Skip to Main Content

Predatory Publishing

This guide was created to help researchers to be aware of predatory publishers.

About Blacklists

A blacklist identifies sites known or highly suspected to be untrustworthy. 

“Blacklists and whitelists share the same problem in that they attempt to externalize an evaluation process that is best internal, contextual, and iterative.” (Swauger, 2017)

DOAJ: Journals Added and WIthdrawn

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) is an index of diverse open access journals from around the world. It is managed by an independent, non-profit organisation.

Beall's List

Jeffrey Beall, a former librarian, collated a list of potential and possible predatory scholarly open access journals. However, this list was last updated in 2017. Researchers could refer this archived list to find out if the journal/publisher is blacklisted.

Review of Beall's List:

Moed, H. F. Lopez-Illescas, C., Guerrero-Bote, V. P.& Moya-Anegon, F. (2021). Journals in Beall's list perform as a group less well than other open access journals indexed in Scopus but reveal large differences among publishers.

 

Cabell's Predatory Reports

Cabells offers a paid subscription service 'Predatory Reports' that provides information on over 17,000 predatory journals.

 

Review of Cabells:

Anderson, R. (2017). Cabell’s New Predatory Journal Blacklist: A Review. In The Scholarly Kitchen.

Silver, A. (2017). Pay-to-view blacklist of predatory journals set to launch. Nature.

 

Retraction Watch

Retraction Watch tracks latest news and incidents of predatory publishing, plagiarsim, falsified data and peer-review scandals.