurish layout, scarce information provided, broken links, pages are always under construction?
• Can you easily identify the contact information of the publisher? How about the company address?
• Does the journal title sound similar to other publications? Does it have the words like 'Advances", "International", "Global", "Open Access" etc?

Peer review and editorial proceses

• Are there clear instructions to the authors?
• Are articles submitted via email directly to editors instead of using a submission application?
• Is the peer review process extremely fast? Can publications be fast tracked? Can manuscripts be published within the matter of days?
• Lack of policies about the editorial process, peer review process not properly explained?

Fees

• Lack of transparency or policies about fees related to publishing 
• Does the journal site explain what these fees are for?
• Are there multiple fees being charged? Submission fee, publication fee, peer review fees, withdrawal fees?

Metrics and indexing

• Does the journal have an ISSN? Do publications have DOIs?
• Invented or fake metrics used?
• Falsely claimed to be indexed in certain databases?

Editorial Board

• Have you heard of any of the editorial board members?
• Do the editorial board mention the journal on their own personal websites?
• Are there broken links or incorrect information provided? Can you find these members and their institutions online?

Can the journal be found on lists?

• Are there any negative news about the journal on Retraction Watch?
• Is the legitimate journal's name found on Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scopus Sources, or Web of Science's Master Journal List?

Adapted from: Think. Check. Submit