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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 Jun 1.
Published in final edited form as: Toxicol Pathol. 2020 Apr 22;48(4):607–610. doi: 10.1177/0192623320920209

Table 2.

Helpful Tips to Determine if a Journal or Publisher is Predatory

  • Are there spelling or grammatical mistakes or other questionable characteristics on their website or in the solicitation email?

  • Is the peer review process clearly stated on the website?17

  • Does the website clearly state the publishing fees?18

  • Is the journal indexed in databases that you use,18 such as MEDLINE19 for biomedical journals?
    • Note: not all journals with articles in PubMed are indexed for MEDLINE.20 To check if a journal is indexed for MEDLINE, check the journal’s page in the NLM Catalog—you can do this by following the link for journal in the article’s record in PubMed. If the NLM Catalog listing says the journal is “Currently indexed for MEDLINE,” this means that all articles published in this journal will appear in PubMed.

  • Can you easily contact the publisher?18

  • Are the time-stamps of incoming emails consistent with the working hours of the reported country of origin?

  • Does the phone number have the correct country code?

  • Is the journal a member of the Committee on Publication and Ethics (COPE)21 or Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA),22 or listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)?23