There is always a concern regarding the “quality” of publications as an index for promotion and career advancement. There are some ways to measure this “quality” including impact factor and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) as a measure of journals’ level of impact, h-index as a measure of researchers’ level of impact, and visibility and citation as a measure of individual papers’ level of impact.
Paper publication is bringing revenue to some journals by soliciting money from whom that must publish or perish. This raises the suspicion of fraud toward Open Access journals because sometimes charlatans pocket the money via creating predatory journals or even creating counterfeit websites using terms similar to those already known. For this reason, legitimate Open Access journals have to be authenticated. Tempting emails from Open Access journals showing high indices of quality might entrap the new researchers, which could be prevented by awareness of the below terms [Figure 1].
Figure 1.
A sample of an email showing high quality indices from invalid databases.
SCImago (SJR)
This is a prestige metric with the idea that not all citation have the same weight (1). For this reason it takes into account the number of citations as well as the journals where citations come from. This is a more advantages measure than Impact Factor, and is calculated and published by Scopus (2).
Impact Factor (IF)
Impact factor was devised by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and is calculated for journals indexed in the Journal Citation Report (JCR). JCR is an annual publication of Thomson Reuters, which has been integrated by ISI Web of Science [Figure 2].
Figure 2.
This shows how impact factor is calculated.
Impact Index
There is no explicit definition of this term and this is not an official report by a database. This is believed to be coined to include other journals that are not indexed in the JCR, which might include some predatory journals.
Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)
It was founded in 1960 and is now part of Thomson Reuters. It provides impact factor published by Journal Citation Report (JCR), which is a measure of academic impact of journals indexed in this database (3).
International Scientific Indexing (ISI)
This introduces itself as a service that covers all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system, and it is not limited to particular language or subject area (4). It calculates the Impact Factor on the basis of International Citation Report (ICR).
Index Copernicus Value (ICV)
Index Copernicus (IC) is a database founded in 1999 and is based in Poland. Given the high proportion of predatory journals included in it, ICV was heavily criticized and considered a worthless measure (5).
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
It is an eight-digit serial number used to identify a serial publication. It is especially helpful in distinguishing between serials with the same title. Print ISSN (p-ISSN) and electronic ISSN (e-ISSN) are assigned to each media.
International Standard Journal Numbers
This might be used by predatory journals, which authors should be cautious when submitting their work.
Hijacked journals
A fake website might be created to pretend to be the website of an authentic journal. The website creators then proceed with manuscript submissions and solicit the submission and publication fee. For example, “Blue jay” is the authentic and “Blue Jay Journal” is the hijacked journals. The list of some hijacked journals can be found at https://scholarlyoa.com/other-pages/hijacked-journals/
H-index
This is a measure of both productivity and citation impact of an author. This metric was introduced in 2005 by Jorge Hirsch, which is sometimes referred as Hirsch index. H-index might be different in different databases based on the journals indexed in that given database. For instance, h-index of a scientist in Google scholar might be higher than h-index calculated by Scopus because Google scholar covers more journals in its database [Figure 3].
Figure 3.
This shows how h-index is calculated by each database.
Recommendations to discern a fraud
Check if there is a legitimate website, which is not hosted on a free websites provider.
Check if there is a legitimate company e-mail address versus a yahoo, Gmail, or similar public ones.
Check the name and details of the publisher.
Check where the journal is indexed.
Become skeptical when terms such as ‘Impact Index’, ‘Universal IF’, ‘IF provided by International Scientific Indexing’, and ‘International Standard Journal Numbers’ are presented as opposed to the authentic known measures.
Check the Editorial Board and the institutions at which the previously published papers were performed.